The Best Time I Tried To Strengthen My Pelvic Floor
At first I could only do it in complete silence while lying completely still. The buzzing required my full attention. Later I got a little more comfortable and experimented with the level of skill I could access; I could wash dishes, but I couldn’t apply makeup. Something about the rhythms. I could lie in bed and text, the vibrations in my hand matching the ones down below. By the end I could handle semi-complex cognitive tasks, like light emails, setting up meetings and answering administrative questions. Sitting felt better than standing, and lying down felt best.
Now, at the end of this very personal experiment, I’m left with only one question: will my next orgasm be better than my last?
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The Luna Smart Bead is billed as “a personal trainer for your pelvic floor.” “Discover your true orgasm potential,” the website implores, and the button to add the Smart Bead to your shopping cart suggestively speaks directly to you: Buy Me Now, the inanimate object asks, a puppy that just wants to follow you home.
It’s smallish. When it arrived I practiced hiding it in the palm of my hand, my fingers gripping around that smooth rubbery-soft vibrator texture as it buzzed, perhaps trying to prepare myself for what was to come.
To use the LUNA Smart Bead, you simply press a small button on the side until a red light appears. The device gives you a few seconds for insertion and then emits three short buzzes to let you know the routine has started. When the buzzing happens, you use your Kegel muscles to squeeze; when the buzzing stops, you relax. By you I mean I. When the buzzing stops I relax.
Lelo introduced the LUNA Smart Bead in the fall of 2014. Founded in 2003, the Swedish company is known for their sleek and minimal aesthetic; tasteful vibrators that have won multiple product design awards. They bill themselves as a “luxury” company, selling the promise of vibration-induced orgasms that prioritize beauty and efficiency. According to their press kit, they’ve sold over 7,000,000 units of Lelo products in the past 11 years. The vibrators, balls, beads, as well as various sexual accoutrements — blindfolds, handcuffs, etc. — are sold in hundreds of stores around the world.
But the Smart Bead stands out from their other products. A vibrator — or personal massager, or sex toy, if we’re using the coded language for such products — is meant to get you off pretty quickly after you turn it on. By contrast, the LUNA Smart Bead is a tool that promises better orgasms in the future the same way the elliptical promises better health. Do 30 minutes of cardio every day so you won’t be winded walking up the subway steps. Use the LUNA Smart Bead every day so that tomorrow’s orgasm rocks your fucking world. So, fine. I was ready to find out for myself. Earlier this year, I committed to spending six weeks using the LUNA Smart Bead.
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The Kegel exercise was first introduced to me as a concept in, I think, an issue of Cosmopolitan, which I began reading when I was about 13 years old with the explicit goal of being a sexually available girl. I knew instinctively which tips were, for lack of a better word, dumb: my friends and I screamed at the suggestion we place a donut around a man’s penis and seductively nibble it off. We were young and stupid but even we knew less was decidedly more when it came to providing heterosexual male pleasure: like, hi, insert in mouth, repeat.
But I also instinctively trusted the assertion that my pleasure, as the target demographic for this particular magazine, was complicated. Complex. This was a message not limited to Cosmo. Television shows, movies, books, and the politically progressive sexual education classes offered at my high school told me the same thing again and again: as a person with a vulva, vagina, and clitoris, my orgasms were not as easily accessible as the adolescent with a penis, prostate, and testicles.
A Kegel exercise is, in case you didn’t know, an internal contraction intended to strengthen the pelvic floor. The Mayo Clinic suggests that if you don’t know how to tighten your Kegel muscles to try stopping the flow of urine midstream. Those are the muscles you’re looking for. The conventional wisdom suggests that Kegel exercises can help with incontinence — very important!! — but they are mainly known as an exercise that keeps the vagina tight and perhaps improves the strength of your orgasms. Personally, I do them literally every time I think about sex, so: frequently. Anecdotally, most of my vagina-having friends report they do the same.
As with most sexual self-help literature directed at women, the “self” aspect of the Kegel exercise is particularly important to note; should you be interested in an orgasm that occurs either simultaneously or parallel to penetration, keeping it tight (lol sorry) is your responsibility.
Initially, I incorporated the LUNA Smart Bead into my regular self-care routine: I would work out in my living room, wash my face, apply a face mask, and then…insert. For five minutes, I swore, I would focus entirely on improving one aspect of my self.
