Sexual relation does not exist

Sexual relation does not exist names the absence of a guaranteed, fully reciprocal formula for relations between partners. In the discussion of Vivienne, the virtual girlfriend, the claim is not that human contact has simply disappeared into screens. It is that fantasy already mediates intimacy: the virtual product makes that dependence unusually visible, unsettling the distinction between simulated relations and supposedly direct ones.

The Claim and Its Provocation

The concept gives a precise meaning to the idea that sexual relations are not secured by the mere presence of another person. A flesh-and-blood partner does not erase fantasy or provide transparent access to another’s experience. The encounter remains shaped by the representations through which desire is organized. The force of the claim, as developed here, is therefore structural rather than a prediction that people will cease forming relationships.

Vivienne tests that distinction by presenting an intimate counterpart who exists through computerized voice synthesis, streaming video, and text messages. Her users know that she does not really exist as a flesh-and-blood person, yet the product can still occupy a place in their fantasies. The troubling implication is not simply that a screen can imitate a person. It is that the screen may expose how much the supposedly more authentic encounter also depends on imaginative mediation.

Vivienne and the Changing Interface

The example begins with the Tamagotchi phenomenon: users interacted with a virtual pet through the screen of a small electronic toy. In March 2005, the Hong Kong software company Artificial Life, Inc. introduced Vivienne as a virtual girlfriend designed to attract users to third-generation mobile phones. The service was presented as a new stage in screen-based interaction, combining synthesized voice, video, and messages rather than a bodily presence.

Vivienne’s promised activities establish both the appeal and the limits of the product. She likes being taken to movies and bars and receiving virtual flowers and chocolates. The service draws a line at anything beyond blowing kisses, although Artificial Life, Inc. had already been approached about a more sexually explicit version. Vivienne was scheduled to become available in Western Europe by late spring 2005, with a possible launch in a few American cities by the end of the year. The company anticipated virtual-boyfriend versions for women and, later, for gay men and lesbians.

The company described Vivienne not as a replacement for a flesh-and-blood girlfriend but as practice before a real relationship. That framing leaves open the question the example is designed to raise: whether a virtual partner is merely preparation for human contact, or instead reveals something already present in it. The move from virtual pet to virtual girlfriend makes the screen a particularly clear site for examining how signs can sustain an imagined relationship.

Fantasy and the Flesh-and-Blood Partner

Vivienne’s significance is connected to the Turing test, proposed by Alan Turing: a machine would count as possessing human intelligence if, after an extended conversation, a human interlocutor could not tell whether the exchange was with a human or a machine. The comparison shifts attention away from whether Vivienne is biologically real and toward how interaction is recognized and interpreted. The uncertainty at stake concerns the boundary between a person and a representation that can answer back.

The example also invokes the familiar fantasy of a ghost inside a machine. The narrator describes this as a thought that arises when using an automated coffee machine at an airport or train station: it can seem as though a hidden dwarf is responding to the user’s buttons and coins by preparing and delivering the coffee. This comic image gives technological mediation an imagined human agent. Vivienne intensifies the same structure because the user knows that the apparent partner does not exist as a person, while the interaction can nevertheless function within fantasy.

The argument then turns the usual contrast between virtual and real sex around. Masturbation may involve an imagined partner, but the book’s symmetrical claim is that sex with a real partner also takes place through fantasy: the other person can serve as a prop for its enactment. This analogy does not make virtual and bodily encounters identical. It challenges the assumption that the presence of another body, by itself, abolishes the imaginative structure of the encounter. Vivienne is traumatic, in this account, for those who rely on a sharp division between real communication and simulation because she makes that structure harder to overlook.

Virtualization and the Return of the Real

The discussion connects the virtualization of sexual interplay to the Real of jouissance. Complete virtualization appears to exclude the flesh-and-blood partner, but the argument does not treat that exclusion as the final disappearance of bodily reality. Instead, it draws on the Hegelian idea of an infinite judgment, in which extreme opposites coincide: the passion for the Real and the passion for semblance are presented as two sides of the same phenomenon. The more the encounter is organized as semblance, the more the excluded reality of the bodily partner can return as a drive toward extreme experiences of pleasure and pain.

Vivienne thus serves as more than a speculative piece of technology or a forecast about the future of dating. Her carefully mediated presence makes visible the mediation that the idea of an entirely direct, unvirtualized relationship would conceal. The concept’s decisive implication is that adding a flesh-and-blood partner does not supply a universal guarantee of mutual understanding. Intimacy remains structured by fantasy, while efforts to bypass that structure through simulation can expose, rather than resolve, the instability between semblance and the Real.