In the heart of Milan, just a few meters from the chaos of the Navigli, hidden from the sight of ‘maranza’ and the rabble, lies a small gem: Doping. More of a club than a bar, more of an oasis than a mess, Doping Club has always been in my top three special places.
If it were a person, it would be an eclectic gentleman from another era, with monocle and top hat, white gloves slightly worn from many adventures, and a suitcase full of stamps and seals from a true globetrotter. Entering the Doping is like crossing a threshold: wherever your gaze lands, it reveals trunks, lamps, stuffed animals, exotic rugs, precious trinkets, refined fabrics, remnants of mid-century modern… there’s even an ostrich, elegantly wedged among a thousand other oddities. Perhaps the reason I feel this place is mine is that… it represents me. Refined and never banal, loaded to excess, overflowing with life and teeming with passions, beyond any common sense and balance. Just as the Doping Club flaunts its baroque nature in the mecca of bourgeois understatement, I present myself cheerful, genuine, and constantly over the top. Some people love me. Some can’t stand me. Who cares: this is me, though, with my life, my memories, my adventures.
And this is where I bring people I want to become special, hoping that—by noticing the place—they might see me. This is where I brought the American Girl. This is where tonight I invited Porcelain Doll: gorgeous, hard and cold, but if you hold her too tight… she breaks.
Porcelain Doll is a breathtaking blonde just under twenty, with a kind and gentle face, two doe eyes of that blue typical of an April sky, a curvy yet slender figure, and two breasts so perfect (and natural) they’re proof of God’s existence (Gödel would approve). She has a little nose she doesn’t like, but that I absolutely adore. She has a delicate voice, a bit sexy and a bit childlike. She’s strong and fragile, cold and tender, seductress and prey.
Porcelain Doll is a 9.5, maybe a 10; she has several hundred thousand followers on social media, but has all the insecurities of a 6.5. And in fact, when she arrives, she’s super nervous. She can’t hold eye contact, acts tough, but you can see the embarrassment.
Porcelain Doll has three essential characteristics:
1. I like her in a way I haven’t liked someone in a long time.
2. She has the same blocks and character limitations as me (she’s a “good narcissist”). I read her like an open book, I understand her, I see her.
3. It was a total failure: beautiful date, we connected but she ran away because of… a wrong phrase in chat.
But let’s take it one step at a time.
The serial killer, the Uber, and the suburban princess
Porcelain Doll is very young. She lives with her parents, somewhere in the outskirts of a big city—one of those places that, when you mention it, people nod politely and change the subject. Present parents—very present. GPS active on their daughter’s phone like a CIA Predator drone in a war zone. Curfew. Shared location. Cinderella, but with a tracked smartphone.
In the days before the date we organize the logistics—which with Porcelain Doll is a military operation.
Her: “I have location sharing with them… so if you turn out to be a serial killer, think again.”
Me: “I understand… I also warned my friends: we know perfectly well that, between the two of us, you’re the serial killer. I’ll send you the venue details the day before. Don’t bring the knife.”
The running joke about the serial killer will accompany us until the evening of the date.
Her: “Me a serial killer? Depends on how you organize the evening.”
Me: “No spoilers.”
The day before I send her the venue. She—and here pay attention, because it’s the first moment she lowers her guard: “The place really appeals to me, I have to admit you nailed it. I admit you have good taste, but don’t brag too much.”
But don’t get too ahead of yourself. Bambolina in six words: she gives you something and immediately takes it back. One step forward, half a step back. Like a dancer—which she actually is (or was, until recently).
The problem with Bambolina is that she’s reading… the Book. That book I’ve wanted to read for 10 years. And that for 10 years I haven’t been able to read, because of a damn curse that haunts this text.
I’m referring to “The 48 Laws of Power” by Robert Greene. I bought it in 2019. The American Girl saw it and immediately asked me… “Can I borrow it?” She disappeared, the book disappeared.
I buy it again while dating a long-term ex of mine. She’s also captivated by it, takes it home and… never seen again.
I buy it a third time but… here too, a girl whose name I no longer remember takes it home.
