A priest, club owner,  romance expert, and Slavoj Zizek walk into a bar.

Just kidding, that’s who The Guardian posed the question “Is Love Dead?” to, in addition to the editor of Diva magazine and a Cambridge University professor.

While the mismatched panel generally answered the question – the nightclub owner knows it’s a consumerist shit show, but he’s still buying his lady flowers – Zizek decided to get interesting.

Titled “In the future we’ll outsource sex”, Zizek just says “fuck it” and decides to proclaim his fascination with flesh lights. And explain how they work.

Romance is maybe not yet totally dead, but its forthcoming death is signalled by object-gadgets which promise to deliver excessive pleasure but which effectively reproduce only the lack itself.

The latest fashion is the Stamina Training Unit, a counterpart to the vibrator: a masturbatory device that resembles a battery-powered light (so we’re not embarrassed when carrying it around). You put the erect penis into the opening at the top, push the button, and the object vibrates till satisfaction … The product is available in different colours, levels of tightness and forms (hairy or without hair, etc) that imitate all three main openings for sexual penetration (mouth, vagina, anus). What one buys here is the partial object (erogenous zone) alone, deprived of the embarrassing additional burden of the entire person.

How are we to cope with this brave new world which undermines the basic premises of our intimate life? The ultimate solution would be, of course, to push a vibrator into the Stamina Training Unit, turn them both on and leave all the fun to this ideal couple, with us, the two real human partners, sitting at a nearby table, drinking tea and calmly enjoying the fact that, without great effort, we have fulfilled our duty to enjoy.

Read the full article on The Guardian.