A recent English publicity spot for a beer enables us further to clarify this crucial point. Its first part stages the well-known fairy-tale anecdote: a girl walks along a stream, sees a frog, takes it gently into her lap, kisses it, and, of course, the ugly frog miraculously turns into a beautiful young man. However, the story isn't over yet: the young man casts a covetous glance at the girl, draws her towards himself, kisses her - and she turns into a bottle of beer which the man holds triumphantly in his hand... For the woman, the point is that her love and affection (signalled by the kiss) turn a frog into a beautiful man, a full phallic presence (in Lacan's mathems, the big Phi); for the man, it is to reduce the woman to a partial object, the cause of his desire (in Lacan's mathems, the object small a). On account of this asymmetry, »there is no sexual relationship«: we have either a woman with a frog or a man with a bottle of beer - what we can never obtain is the »natural« couple of the beautiful woman and man... Why not? Because fantasmatic support of this »ideal couple« would have been the inconsistent figure of a frog embracing a bottle of beer.