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The price of fake love
2021-02-27 
Ubiquitous entertainment and media have squeezed real social interaction. [Photo provided to China Daily]

Nobody to celebrate your birthday with? Don't worry, a friend is close at hand-but you may need your phone to complete the transaction.

Li Meiying is bored, fidgety and wide awake. It's 11 pm and the 25-year-old Beijing office worker who has been suffering from mild insomnia for a few week, knows she is in for another bad night. Then she has a flash of genius: what about hiring someone to help her fall asleep? A virtual boyfriend no less.

Forget robots, for this will be a real, flesh-and-blood companion whose services she can pay for online. The idea is not exactly new, virtual boyfriend and girlfriend services being all the rage last year when COVID-19 was doing its worst and the isolation that a national lockdown brought had prompted a surge in the affective interaction business.

"His voice is the kind I like ... and it's not sultry and annoying," Li says. "He was originally supposed to chat with me for an hour until midnight, but it was so soothing to have him talk to me. I paid for an extra half hour, and he later stretched that to a full hour free of charge. I was so sleepy that I didn't even hang up, and his voice was beginning to blur."

As long as you pay a fee ranging from 50 yuan to 200 yuan ($7.7-30.8), you can have a boyfriend or girlfriend with a charming voice on call. In June last year the term virtual boyfriend appeared in Weibo's hot search list, and the "companion economy" became a big talking point. On the video platform Bilibili countless videos with virtual boyfriend and girlfriend as keywords garnered views of up to 1 million for a single video. The popularity has also inspired videos in which virtual boyfriend or girlfriend services are evaluated and rated.

The combination of a gentle voice and a verbal tease is addictive, it seems. In the next few days, Li said, she could not get enough of virtual boyfriends.

"Actually, I had almost become immune to most of them until this real husky voice absolutely got to me. This virtual boyfriend is regarded as the best seller in this particular shop, and he said some of the most gentle words in the most manly voice possible. Every syllable tug on this maiden's heartstrings. I love it. It's sweet and reassuringly safe in some strange kind of way. For some odd reason it makes me-and I describe myself as a 10,000-year-old iceberg-really want to hug him or lean on his shoulder."

Videos listed in hot searches have allowed the "companion service", an obscure and niche business to be given wider public exposure. Directly searching for the likes of "virtual boyfriend" and "virtual girlfriend" on Taobao will return a "No related items found" message. However, that does not mean affection as a commodity has disappeared; it is proliferating in other areas online in a more discreet way.

Such services are linked with keywords such as xiaogege (boyfriend) and "relief", and dozens of stores offering these types of services can be found. Most of these shops use anime characters as their product siren.

Various types of services are offered. In addition to virtual lovers, they offer customized services such as friend chat, emotional consultation, wake up and sleep, and trick packages. Delivery methods include text and voice chat and real-time voice calls. Store staff are divided into different grades such as gold medal, top brand, and "god" or "goddess" and are evaluated by how much praise they attract and the number of repeat orders they garner. The top performers are those rated as coming across extraordinarily well audibly in addition to having an attractive face.

[Photo by ISMAEL SANDIEGO/CHINA DAILY]

For this type of service, most shops clearly mark their price. After the order is placed, the customer service sends the customer's request to a special order group, and the clerk decides whether to take the order. After the transaction is completed, consumers evaluate the service and choose to renew or end the transaction.

In China such chatting services alone are not illegal, as long as the contents and methods of the service are legal. Any obscenity, fraud or extortion takes the activity into illegal territory, with those involved liable to prosecution.

"He sang to me on my birthday, but that cost 50 yuan," said a woman who did not want to be identified, talking of a virtual boyfriend she had gained as a result of an online gift from a friend.

For 30 minutes the birthday girl and her boyfriend chatted, and at her request he played the guitar and sang a song called Summer Breeze. Over the half hour, the woman said, she had mixed feelings.

"My gut feeling was this stuff is a bit expensive, but on the other hand in that short time I did feel I was being pampered and cared for."

"With the advance of digital tools, human senses extend from the real world to the online world," says Jiang Wenxiu of the Department of Psychiatry, Zhongda Hospital, Southeast University.

"However, ubiquitous entertainment and media have squeezed real social interaction and emotional communication. It has become the norm for city dwellers to become more and more lonely, and people's needs for emotion and companionship have become stronger. Virtual-lover services cater to this kind of emotional demand that has nowhere to be trusted."

Virtual boyfriends drew a lot of attention on the internet in 2014, when such services were first popular on online shopping platforms. The owner of one of the businesses says that since the store opened nine years ago trade has been brisk.

"Our shop has an average of 5,000 visitors a day and about 100 orders," he says, stressing that the chat involves nothing obscene.

Besides such paid services, voluntary virtual-lover groups such as Seven-Day Couples on Douban are popular. The service, set up in 2014, has 1,300 members. The service provided is similar to that on Taobao for single men and women in big cities to find suitable internet chat companions. The game rules are online only, no meeting in person for seven days.

The group profile made no bones about the kinds of people it thought would be interested in its activities:"Do you often leave work alone, squeeze out of the crammed back of the bus late at night, arrive home to an empty room, play with your phone late into the night and then fall sleep without so much as a 'Good night'? Although I don't know who you are, what does it matter? I just like the feeling of being loved and loving others."

Jiang Wenxiu, the physician, says:"This fast-food fragmented virtual emotional consumption is both simple and complex. The market place dictates that anything can be bought and sold. However, now and again imperfect business rules and blurry service boundaries can strike a raw public nerve. In the era saturated with media where real social connection is scarce, more and more young people are crying out to be with others and for companionship. The popularity of the companionship economy points to the demand for the virtual emotional consumption market and the potential it holds."

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