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Slavoj Žižek on Synthetic Sex and “Being Yourself” | Big Think

Big Think | November 18, 2025



Slavoj Žižek on Synthetic Sex and “Being Yourself”
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Philosopher and social critic Slavoj Žižek dislikes the sense of self-commodification and self-manipulation innate in online dating. People strive for perfection when they set up dating profiles. Žižek believes love isn’t about seeing someone as perfect, but rather appreciating them for the reasons they’re not perfect. Perfection is an illusion, he says. “Perfection” is plainness. It’s innocuous and generic. This isn’t necessarily an endorsement of bold and honest self-expression, because as Žižek explains, it’s important to maintain manners and structure. Instead, Žižek promotes the idea of paying tribute to a perverse superego in order to be able to maintain civility. He then describes what he thinks the ideal date and sexual scenario would be — complete with the aforementioned “tribute.”
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SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK:

Slavoj Žižek is a Slovenian philosopher and cultural critic. He is a professor at the European Graduate School, International Director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, Birkbeck College, University of London, and a senior researcher at the Institute of Sociology, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia. His books include Living in the End Times, First as Tragedy, Then as Farce, In Defense of Lost Causes, four volumes of the Essential Žižek, and Pandemic!: COVID-19 Shakes the World.
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TRANSCRIPT:

Slavoj Žižek: The problem I see with online dating is that it always automatically involves this aspect of self-commodification or self-manipulation. When you date online, you have to present yourself there in a certain way putting forward certain qualities. You present an image of yourself. You focus on your idea of how other people should perceive you. But I think that’s not how love functions, even at the very simple level. And so called, I think the English term is “endearing foibles,” elementary ingredient on love. You cannot ever fall in love with the perfect person. There must be some tiny small disturbing element and it is only through noticing this element that you say, but in spite of that imperfection I love him or her.

A funny story: They made in Europe, not in the United States, some decades ago when the two big modeling stars were Claudia Schiffer and Cindy Crawford. They made in France, I think, a big opinion poll like, “Whom would you prefer to live with?” Cindy Crawford won. You know why? Because of that birth, that particular small mole here, whatever, birthmark. The idea was Claudia Schiffer is too perfect. There must be some tiny element of imperfection.

And now let me tell you a totally crazy personal experience, which happened to me. I was talking once in a faraway country somewhere in Latin America. Of course I will not say where. A still very attractive lady, sexually, late 30s, who told me of a strange thing that happened to her. She told me that when her last lover saw her naked before making love that he told her if you were just to lose three, four pounds, your body would have been perfect. And I told her just don’t lost three or four pounds. Because, you know, like if she were effectively to lose three or four pounds she wouldn’t be perfect. She would just be plain. The illusion of perfection is created precisely by this excess. It’s too much, but then you imagine or without this it would have been perfect. If you say — if you take away this excess you don’t get perfect, you know. This is what in psychoanalytic theory we call object cause of desire. Not object of desire, object of desire I think in this case is a woman or a man or whatever. But the cause of desire in the sense of what makes you fall in love is always a sign of imperfection. So that’s for me a big problem in I don’t, I’m not doing it so I don’t know enough of it how to include into online dating this element of contingency.

I don’t find a problem with online dating in the idea that you are not spontaneous, et cetera. Listen, we are never spontaneous. If there is a big lesson of all those Big Brother and other reality shows, it’s that even when we are just ourselves in private life we always play being ourselves. And I think this is in a way a good thing. I mean when people say no, you know, all these actor studio methodology — express yourself, be who you really are. Well I think most people are monsters secretly. I think — I like to live in a society where you do whatever you want. Just please don’t express yourself too much, you know…

Read the full transcript at https://bigthink.com/videos/online-dating-and-synthetic-sex

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Comments

This post currently has 50 comments.

  7. @johnmaynard869

    November 18, 2025 at 4:07 am

    I feel the intricacy of the “explosive moment” can be understood as finding the excuse to lose control. It is often followed by an excuse for why “any person would lose it “ over this comment or that idea. To start off a conversation with friends in this way legitimizes this point because you have already established the pretext of its allow ability and can vent on recent suppressed feelings.

  8. @semicolumnn

    November 18, 2025 at 4:07 am

    "Even when we are just ourselves in private life, we always play being ourselves." A pleasantly insightful comment that makes me wonder how Zizek's opinion on transgender people came to be this way. He talks like Judith Butler here!

  17. @철-l3n

    November 18, 2025 at 4:07 am

    But is such “tribute” mild as that? People sometimes kill each other in that “tribute”. It’s not simply a precisely calculated act prepared for peace talks. His words are quite bright but it’s based on sexual reality of an individual, not the true reality which must be asexual. There’s no talk after ritual, only death.

  29. @km72327

    November 18, 2025 at 4:07 am

    I really like Zizek's jokes. I think I understand his beliefs best through his jokes. He has a love of irony and likes to demonstrate the truth of ironic situations. I mean, it wouldn't be funny if it weren't true, you know?

  39. @Acoustic-Rabbit-Hole

    November 18, 2025 at 4:07 am

    Theory of perfection as an idealized flaw is similar to tuning a piano. If you tune every note perfectly against middle-C, play in C creates beautiful, rich, resonant intervals that we are not accustomed to in our flawed standard Equal Temperament tuning. Everything seems perfect in C-major, but if you try to play the same thing in the black keys, it all falls apart and sounds like a dying cow.

    I am not saying that Equal Temperament is great. Its harmonic compromise creates dull, grey intervals and chords. We simply don't know any better because even the early jazz and Classical recordings were almost entirely recorded in Equal Temperament. In 2025, if Western music as we know it is to evolve the tuning must change. But, what I AM saying about perceived perfection and musical tuning is that if you tune perfectly then the perfection only works or "exists" at one angle. Shift the key or "viewpoint" that the literal perfection becomes ugly. A mole on a flower can only be eaten from a distance.

  49. @okok-zf2gb

    November 18, 2025 at 4:07 am

    The real reason why "imperfections" are attractive on attractive people, is because the human mind focuses on imperfections, imagine you were in a isolated room where one of the walls had a black dot, then you would spend most your time look at the black dot. Now if you notice an imperfection on a face it would lead to you looking at the face longer, and humans like looking at attractive people, so this imperfection would lead to a longer experience of something we like. When it comes to rating which is more attractive we would choose the face which made us the happiest, which would be the one we looked at longer.

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