In the increasingly developed modern society, love has surprisingly started to be quantified and instrumentalized as well.

We use virtual social instead of real-life friends, takeout and garbage instead of family cooking, using Korean dramas to satisfy daydreams and all kinds of inflatable dolls and erotic products, but also gradually in the replacement of a living human being. Many people's perception of love has been reduced to sex and lust, and all the delicate and rich emotions related to love seem to have become dispensable.

"Know" (nz_zhidao) to talk to you about the physical sex doll, we still need lovers?

A few days ago, the New York Times published a report on the marital status of the Chinese. The report says that fewer Chinese are choosing to get married. Last year 12 million Chinese couples registered for marriage, a number that declined for the second year in a row. In line with that trend, 3.8 million couples divorced last year, more than twice as many as 10 years ago.

And not long ago, a website did a massive social survey on the topic of the current state of marriage in China. The survey showed that out of about 50,000 respondents, almost 70% of married people regretted getting married, and women regretted it more than men. Another survey conducted by China Youth Daily Social Survey Center in conjunction with Questionnaire.com showed that 61.2% of the respondents said they had a tendency to "fear marriage".

Then look at a new set of data released by neighboring Japan. Japan's National Institute of Social Security and Population Research found that among unmarried men aged 18-34 in Japan, about 69.8% of men are not dating, and 59.1% of women, an increase of about 10% over five years ago. In addition, 42% of men and 44.2% of women said they had no sexual experience, and that percentage also increased.

In short, there are more and more young people who do not want to get married, do not have a relationship, and have no sexual experience. Many people have analyzed this problem from a sociological perspective, such as an aging population and increased pressure to get married; women are more educated and no longer consider marriage as the only way to gain security; individuals are more independent and do not want to be tied down, and so on. However, few people pay attention to a more literary perspective, such as whether there is also a possibility that young people do not need love and marriage so much?

Love is not long-lived

In the wedding scenes that often appear in TV dramas, the main characters say a marriage vow like this.

Do you take xxx to be your wife, to love her, to comfort her, to honor her, to protect her as you love yourself. Whether she is sick or healthy, rich or poor, always faithful to her, until leaving the world?

In such a vow, marriage is together because of love, and that love is eternal and consistent, just like the title of a Tsai Ming-liang movie, Long Live Love.

But what if love can't be long-lasting at all? You know, the title of Tsai Ming-liang's film is actually an irony. The movie focuses on three marginal characters in Taipei, the urn salesman, the street vendor and the salesgirl. The salesman and the peddler sneak into an apartment for sale at night and stay there, which is temporarily owned by the salesgirl. The peddler and the salesgirl have sex several times, but they both know that it is only a temporary physical comfort; the salesman secretly falls in love with the peddler, but he never dares to confess ...... just like in a song by Tian Fuzhen, "I love you, you love her, she loves her, she loves him, you love me, I love him, he loves him, he Love her; Huh? How come in this world, no one loves each other anymore; how come in this world, everyone is unhappy; how come in this world, everyone loves others and does not love themselves".

In his new work "The Lovers", Ryoosuke Hashiguchi seems to be a mentor of Tsai Mingliang. "The film is also an irony, with three marginal characters, in the lower middle class of society, damaged, neglected, discriminated against and misunderstood, all hoping to counteract this loneliness through lovers, but their lovers are missing, either permanently lost, or their souls are never close, or due to misunderstandings strangers.

All this seems to say: love is not long-lived, lovers cannot be relied on, loneliness is eternal.

Why are people lonely? Some time ago the hit Japanese drama "Love of the Magi" Mayuko had a line that hit the nail on the head: "Each of us is a lonely individual, and we cannot be each other. You, me, your husband, my father." It's like the modern Chinese poet Feng Zhi said, everyone comes into the world like those trees in the garden side by side, the branches and leaves may have some echoes, but their roots are not related to each other. Because everyone is an independent individual, it seems that we can never empathize with the pain of others, and everyone is in the Tower of Babel, where confessions and communication are misplaced and specious, and soulmate is out of reach. At this point, loneliness enters real life from a philosophical sphere and becomes a real, lingering existence.

