A few months ago, I almost broke up with my girlfriend because of Netflix. Don’t get me wrong: my girlfriend is great. She is smart, funny, skeptical, beautiful, and has a vagina—four qualities I enjoy immensely, and one of which is very rarely found in women at all (hint: it’s not vaginas). However, a few months ago her choices in Netflix movies were making me reconsider our relationship.

Why would anyone break up with someone over Netflix movies? Well, what if your significant other’s movie selections revealed deep psychological problems? What if she only watched films starring Sandra Bullock? Post-Speed Sandra Bullock? Clearly, you would break up with this madwoman. My girlfriend’s movie selections, believe it or not, were worse than films featuring Sandra Bullock. (Yes, this is possible, though highly unlikely.)

It started off innocently enough. We got a Netflix envelope in the mail, opened it up, popped in the movie, and watched a nice drama about children being brutally murdered. When we finished, we sent off the movie and soon got another film in the mail. This time, it was a wholesome movie about child rape and torture. “Perhaps this is just a coincidence,” I thought to myself as I warily eyed my girlfriend out of the corner of my eye while countless children onscreen were being horrendously victimized. “Surely, once we send this movie back, we’ll get something like Lion King or some sort of romantic comedy starring Sandra Bullock, ending this madness. I never thought I’d say this, but OH GOD I HOPE THE NEXT ONE IS A SANDRA BULLOCK MOVIE.” But no. The next week’s movie was the story of a child in a concentration camp. Suddenly, it dawned on me. My girlfriend frequently told me that she loved children. I realized with dread that she was leaving out the last part of the sentence: she loved TORTURING children. Worst of all, this vile monster worked with children, seeing as how she’s in a PhD program in developmental psychology. What horrible things was this mad scientist studying? Perhaps she was studying whether children preferred being punched in the face over being kicked in the stomach. Or maybe she was studying whether infants would rather have pepper sprayed in their eyes or hot coffee spilled on their laps. Or worse yet, perhaps she was studying whether infants prefer Sandra Bullock films to minute-long submersions in ice-cold water. (They all preferred the submersion in ice-cold water.)

I did not voice any of these doubts. As the child in the movie was lamenting his plight during the holocaust, I was lamenting my plight in the child-torture-film-o-caust. My girlfriend was a sadistic, child-hating freak; at least, this is what her movie-viewing habits suggested. Why else would we be enduring three weeks’ of child torture movies? I began to feel more and more as if I should break up with this woman, but I simply couldn’t do it just yet. After all, she was smart and funny and beautiful and skeptical and had a vagina. So she has some flaws. So she likes watching children being tortured. It could have been worse. She could have liked Adam Sandler movies (which, incidentally, have been used to torture children and adults).

At that moment, though, I had an epiphany. I rushed to the Internet to look at the movies that had previously been in my Netflix queue. The first six movies were all confusing, pretentious films that made no sense at all and had little to no discernible plot. Earlier in the month, you see, I had rated Inland Empire, Synecdoche, New York, and Waking Life quite favorably on Netflix. Sometimes when you rate movies, of course, Netflix suggests movies that are similar. Naturally, being the kind of person that likes confusing nonsense with no discernible plot, I quickly added six similar movies that were suggested. I had to wonder: when we were watching six weeks’ worth of pretentious nonsense, was my girlfriend secretly eyeing me, wondering why in the fuck I took such joy in torturing people who prefer their movies to make sense and have plot structure (and possibly child torture)?

Now, of course, whenever my girlfriend’s movies seem to revolve around a common, often completely fucked up and depressing theme, I know it is not an indication of some sort of mental problem. Still, it is nice to vary the selection. No one wants to see seven weeks’ of mobster movies, or ten weeks’ of samurai films, or six weeks’ of animated science fiction romance films featuring strong female leads and at least two African elephants. (Seriously, what is with the level of detail some of these movie descriptions go into on Netflix?)

