The human male has a deep and abiding fear of the machine. The machine has replaced skilled factory workers, and a machine can outthink the world's greatest chess player (such as Gary Kasparov's defeat at the hands of the computer Deeper Blue in a 1997 chess match). But there is a deeper fear. The truth is the deepest root of all these fears is the fear that male sexual prowess cannot compete with fucking machines. Any live demo of thethrillhammer, whether at one of Las Vegas' various sex expositions or right here at Portland's homegrown Masturbate-a-thon, is all you'll need to realize the machines have won again.

I first saw thethrillhammer in action at the first Masturbate-a-thon, held at what was then called The Dungeon in Southeast Portland. While a Seattle band called Blue Frame played porno funk for background music, several women mounted thethrillhammer to taste the heights of orgasmic bliss. Aural voyeur that I am, I recorded the first two women digitally with my stereo mini-disc. Sure, photographs of the event would've been great, but the orgasms I got on disc are far more erotic than anything printed could ever be.

The master of ceremonies--or at least the master of the masturbating machine--is named Allen. He is one half of the husband and wife team Allen and Daphna, the owners and operators of thethrillhammer.com website, purveyors of fine custom-built sex machinery for the high end market and co-sponsors with Darklady of the first three Masturbate-a-thons. They are the sweetest, funniest couple you will ever meet.

Guess if you're in the fucking machine business you've got to have a sense of humor. Allen never misses a joke. He can put a crowd at ease with his jokes as adeptly as he puts the ladies at ease with a wave of his magic wand (the machine, that is). With everyone comfortable and a volunteer in the driver's seat, Alan starts the dildo of choice spinning and pumping with his control box. He is quick to give lessons on the operation of the control box and many women line up to get themselves off.

Allen's operation of thethrillhammer blurs the lines between masturbation, machine sex and sex with Allen, but he doesn't seem to mind. Anyway the machine never gets tired and Allen never gets tired of getting women off. He's approaching a thousand satisfied customers, with no sign of letting up.

The creation of thethrillhammer and the various spin-off businesses were a long time in germination, but when the time was right, Allen and Daphna's plan came together very quickly. The actual ideas for thethrillhammer go back to Allen's fascination with such parallel cultural phenomena as the Orgasmatron in Woody Allen's Sleeper, the old-school Apple 2 computer game Leisure Suit Larry and "Sy Borg" from Joe's Garage by Frank Zappa. Sounds sick, no? Yes, but the ends do justify the means, most definitely.

thethrillhammer can be built to spec with any kind of chair or upholstery and a wide range of machinery and dildos, but the standard demo model is a nice slick silver grey chair. With a little bit of oil you can slide all over it.

There was some resistance on the part of Daphna to the idea of building thethrillhammer, but now she is as into it as Allen is. Back in Seattle when they were living on a classic 1951 yacht, a Bullnose Chris Craft to be specific, Allen began to covet a gynecological exam chair he saw in an antique store. He could not get the idea of the chair--and his planned modifications--out of his mind. Daphna nixed the idea as the chair's weight would have been about a third of the weight of the yacht. Plus, where would they put it?

Many months later as the internet boom was reaching its own orgasmic heights, Allen realized that all the elements were in place to start up the first tele-sex internet fucking machine site on the web and make a killing. He just needed that chair.....

His wife gave him an ultimatum: find the chair and give her a specific dollar amount of what it would take to start the business and then he could have it. She gave him one day.

Allen was able to find the tattoo parlor in Renton, Washington, that the chair had been sold to, bought it for next-to-nothing and got Daphna the budget she demanded. The Super Humongous Corporation Incorporated and thethrillhammer.com were created in a day.

In the realm of commercial tele-dildonics there were only a few products, such as the failed Safe Sex Plus in the early 00's, which was a consumer vibrator that had a function that changed the colors on a computer screen to match the activity of the vibrator. There was one other product built by a company called Sinulate. It was a cool internet-controlled handheld vibrator that acts like a heat seeking rabbit. But no one was focusing on large scale internet-controlled fucking machines. That was the territory that Allen and his team set out to claim.

The first machine was built to be a super cock. Allen and company began working with Sybian, which is the Rolls-Royce of vibrators, taking their best unit and souping it up to make it even better. The average Sybian clit vibrator runs at 6500 rpms; thethrillhammer runs up to 7000 rpms. Most riders can take it, but not for too long. The other motion of the machine mimics the rolling motion of a cock and runs at 120 rpm. Just these two motions, the position of the rider on the machine and the skill of operation of the joystick are enough to send women into orgasmic bliss over and over again. Women who usually can't have more than one orgasm have anywhere from two to three in one session and many are left literally limp with