This book tickles the deepest manipulative instincts of young women. And Doll applies it to the letter, even with me, thinking I won’t notice.
I send her an Uber—not to her house, but to a point a bit further away, because her parents mustn’t see. I write to her: “When you’re ready to come down, I’ll call you an Uber so you don’t wait in the cold.”
Her: “I’m basically ready.”
She’d basically been dressed for an hour.
Interesting.
Me: “Good girl. Give me the ok and I’ll call.”
Total black. She arrives on time. And the fact that a girl with hundreds of thousands of followers arrives on time for a date is—statistically speaking—an event less likely than the apparition of the Virgin Mary at Lourdes. I tell her “I should feel honored” and I really mean it.
Then she looks at me and says something I don’t expect: “You’re handsome, you have a very well-proportioned face.”
Pause.
A 9.5 with impostor syndrome giving you a direct, spontaneous compliment, without you having extracted it from her? It doesn’t happen. Not in this universe. And yet it happens, at the Doping, on a Friday evening in March, while the stuffed ostrich watches us from above with its glassy and judgmental eye—perhaps the only male in the room less confused than me.
Three and a half hours of (brilliant) monologue
There’s a moment, in certain dates, when the air changes density. As if the venue around you loses its contours, the sounds muffle, and only the two of you remain in a bubble of very thin glass. The Doping, with its amber lights and its stuffed animals that seem to have come out of a Wes Anderson dream, was the perfect theater for that kind of spell.
And Bambolina talked. She talked only about herself for three and a half hours. But she wasn’t chatting. Bambolina was confessing.
She told me about her dogs—two cute little troublemakers, the only living beings she talks about without acting. She studies something related to animals and, when she talks about it, something lights up in her eyes that, in the rest of the conversation, remains off: a real light, not filtered, not curated for reels. For a moment you see who Porcelain Doll would be if the world hadn’t taught her she had to be someone else to be loved.
She told me about her family. Parents who compare her to another family member. “Whatever I do, I’m not as good as her.” That kind of phrase that, if you hear it enough times as a child, gets into your bones and never comes out. You build your life around that hole—followers, brand collabs, men who adore you—and the hole stays there, identical, like the first day.
She told me that when she was little she was convinced she was the protagonist of the Truman Show. At six years old, guys.
And then she told me the thing. Days before, in chat, she’d hinted at it with these exact words: “I received a huge stab that I’ll never forget.” And right after: “Now I’m afraid to trust people.”
I won’t tell you what. It’s none of your business and it’s none of my business to share. I’ll just tell you this: a man behaved in the most cowardly way possible at the moment when she needed him most. He left her alone. One of those things that at twenty changes your brain chemistry, redraws the map of who you can trust and who you can’t. And the new map, the one Porcelain Doll drew afterward, is very simple: no one.
From there on, everything else makes sense. The sudden disappearances. The thirteen-day ghost without a word. The phrase on the dating site that struck me from the beginning—I ask her how to avoid spoiling her, and she: “You do, I decide when and how.” (Obviously I immediately put her back in her place; she liked it and we met up). The constant tests, the textbook phrases (“unpleasant only to those who can’t handle it”, and when you ask her what it means: “if I have to explain it to you, then you really can’t handle it”). Porcelain Doll doesn’t manipulate—Porcelain Doll defends herself. With the only arsenal she’s found: a book on the 48 Laws of Power and the granite certainty that whoever gets too close will eventually hurt you.
“Yet all the guys I deal with become obsessed with me”, she wrote to me one evening. I ask her if that’s what she wants.
Answer: “I’ve always loved it.”
The saddest thing I heard even before arriving at the Doping. Porcelain Doll exists when someone looks at her. If no one looks, Porcelain Doll doesn’t know who she is. She confirmed it herself, on a night of confessions on WhatsApp: “I change personality and character every time I disappoint myself, and I’ve done it so much that I don’t even know if I’m a good or bad person.” At just under 20 years old. With the beagle sleeping at the foot of the bed and The 48 Laws of Power on the nightstand.
I see her. I understand her. Because I’m like that too.
