Today, "sextech," an expanding branch of the AI boom, is becoming more and more a part of faire couple.
Through a phone app, sex toys can now be controlled and synced with a long-distance partner or a stranger on the other side of the world. This technology became especially popular during the pandemic period. It offered a way to connect couples not only through telephone or video, but through a technological touch proxy.
New toys can even respond in intensity to a partner's voice: "think of it as a 21st-Century love letter" writes one review.1 The discrete nature of some of them allows its use beyond the bedroom, adding surprise, with the users stimulated by their partners randomly throughout the day.
In one Lovense advertisement, a wife is irritated by her husband's snoring and eating sounds, so she ignores him in the morning.2 The next night, the ad shows her recording his snores with a smart phone application, which then syncs these sounds via Bluetooth to the rhythms of her sex toy. Promising to "turn any un-pleasant sounds into pleasure," thanks to the sex toy's solution, the following morning the couple is affectionate again.
Other products do not depend on a partner. Rather, the aim is to enhance the autoerotic, syncing a toy's strokes or vibrations to pornography, whether audio or visual.3 The imaginary "body-scopy"4 seems to be no longer enough. There is a search for yet another surplus jouissance, simulated at the level of the real body.
[1] Cf. Smith, S.L., "The Best Sex Toys of CES 2025," https://gizmodo.com/the-best-sex-toys-of-ces-2025-2000549273
[2] https://www.lovense.com/scenarios/scene/sync-sex-toy-sounds
[3] Smith, S.L., "The Best Sex Toys of CES 2025," op. cit.
[4] Cf. Miller, J.-A., "The Unconscious and the Speaking Body," https://www.amp-nls.org/nls-messager/jacques-alain-miller-the-unconscious-and-the-speaking-body/
