Sex tracking apps and sexual self-care

Abstract

‘To-Do List: Masturbate’ reads one of the Instagram posts for the fashionable, new Lioness vibrator and tracking app. Lioness is just one of the most publicised of a spate of sex tracking apps principally aimed at women that have emerged over the past 5 years, which asks users to monitor their sexual interactions, and which also offers medical and holistic advice on how to improve one’s sex life. This article focuses on how the value of this technology is articulated through the rhetoric of self-care that connects these apps to the increasingly culturally pervasive valorisation of sex as a form of work; and how its connections both to self-care and quantification demonstrate important developments in post- and neoliberal feminism where objectivity and distance become central to the formation to female sexual subjectivity.

Queer and feminist reflections on sextech

“…The Lioness – primarily marketed to cisgender women – promises to enhance self-knowledge and intimate connection via data – and also offers users an opportunity to “donate” their data to sexological researchers. As Saunders 34 argues, these connections to both self-care and quantification connect in interesting ways to post-feminist discussions where both a form of objectivity and distance are key to articulations of female sexuality. In contrast, the Lelo F1 penile masturbation sleeve invites cisgender men to respond to data insights by re-programming their device, enhancing their own pleasure.…”