Lie to Me Again, Pinocchio!

Two topics determine today's liberal tolerant attitude towards others: the respect of otherness, openness towards it, and the obsessive fear of harassment. The other is OK insofar as his presence is not intrusive, insofar as the other is not really other. Tolerance coincides with its opposite: my duty to be tolerant towards the other effectively means that I should not get too close to him, not to intrude into his/her space - in short, that I should respect his/her intolerance towards my over-proximity. This is what is more and more emerging as the central 'human right' in late-capitalist society: the right not to be harassed, i.e., to be kept at a safe distance from the others.

Zizek, "How to Read Lacan"

The attraction of cybersex is that, since we are dealing only with virtual partners, there is no harassment. This aspect of cyberspace - the idea of a space in which, because we are not directly interacting with real people, nobody is harassed and we are free to let go our dirtiest fantasies - found its ultimate expression in a proposal which recently resurfaced in some circles in the US, a proposal to "rethink" the rights of necrophiliacs (those who desire to have sex with dead bodies). Why should they be deprived of it? The idea was formulated that, in the same way people sign permission for their organs to be use for medical purposes in the case of their sudden death, one should also allow them to sign permission for their bodies to be given to necrophiliacs. This proposal is the perfect exemplification of how the Politically Correct anti-harassment stance realizes Kierkegaard's old insight into how the only good neighbor is a dead neighbor. A dead neighbor - a corpse - is the ideal sexual partner of a "tolerant" subject trying to avoid any harassment: by definition, a corpse cannot be harassed; at the same time, a dead body does not enjoy, so the disturbing threat of the excess-enjoyment to the subject playing with the corpse is also eliminated.

- Zizek, ibid.