To celebrate ‘masturbation May’, innovative sex toy company Lovense organised a Twitter orgy, which began Saturday 22 May at midnight Eastern Time and ran for a full 24 hours. So, what did it consist of exactly and did you actually miss out on a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity?
If you’ve never heard of Lovense before, it is a Singapore-based teledildonics sex toy manufacturer mostly known for its VR and smart sex toys, which can be controlled via Bluetooth using the company’s own mobile app.
Lovense’s idea was pretty straightforward: users connected to the internet orgy using the Lovense Remote or the Lovense Connect app (available on the App Store and Google Play) in order to experience vibrations in real-time as Twitter users posted using official hashtags. Any time someone tweeted or retweeted one of the selected hashtags, users who had agreed to opt-in to the event received a vibration on their device.
“Bringing people to the incredible joys of sex tech is our main goal, so we are very pleased to invite everyone to join this exciting event,” Lovense CEO Dan Liu said in a statement. “The Lovense Orgy is a wonderful occasion to unite the whole world and festively celebrate Masturbation May together.”
The company’s first Twitter orgy was open to anyone over the age of 18 with the company’s internet-connected devices. Once they joined via the connected app, their toys vibrated in time with Lovense’s active hashtags for the event—of which there were 17.
Each hashtag set off a different vibration pattern from the Lovense library. Tweets with #Lovense sent out the ‘Firework pattern’, while tweets with #LovenseOrgy set off the ‘Earthquake pattern’. The other 15 hashtags were released on the day of the orgy. All of the remaining ones were created by “friends and partners of Lovense” to be released specifically for the orgy. You simply had to tune in to try them out.
Lovense is part of this industry, and it’s already managed to stand out from the crowd in December 2020, when it announced the official launch of the Group Control feature on its app, which allows up to 100 people to participate in virtual orgies using the company’s connected sex toys.
Through Group Control, everyone has the ability to take control of someone else’s device (with their consent, of course) and they can be synced to simulate sexual acts. Vibration power and frequency can be adjusted in real-time, or users can download patterns created by others. The chat also features a push-to-talk feature and supports any sexy images you want to send.
Lovense offers products for all genders, which means anyone can join the party. The moral of the story is, even though you missed the Twitter orgy of the century, you can still find what you’re looking for—along with a bit more privacy—on Lovense Remote.
The future of pleasure is coming, and it’s honestly so polite of it to make sure we are too.
The World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a pandemic on 11 March, 2020. It was the day after Activision released its free-to-play battle royale game Call Of Duty: Warzone and a little over a week before Nintendo released Animal Crossing: New Horizons. One year later, these two games have essentially reshaped our lives over the pandemic, providing comforts of escapism and helping build socially-distanced friendships via multiplayer. But what if such gamification models could redefine today’s digital-first education system, particularly for those subjects which require ‘interactive tools’ for better understanding? What if contemporary sex education was meant to be taught through video games?
The challenging shift to online sex education
In an era where mornings have become synonymous with Zoom links and clean backgrounds for students, schools are increasingly prioritising what gets taught online. As subjects like physics and physical education go online, much of the curriculum is getting lost in translation from the real to the virtual world. And sex education is no exception.
“There’s already lots of cultural stigma around something like saying the word ‘penis’ in a room full of people who are under 18,” said Karen Rayne, the executive director of UNHUSHED, a non-profit that offers sex education for schools with the aims to remove the stigma surrounding them. In an interview with US News, she illustrated the challenges of teaching homebound teenagers and college students who are “attending classes from their childhood bedrooms” about the birds and the bees.
Not long after the pandemic hit, Rayne, who also teaches human sexuality at the University of Texas at Austin, created a manifesto outlining 10 tips for teaching online sex ed. These tips include being mindful of students’ developmental stages, expecting some awkwardness and looping in parents.
Despite her efforts, however, she admitted that some students were in fact being left behind in classes. “After so many months online, we were beginning to lose some kids in a way that I wasn’t really concerned about in March or April (2020),” she said. “It might be that for some kids, sex ed is not where they need to spend their limited online learning hours.”
A paper published by Leslie Kantor, chair of the Department of Urban-Global Public Health at the Rutgers University School of Public Health, further spelled out why teaching reproductive health during a pandemic is critical and how schools should prioritise the same. “Even when in-person schooling resumes, missed sex education is unlikely to be made up, given the modest attention it received prior to the pandemic,” the paper concluded, which has essentially hatched a sense of urgency at the educational forefront.
As teachers scramble to come up with innovative ways to “translate what we learned about effective, in-person sex education into the digital environment,” some sex education game developers think this could be their moment.
The science behind gamified sex education
Gamification can be summed up as the use of game design elements like avatars, scores, leaderboards and virtual rewards in non-game contexts such as apps for learning a skill or tracking one’s progress. With the growing use of computer-based therapy in mental health and promising results seen in the use of gamification in psychotherapy, the push to gamify sex education is part of a broader movement—deploying video games to target health issues ranging from depression to tobacco use.
So how does game design and principles help tackle a social stigma? Three major factors come into play here: interactivity, privacy and familiarity. Interactivity is a huge influence on a person’s learning capacity, especially in a digital age saturated with online lectures and note-taking. What this means in terms of sex education is that these games could essentially offer a way to interact with the subject at hand without getting ‘down and dirty’.
“Putting a condom on a banana, that’s like a stereotype of sex education, right? But that’s what everyone remembers,” said Nina Freeman, the developer behind the acclaimed sex education game how do you Do It? “It’s the thing that you’re actually doing. You’re basically performing the act of putting a condom on a penis—it is performative.” In an interview with Mashable, the developer equated the act of putting a condom on a banana to a game-like experience and how in that sense such games could be a very effective way of conveying information.
Freeman’s approach to game design involves role-plays and simulations which gives players a different perspective on the whole sex education front. “I think player/character embodiment is really powerful and games are uniquely better than other media at having people get into character, almost like they’re in a play,” she said. “Games are really good at that because they’re actively having the player pull information instead of pushing it on them.”
Another example of interactivity in gamified sex education is the smartphone app Tap That where players are responsible for taking care of different characters navigating their sexual relationships. If one of them has an STI, the players have to diagnose and determine how to cure or treat it. Virtual condoms are also offered in player toolkits to prevent the infections from spreading.“Sex should be a positive experience, so why shouldn’t sex ed be too?” a video explaining the game reads.
This brings us to the next two factors pushing these video games into the mainstream: privacy and familiarity. Such games have the potential to filter out all of the awkwardness surrounding the topic. It gives players the ability to learn about sex and sexuality from the privacy of their homes in a way that they’re familiar and comfortable with.
“Having students engage with the world in a way they’re more familiar with and feel more comfortable doing makes a difference when you’re trying to get them to talk about issues that are really sensitive or maybe their parents haven’t talked to them about,” Freeman mentioned. “I think giving them more of a private space to explore some of this stuff is definitely helpful.” The added privacy also fosters a safe space for players. One where they can reflect on their own sexuality and explore their feelings without being judged.
A comprehensive way forward
In a recent report by Censuswide, the agency surveyed 500 teachers who used video games in their classrooms over the pandemic. 89 per cent of them highlighted the fact that the tool has proved beneficial for engaging students with their subjects. 69 per cent stated that their students are more likely to do their homework when gaming is involved. And 68 per cent swore that gaming would become an important resource in education moving forward.
As comprehensive sex education becomes essential for today’s ‘digital native’ youth—with means of sexting, online dating and VR sex literally available at their fingertips—video games along with the transferrable skills they offer might just help safeguard education in the COVID-19 generation and beyond.