Let’s be honest: the companies, the blog, the millions, the impossible challenges, the pictures of all my women hanging on the wall of my house… they are the product of the same, deep foundation of truth: love is something you have to earn, something you have to obtain by being extraordinary. Me, just as I am, without doing anything, I don’t deserve love.
My business partner always tells me: “But I don’t understand you. You talk about relationships as if they were complicated, difficult, epic. When they should be as simple as drinking a glass of water.”
I understand Porcelain Doll, I read her, I see her. And I look at her with the infinite love I’d like to give myself, hoping that healing her might heal my primary narcissistic wound (forgive the psychologist jargon). To be clear, I also want to have an epic fuck, because she’s gorgeous, sweet, and tender. But it’s not just that, it’s much more than that.
The boundary
I look at her.
I tell her: “You haven’t asked a single thing about me in three and a half hours. How can you tell if a man has value if you don’t even ask him a question?”
Silence. Ten seconds. Maybe fifteen. The doe eyes, suddenly still; the processor overloaded; the emotional Blue Screen of Death. She didn’t expect it. No one had ever told her. Because the men around her—the obsessed ones, the ones she seeks—don’t set boundaries. They absorb. They listen to monologues. They chase across three platforms when she disappears. They don’t say “hey, what about me?”
I said it.
It was an act of love, even if it seemed the opposite. Because boundaries aren’t walls—they’re mirrors. And no one had ever put a real mirror in front of Porcelain Doll, not filtered, without the right angle and Instagram lighting.
The denied kiss and the lesson in applied hippology
But let’s take a step back. On the Doping’s couches, the physical escalation was natural from the start. My hands on hers, on her thighs, on her breasts—everything accepted without resistance. She only stopped when “they can see us”—the limit wasn’t the contact, it was the wrong audience.
Then, at the seventeenth minute, I go for it. The kiss.
“I don’t kiss on the first date. At least the third.”
Stop. Read that again.
She’s letting me touch her breasts. My hands are everywhere. And she’s perfectly comfortable. But the kiss, no. The kiss is for the third date. And in that refusal is the entire portrait of Porcelain Doll in a single rule: the body she gives because the body is power, it’s display, it’s “I decide when and how”. But the mouth? The mouth is where surrender begins. It’s intimacy. And intimacy, for someone who’s been betrayed in the most intimate moment, is the enemy.
My response: “I’ll remember that. I’ll make you wait until the fourth to let you taste my full and sexy lips.” Sicilian-style theatrical gesture of sealing my lips. She laughs. I don’t push. I raise. I go from three to four. Poker.
Then I take her home. “I’ll show you where I live.” (The oldest and most transparent excuse in the history of excuses, and it still works every single time—perhaps because both parties know it’s an excuse and find it more elegant to pretend it’s not). She stays in her coat, sits on the edge of the couch. I’m her first older man; until now she’s had at most peers.
Here things intensify. She talks about this and that, embarrassed. I feel an incredible attraction growing.
I move closer.
I caress her.
I move up her thighs.
Her belly.
I reach her breasts.
A Bernini masterpiece on par, perhaps, with Little Troublemaker.
I touch her breasts.
I uncover them.
I lick them.
And here—here, dear readers—the thing happens.
How to put it. I have my mouth on her nipple. A sacred moment. A moment of carnal communion. The senses are all strained toward a single point. The blood has left the brain for more urgent, southern destinations. And she—with her breast out, my tongue on her body, the situation unequivocally, indubitably, incontrovertibly erotic—says to me:
“You know, the most important thing in horse care is shoeing.”
I look up. Slowly. Incredulous like Pozzetto seeing a Milanese studio apartment.
She, unfazed, continues: “Because if you get the hoof angle wrong, then the animal develops postural problems and…”
Gentlemen.
Ladies.
Your Honor.
Honorable jury.
I’m licking the breasts of one of the most beautiful girls I’ve ever seen, while she’s giving me a masterclass on equine podology. With the same tone a veterinary professor would use to illustrate module 3 slides to a classroom of sleepy freshmen. Breasts out, nipple wet, and a dissertation on hoof biomechanics.
