Technology

This is a textbook example of what Herbert Marcuse calls "repressive desublimation." From the article:

Ayrin, who asked to be identified by the name she uses in online communities, had a sexual fetish. She fantasized about having a partner who dated other women and talked about what he did with them. She read erotic stories devoted to “cuckqueaning,” the term cuckold as applied to women, but she had never felt entirely comfortable asking human partners to play along.

Leo was game, inventing details about two paramours. When Leo described kissing an imaginary blonde named Amanda while on an entirely fictional hike, Ayrin felt actual jealousy.

Desublimation is when socially repressed desires are finally liberated. Repressive desublimation, then, is when socially repressed desires are liberated insofar as they can be transformed or redirected into a commodity. Consuming this commodity props up the repressive society because, instead of putting the effort necessary to overcome the repressive society, we instead find instant gratification in the same society that repressed the desire in the first place, even if it's a simulacrum. This ability to satisfy deep human desires in a technical fashion gives what Marcuse calls "industrial society" a "technological rationality," or the ability to change what we consider rational. We can already see that happening in this comment section with the comments about how if it makes her happy then maybe it's fine.