In the end, because we are both good at relationships, my girlfriend and I quickly confided our secret fears about each other. “You’re going to think I’m silly, but I was really beginning to wonder whether you were some sort of malevolent child predator,” I told her. “Oh, wow, I guess I did add a lot of strange movies in a row!” she said, laughing. “To be honest, I was beginning to think you were some sort of pretentious douchebag, given the movies that had been showing up for you!”

My smile disappeared. I actually was a pretentious douchebag. She continued: “I was also beginning to wonder about all those period-piece dramas featuring armadillos, too.”

Thankfully, to this day, my girlfriend has not realized I’m actually a pretentious douchebag. And that the large volume of period-piece dramas featuring armadillos was not actually suggested to me by Netflix.

Cognitive scientists have long known that people can be induced to feel as if a fake limb is their own. This is done by hiding the arm from the subject’s view (under a table, for example), putting the fake arm in view, and then physically stimulating the visible fake arm and the unseen real arm in an identical fashion. The human brain, being easily confused by the conflict between the visual and tactile systems, will correct this discrepancy by suddenly mapping the fake arm onto the body plan, causing people to think the fake limb is now their “real” limb. (My own mind, however, being so used to being wrong and embracing absurdities such as the belief that Barack Obama was born in Kenya, does not even attempt to resolve this conflict; indeed, if it chooses to do anything, it will often choose to embrace further absurdity and just assume, for example, that the whole damned room is my actual arm.)

Having discovered this, scientists have desperately tried to find even more ways to screw with people’s minds. For instance, Swedish researchers made study subjects feel as if a prosthetic arm were a third arm in a recent study. Not content with this magnitude of a mindfuck in the participants, though, the researchers then brandished knives menacingly at the newfound arms, just to see if the participants would have a physiological reaction, which was measured by the sweatiness of their palms (hopefully of the real arm). Needless to say, though, they could have just as easily measured the physiological responses by noting the participant’s words (e.g., “What the fuck are you doing, you crazy asshole? You make me think I have a third arm and then you fucking try to cut it?!”), their fearful and confused expressions, or their attempts to punch the researchers in the face (which often failed because they tried to punch with their fake third arm, resulting in only a phantom punch). Not surprisingly, the subjects induced into thinking the prosthetic arm was their third arm had significantly sweatier palms when the prosthetic arm was threatened with the knife than those subjects who had not been tricked into thinking the plastic arm was their own.

This research shows that a person’s body image is not limited to a body plan with only two arms, two legs, and two heads [Editor's note: the author of this article strangely has two heads]. If people can be induced into thinking they have 3 arms, perhaps they could be induced to think that they have 4, 5, or 4211 arms. However, there are limits to the body plan revisions. When the prosthetic arm was replaced with a prosthetic leg, for instance, the subjects did not suddenly think they had a leg for an arm, much to the scientist’s chagrin. (These sick fucks wanted people to believe they had a third leg where their third arm should have been. That’s just going too damned far!)

It has not escaped this author’s attention, however, that this study opens the door to several perverse opportunities. Not content with only two dicks [Editor's note: among the author's already numerous problems, this extra dick is yet another], I could use these techniques to make myself believe this oiled-up banana is my third dick, allowing me to triple the rate at which I have sex, bringing the total up to zero. And if I was doomed to loneliness, perhaps finding that women are not attracted to two-headed, three-dicked monstrosities, I could try to use these techniques to map my body image onto a more popular person’s body. There are certain Hollywood actors who have sex with hookers and women from LA (pardon the redundancy) all the time. If I were to watch them being touched all over and then simulate the exact same touch-sensations on my own body, with enough time I could possibly map my body image onto the actor’s, allowing me to finally live the dream of inhabiting an actor’s body without the attendant side effects of stupidity and scientology (again, pardon the redundancy). Of course, these possibilities still remain to be tested. And while third arms definitely seem to be a possibility, it is unclear whether thirteen thousand dicks are, much less a leg made of machine guns and arms made of Charlie Sheen and Emilio Estevez, respectively. Nothing will stop me from trying, though, and I simply will not stop—not for food and not for women with three-vagina body images—until I have constructed for myself an arm made of Charlie Sheen, the finest actor of our day and the finest stuff of which arms could possibly be made.