My brain—or what was left of it, given that most of the blood was away on business—had a kind of mystical short circuit. One of those enlightenments that happen once in a lifetime, like St. Paul on the road to Damascus. Except St. Paul fell off a horse, and I was licking the tits of someone talking about horses. The cosmic symmetry was almost too perfect.
I understood everything in that moment. It wasn’t boredom. It wasn’t detachment. It wasn’t even—as it could have been—a genuine passion for equine podiatry that simply couldn’t wait. It was control. Pure, crystalline, absolute.
“You have my body. But my head? My head remains mine. While you desire me, I talk about horses. Because if even my thoughts were here, with you, in this moment, it would mean I’ve surrendered. And I don’t surrender.
It’s the sexual version of the 48 Laws of Power.
It’s the 49th law, never written, by Robert Greene: Law 49 — When they’re licking your tits, talk about hooves.
An oxymoron.
never be a gentleman
Maybe it’s because I liked her so much. Maybe it’s because I recognized myself in her. Maybe it’s because sex is a commodity for me now, I’m not necessarily interested in emptying my balls, I want to be seen, appreciated, connected. Maybe it’s because I’m an idiot (and, well, we all unanimously agree on that) but I didn’t do what I should have done: pull out my dick and put it in her mouth while she talked about horses.
I preferred to postpone to a later moment of total connection. I ended the evening: “Ok, I’d like you here all night, but it’s late for you; I’ll call you an Uber.” I didn’t wait for her to say it.
As soon as she gets in the car, she immediately writes to me: “I’m not a child who goes to sleep that early.”
She wants to chat, she wants to write, she wants to talk about the evening.
I want to go to bed keeping her taste on my lips.
Me: “No, you’re a princess who has a curfew. Off to bed.”
Her: “Always a princess, but I’m not very good at following orders.”
“Some are more dangerous than others”, she writes shortly after. And then: “Don’t be too sure. I might surprise you.”
In chat that night, the game was perfect. Calibrated push-pull. Paternal tone but with fangs. It worked. And when it works, when you’re in flow, when everything clicks—that’s the exact moment you make the mistake.
Given her position as a super woman who doesn’t kiss, who doesn’t give herself, who exercises the laws of power… I wanted to tease her a bit. I told her I’d keep her as a friend.
A stupid thing to say. Maybe a false step. But in her—so terrified of not being liked—it detonates like a hundred kilos of dynamite.
She disappears.
She stops responding.
I apologize.
She doesn’t answer me.
She archives our chats.
I could chase her.
I could act like those men obsessed with her that she likes so much.
But I don’t feel like it.
I liked Porcelain Doll to death. I liked her in a primitive and total way I hadn’t felt in a long time. I understood her. I saw her. I recognized in her my own mechanisms, my own armor, my own hunger for attention masked as confidence. We were two good narcissists looking at each other in the mirror without knowing it.
But I can’t be with someone who disappears for thirteen days without a word and then comes back as if nothing happened. I can’t build something with someone who accepts my body but refuses my mouth, who takes my attention but doesn’t reciprocate a single question, who wants to be adored but doesn’t know how to stay still long enough to let herself be loved.
Let’s be clear: I don’t want in my life someone who gets offended over half a sentence, who disappears without explanation.
I had told her, weeks before: “If you put up too many barriers, you get what in economics is called adverse selection. The only ones who keep jumping through your flaming hoops are the terrible ones. A decent person leaves before that.”
There you go. Self-fulfilling prophecy. She tactically ghosted me. I left for good.
Epilogue (without an epilogue)
Perhaps Porcelain Doll will forever remain that Friday evening at the Doping—the amber lights, the stuffed ostrich, her April eyes, the dissertation on equine shoeing with her breasts out. A perfect frame, suspended in amber like those prehistoric insects you find in museums: beautiful, intact, and hopelessly frozen in time.
Some people you can only watch pass by like beautiful comets: they take your breath away, they light up your night, and then they disappear into the darkness. And you’re left there, nose up and heart a little bigger than before.
Porcelain Doll, wherever you are: good luck. Really.
And learn to kiss on the first date. Life’s too short to postpone the beautiful things to the third.
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