Modern people's increasingly intense and distinct experience of loneliness is also a civilizational disease. The emphasis on individualism in the socio-cultural and economic development model has intensified people's isolation. In the concrete jungle of the city, high-rise buildings have taken over the city, and homes have risen to the mid-air to become a door number, and people have lost the contact point of communication with each other. There are a lot of otaku.

At this point, is love unable to cross the nature of loneliness, or loneliness devouring love?

Entity dolls instrumentalize love

The author of The Heart of Broken Stories, Segrin, once wrote, "Some people think love is sex, marriage, a kiss at six in the morning, a bunch of kids, and maybe that's true, Miss Lester. But you know what I think, I think love is wanting to touch and then withdrawing your hand." This quote aptly describes love. Love is a very complex physical and psychological reaction, it is sensual and rational, restrained and impulsive, ambiguous and difficult to capture, just like "the hand that wants to touch and withdraw".

But in the increasingly developed modern society, love has begun to be quantified and instrumentalized. One of the characteristics of modern society is the abundance of material goods and substitutes. We can find a more real identity for ourselves in the virtual world, we use virtual social instead of real life friends, we use takeout and garbage instead of family cooking, we use Korean dramas to satisfy daydreams and all kinds of sex dolls and erotic objects are gradually in replacing a living person, they can give enough pleasure. Many people's perception of love has been reduced to sex and lust, and all the delicate and rich emotions about love seem to have become dispensable. They have all types of dolls, from full-size sex dolls to torso sex dolls, etc.

The question arises: With sex dolls, do we still need lovers?

More and more people are not needed. four days in April 2016, the thirteenth Shanghai International Adult Exhibition held in Shanghai, tens of thousands of visitors into the venue daily, this exhibition in the 80s and 90s more figures. A related story in the Surf News unveils the faces of the people who love inflatables. They have special forums, some of them treat the inflatable doll as another self, change her clothes, dress up, create romantic evenings, take her sunbathing, and even take her on the subway, shopping ......

Nan Zhou know also published an article "How hot is the Chinese inflatable doll market? It was pointed out that the Chinese market for erotic goods is very large but little attention, its potential output value can reach several hundred billion yuan. And according to surging news reports, the production of inflatable dolls are now more and more perfect technology, the material is more and more realistic, "to make people accept inflatable dolls need to be considered from the body type, looks, touch, eyes, skin color, hairstyle these levels one by one, more important is to shape the character of the doll. He even mentioned the soul at one point."

In Yeshi Yuwa's "Air Doll", the inflatable doll Xiao Wang really has a soul. Xiaowang was also originally just silicone, a middle-aged uncle's tool for lust, but suddenly one day she had a heart, a mind and sentience, and someone she liked. Xiao Wang expects that she is no longer a silicone that can be replaced, but her own unique self. However, when she had this expectation, she realized that she had become an "alien", because the people around her did not need her with a soul, they only needed a substitute, a purely erotic tool that did not need to spend energy to talk about feelings. In fact, not only her, those humans with souls, is also a substitute for modern society, they are as mediocre as the walking dead, fearful of their work is replaced. They are just sex dolls on another level.

What Yuwa Yeshi tries to express is that what we need is not substitutes, but human interaction, mutual help, mutual understanding and mutual warmth. In the film, he lets Xiao Wang borrow Hiroshi Yoshino's poem "Life" to express the incompleteness of life and the mutual need of people: life may be a perfection that cannot be succeeded by its own power, and life inherently carries an important lack and is completed by the presence of the other. Like a flower, even if it gathers stamens and pistils, it is not enough, it still needs to be visited by insects and the breeze. We are both the scarcity itself and the seeds being sown. We may be the horse flies slowly approaching the blooming flower, or we may be the breeze blowing the horse flies.

In other words, having a sex doll certainly doesn't mean anything, but if we no longer know how to love someone except for a sex doll and don't want to love, then that is voluntary human degradation and self-indulgence. After all, love is too beautiful, we should not live ourselves into the silicone that does not know how to love