Thursday 6 April 2017

Maybe you don't really need Salon.com?

Maybe you don’t really need a Wi-Fi-connected sex toy

... is the clickbait title of Salon's latest proof of massive 'Liberal' idiocy. Dispatches reports, you decide:

The internet of things is gaining a lot of attention these days as this growing network of internet- and Wi-Fi-enabled products are increasingly showing up in homes and bedrooms. This technology lets you do things like print messages on toast, remotely control a pet door with a mobile phone and read today’s weather forecast from a bathroom mirror.
But cybersecurity experts are warning the spread of internet of things devices in consumer products is moving too rapidly as companies scramble to gain a lead in the nascent market for connected home products, leading to an increasing number of software vulnerabilities that pose considerable threats to consumer privacy.
This week, U.K. cybersecurity services provider Pen Test Partners shed light on a particularly prurient internet of things vulnerability in the Svakom Siime Eye, a $250 sex toy equipped with an internet-connected camera that lets users stream a dildo’s eye view of masturbation via the internet to another person’s smartphone.
Wanna have sex? Ask your wife (nicely!), not your 'hot' Wifi didgeridoo. Simples, really...

8 comments:

  1. As Lacan said, "there is no sexual relationship"...

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  2. What does he reallt mean by that, Thersites (Farmer)?

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  3. "There is no sexual relationship" - Lacan is referring to a
    fundamental relationship – to the impossibility of a perfect sexual
    union between two people. Perhaps one of the most pervasive cultural
    fantasies we have today is of finding our perfect partner and of
    having a completely harmonious and sexually fulfilling relationship
    with our ‘other half ’. It is precisely because masculinity and
    femininity represent two non-complementary structures, defined by
    different relationships to the Other, that there can be no such thing
    as a sexual relationship. What we do in any relationship is either try
    to turn the other into what we think we desire or turn ourselves into
    that which we think the other desires, but this can never exactly map
    onto the other’s desire. In other words, the ‘major problem of male
    and female subjects is that they do not relate to what their partners
    relate to in them’. It is this very asymmetry of masculinity and
    femininity in relation to the phallus and the objet a that means that
    there can be no such thing as a sexual relationship. According to
    Lacan, at least, masculine and feminine types of jouissance are
    irreconcilable.

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  4. There are no sexual "relationships" between women and vibrators, either... so no need for "jealousy". ;)

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  5. GIVEN MAN'S RELIANCE ON LANGUAGE for entrance into the symbolic order (see the Lacan module on psychosexual development), it is not surprising that, according to Lacan, we are not even in control of our own desires since those desires are themselves as separated from our actual bodily needs as the phallus is separated from any biological penis. For this reason, Lacan suggests that, whereas the zero form of sexuality for animals is copulation, the zero form of sexuality for humans is masturbation. The act of sex for humans is so much caught up in our fantasies (our idealized images of both ourselves and our sexual partners) that it is ultimately narcissistic. As Lacan puts it, "That's what love is. It's one's own ego that one loves in love, one's own ego made real on the imaginary level" (Freud's Papers 142). Because we are working on the level of fantasy construction, it is quite easy for love to turn into disgust, for example when a lover is confronted with his love-object's body in all its materiality (moles, pimples, excretions, etc.), the sorts of things that would have no effect on animal copulation. By entering into the symbolic order (with its laws, conventions, and images for perfection), the human subject effectively divorces him/herself from the materiality of his/her bodily drives, which Lacan tends to distinguish with the term "jouissance."Note Through the Law (which we come to acknowledge by way of the Oedipus complex), the human subject effectively chooses culture over nature: "The primordial Law is therefore that which in regulating marriage ties superimposes the kingdom of culture on that of nature abandoned to the law of copulation". That Law, for Lacan, is "identical to an order of Language", specifically what he terms the symbolic order and it is supported by the symbolic fiction of the "Name-of-the-Father."

    Desire, in other words, has little to do with material sexuality for Lacan; it is caught up, rather, in social structures and strictures, in the fantasy version of reality that forever dominated our lives after our entrance into language. For this reason, Lacan writes that "the unconscious is the discourse of the Other." Even our unconscious desires are, in other words, organized by the linguistic system that Lacan terms the symbolic order or "the big Other." In a sense, then, our desire is never properly our own, but is created through fantasies that are caught up in cultural ideologies rather than material sexuality. For this reason, according to Lacan, the command that the superego directs to the subject is, of all things, "Enjoy!" That which we may believe to be most private and rebellious (our desire) is, in fact, regulated, even commanded, by the superego.

    In constructing our fantasy-version of reality, we establish coordinates for our desire; we situate both ourselves and our object of desire, as well as the relation between. As Slavoj Zizek puts it, "through fantasy, we learn how to desire" (Looking Awry 6). Our desires therefore necessarily rely on lack, since fantasy, by definition, does not correspond to anything in the real. Our object of desire (what Lacan terms the "objet petit a") is a way for us to establish coordinates for our own desire. At the heart of desire is a misregognition of fullness where there is really nothing but a screen for our own narcissistic projections. It is that lack at the heart of desire that ensures we continue to desire. To come too close to our object of desire threatens to uncover the lack that is, in fact, necessary for our desire to persist, so that, ultimately, desire is most interested not in fully attaining the object of desire but in keeping our distance, thus allowing desire to persist. Because desire is articulated through fantasy, it is driven to some extent by its own impossibility.

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  6. Erm... OK... thanks for making my head spin WITHOUT any Chimay!

    ;-)

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