After Melissa, a 35-year-old event planner living in Chicago, masturbates, she sometimes studies a chart that resembles the output of a heart rate monitor or that of a seismograph capturing an earthquake.
The data is generated by her vibrator, the Lioness, which measures her arousal and uploads information about her orgasm patterns to the company’s app. The sensors embedded in the toy track her pelvic floor movements. With each involuntary squeeze and release of her pelvic floor muscles, the app displays a graph showing her rhythmic pattern in a series of peaks and valleys. She typically uses it in tandem with her other clitoral stimulating vibrators, so that she can compare the orgasms she experiences with each one.
“I use it just as a data collection dildo, essentially,” said Melissa, who asked to be identified only by her first name because of privacy concerns. Besides the Lioness, she doesn’t own any wearable activity trackers, like the popular Apple Watch or Fitbit, but she says she likes “to have quantifiable information when I’m learning things.”
Whether it’s obsessively collecting step counts or waiting for Spotify to reveal our musical tastes each year, we may be growing more accustomed to tracking every aspect of our lives through technology. The option to track female orgasms at home introduces the possibility of hacking what some scientists have treated as an enigma. Some people use the tracking technology to combat sexual changes that can come with menopause or polycystic ovary syndrome, for example. Others say they want the data to see how certain foods or medications may affect their arousal — and they’re thinking about how to optimize their orgasms with smart, Bluetooth-enabled sex toys they hope will help them better understand their bodies.
“We really call it a tool for ‘sexperiments,’ so doing experiments with yourself or with partners — how caffeine can have an effect on your orgasms, how alcohol, how CBD, how stress, all these things,” said Anna Lee, the chief executive and co-founder of Lioness.
Ms. Lee started the company about eight years ago with Liz Klinger, and the pair pitch their vibrators as a way for people to have “smarter” orgasms, joining a wave of everyday devices that are connected to the internet.
