Last month was an eventful one for vaginas, it seems. National Masturbation Month in the US also saw “International Clitoris Awareness Week”, an awareness drive that sought to make discussions around female sexuality and pleasure more comfortable and mainstream. This isn’t an idea found in isolation though, nor is it one that’s restricted to serious discussions and campaigns.
“Meet Happy, your friendly neighbourhood vagina.” That’s right. That utterly kissable mascot is a stand in for your vagina, courtesy the creators of HappyPlayTime, a new app that’s trying to change attitudes about female masturbation through education, adorable graphics and “light-hearted games”.
The website, which is currently in alpha, urges you to “love your vagina, because all she wants is to love you.” It also has a bunch of rather interesting, albeit questionable, statistics, which include the levels of guilt, shame, “silliness” and satisfaction women from various age groups associate with masturbation. Women between the ages of 17 and 26, by the way, seem to feel the silliest, while women between 46 and 57 record the highest feelings of satisfaction.
The upcoming app will have games and lessons on masturbation, and if the screenshots provided on the website are any indication, remarkably basic ones at that. However, the screenshot provided is only Lesson 1, so we can safely suppose it gets more complex after we master the basics (“This is the clitoris. Make a circular motion here.”)
Personally, though, as much as I appreciate banishing the stigma around female masturbation, having a game to do it just seems like a bit of a turn off. And most importantly, only a truly disturbed individual could successfully associate pleasurable sexual experiences with that adorable little vagina mascot/carefully swaddled infant, Happy.