I was both intrigued and annoyed by this small pink egg. Could it give me measurably better orgasms, both alone and with a partner, the same way more reps at the gym meant I could carry more bags home from the grocery store? Perhaps more perplexing, were my orgasms in need of improvement? And, to get up on my feminist high horse for a second, the most pressing question in my mind: why did I need to buy something to fix my orgasms? Is there no part of my manicured, lotioned, bleached-blonde, lacquered body free from a capitalist beauty industrial complex? Even my cervix needs a makeover, I bitterly thought to myself.
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I emailed Steve Thomson, the head of marketing for LELO, to find out what purpose they wanted the LUNA Smart Bead to serve. “The idea itself came from a simple challenge we set ourselves,” he told me. “Instead of making an improved sex toy, is it possible to improve the orgasm itself?”
There are five exercise routines programmed into the Smart Bead. Each take about five minutes, and the Bead uses touch-sensors to assess your “fitness levels” the first time it is inserted; everyone begins at Level 3, and then the Bead adjusts up or down depending on, to paraphrase Kanye West and Chris Rock, how much reupholstering your pussy needs.
Developing the Smart Bead was a long, labor-intensive process. LELO does extensive research and development for all their products, sending new items to a select number of people for six-week trial periods and soliciting their feedback, as well as consultations with sexual health professionals and doctors.
Thomson describes the LUNA Smart Bead as the most sophisticated product LELO has ever created. “Normally we focus on vibration power, noise levels, ergonomics, that kind of thing,” Thomson explained. “But here we were trying to assess their satisfaction with orgasms, and how the LUNA Smart Bead improved that. So we asked questions on how the women rated their orgasms in terms of satisfaction, how frequently they experienced an orgasm, had they experience a multiple orgasm before and even approximately how long they thought this lasted.”
For this kind of research, subjectivity can’t be discounted. Thomson concedes that orgasms are so personal, so unique, that quantifying them is a difficult if not impossible goal. But the responses were, according to their research, overwhelming. They found “that a focused routine that enhances your pleasure potential can really increase the chances of orgasms despite all potential distractions. When you hear respondents thanking LELO for opening them to multiple orgasms for the same time, or even saving their marriage(!) — you know you’re doing something good with your time.”
Personally, as the days turned to weeks and I got more comfortable with the Smart Bead, I became unable to tell the difference between the routines. Instead I took it one vibration at a time. My commitment to lying still and focusing fell by the wayside; waiting for a buzz inside you is a little boring! I read. I emailed. I took notes (Dear Diary, today when I put the Smart Bead in it hurt a little, whoops) for this article. I tightened, and then I released.
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My favorite sex store in Toronto is called, perfectly, Come As You Are. I knew I wanted to talk to Jack Lamon, one of the owner-workers of the co-op who has been on staff since 2001, to see what he thought about the LUNA Smart Bead.
For context, Lamon specified that he has a vagina, prefers male pronouns, and regularly performs Kegel exercises. He told me that he feels strongly connected to CAYA’s central mission to make sexual pleasure, health, and education more accessible to more people. “While I still feel that’s true,” he said, “I can’t help but think that an easier route to making the world a better place would be to just encourage people to do more pelvic floor muscle exercises. Seriously.”
Lamon agreed with me, to a certain extent, that the idea of buying a product for a vaginal or orgasmic makeover is fraught at best. “As a fundamentally anti-capitalist sex shop, there’s very little in the way of advertising or marketing that we can get behind, especially when it comes to sex products,” he said. “We find that the marketing of sex products is at best misleading, and at worst actively harmful. I would say that this entire industry is built on marketing products that supposedly improve one’s sex life — that’s why sex toys were called marital aids for so long, right?”
Beyond that, sex toys have also been the focus of a legal crackdown; up until 2008, for example, it was illegal to sell (and, obviously, buy) any kind of device explicitly intended for x-rated purposes in Texas. These kinds of laws and statutes are why the catch-all phrase “sex toy” still dominates the market; if a retailer was selling a dildo or vibrator, it was for a very funny joke ha ha. Retailers could also say that they were selling them for educational purposes; anything, basically, that was not about getting an unmarried customer thoroughly off.
“For what it is worth,” Lamon stressed to me, “LELO’s most misleading marketing is more honest than most of the sex product marketing we’ve seen over the years. I think that LELO has been an incredibly positive influence in this industry. LELO has made the industry make better toys by showing people that sex toys could be well made and beautiful, and that buying sex toys could be shame-free and a sex-positive experience in mainstream culture. So, yeah, this orgasm-pressure marketing is disappointing, but it is better than the average. The big difference with the LELO campaign for the Smart Bead, is that there is at least some kind of truth behind what they’re marketing, unlike penis pumps, or herbal Viagra, or etc etc.”
In July, Rose Eveleth published an excellent essay on other products similar to the LUNA Smart Bead called “Your Vagina Is Not A Machine,” where she introduced me to the fascinating and horrifying concept of “wetware:”
In the late ’80s, mathematician and science writer Rudy Rucker popularized the term “wetware” to mean “the underlying generative code for an organism” — a.k.a. things like genes, the biochemistry of cells, and the architecture of a body’s muscles and bones. But in the years since, “wetware” has come to represent everything that is soft and squishy about humans: our brains, our health, our fleshy and fallible bodies….The results of this belief are unending attempts to replace, track, or supplement every aspect of our messy human lives with an app or device.
Eveleth asked, upon looking at products like Loop, Elvie, kGoal, and Skea, if we really needed to create a gamified vagina. “Your body isn’t a car,” she intoned, “and your vagina isn’t a carburetor.”
In a similar vein, I read Hairpin friend Hannah Smother’s incredibly comprehensive piece on how the vibrator evolved past the appearance of human penises with great interest. “[I]f women and couples are looking for something more than their own, very real human parts,” Hannah asked, “[why] would they want a plastic knock-off of those same parts in bed?”
These are two equally valid and entirely contradictory points, and I agree with both of them: our bodies are not and will never be machines, but if we are going to turn to machines for pleasure, they might as well be machines that serve a purpose and not pale imitations of human sexuality. The Smart Bead worked for me, I thought one day with all the force of an epiphany. It didn’t work on me. That was a distinction I hadn’t realized I wanted.
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When I began my personal experiment, I was trying to balance my cynicism with the potential for being surprised. I experienced all the eye-rolling, “over it” feelings typical to when someone or something comes at you with what they know you need, conveniently available at a very reasonable price.
But over the course of this experiment I had some very, very good times, both with myself and with A Partner. Was it better? is the question I asked myself every time, trying to take notes in the interest of science but unsure of how to even begin to answer.
When we report our orgasms, there is an element of recollection that can’t be ignored. If you could formulate a rating at the exact moment of orgasm, you might give it a much better rating than the one that comes several days or weeks or years later, like when you see a Former Sex Partner doing something dumb on social media and mentally downgrade that orgasm from “mind-blowing” to “slightly above average” in an effort to convince yourself that you have matured. That kind of unreliable reporting.
On the days when I was really concentrating, I tried to ascertain what level I was at or if I was improving in any sense I could feel. Sometimes the buzzing was frequent and short; sometimes it was sparse and long. It did, in fact, remind me of the interval training I was doing at a local gym on Thursday mornings, albeit a much less sweatier kind of interval training.
But to answer the original question: yes. At the end of this experiment I had one orgasm that I would rate as better than many of the ones that preceded it. There are factors I can identify. The orgasm happened with penetration, but not a penis. I was in bed, but I wasn’t lying down. It was, like most great sexual experiences, largely mental; perhaps even (ugh) emotional. It was great!! Good work, we can all take the LUNA Smart Bead home.
Or we can all do any number of things to improve our sex lives. We can teach ourselves what we like, and then teach our partners; we can buy all kinds of sexual tools for any purpose we like; or, if we have vaginas, we can just tighten and release. Because I cannot, with total confidence, tell you that the Smart Bead made anything better, or if that orgasm was a fluke, or if I can even see a difference in subsequent orgasms. I have no idea if my pelvic floor is stronger, and said Partner is an unreliable source of data, being just a flawed human himself. I committed to six weeks, but the battery died as I hit five; I did not replace it.
“The amazing thing about pelvic floor muscle exercises is that you can do them with Kegel balls, a small vibrator or dildo, or nothing at all!” Lamon reminded me. “Kegel devices (barbells, balls, etc, etc) are great because they give your muscles something to resist against and because they help you target the correct set of muscles. The LUNA Smart Bead provides a gentle and pleasurable reminder, and makes doing exercises ridiculously straight-forward.”
In Lamon’s experience, he’s found that Kegel exercises are best for so many reasons, including childbirth and incontinence, but when people come to him for advice, they almost always have one agenda in mind. “The most heartbreaking thing to us is that typically, people ask us about them because they want to be tighter for their partner,” he reported. “In comparison, people wanting to do Kegels to have better orgasms seems downright revolutionary, no?”
Yes.