Blog – Page 36 – Sonya Ellen Mann

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Sonya Mann's active website is Sonya, Supposedly.

Do Women Want To Compare Orgasm Stats?

Posted on March 19, 2015August 29, 2015 by Sonya Mann

Startup SmartBod boasts, “We make learning about your arousal and orgasm less like fumbling alone in the dark and more like discussing your Fitbit’s step count with friends.” WHOA, SIGN ME UP. Except don’t because that sounds terrible? People want to do this? Founders Liz Klinger and James Wang think so. Masturbation should be competitive; that’ll improve the world!

According to Clare Thorp, “The statistics generated by the app will also allow you to see how your satisfaction compares with other users[,] like a leaderboard for orgasms. […] Liz Klinger hopes that it will give women reassurance, and cut through the nonsense that people peddle about their sex lives. […] It’s the ultimate answer to that perennial question: ‘Am I normal?'”

Instead of telling everybody that they’re normal, which is statistically impossible just like everyone being exceptional, why not encourage people to accept their orgasm profiles—or whatever term SmartBod plans to use—the way they are? Klinger and Wang are kidding themselves if they don’t realize that people are going to worry about climaxing too quickly or needing super intense vibration. Look at how people react to disparities in Instagram likes.

Based on the SmartBod website and a story by Patricia Yollin, Klinger and Wang are motivated by the admirable desire to help people understand their bodies and optimize pleasure. As Yollin explained, “Klinger and Wang figure that the urge to quantify, measure and explore one’s body should logically extend to female excitement.” Often I read sentences to which I react, “This is everything that’s wrong with Silicon Valley,” but seriously, this is everything that’s wrong with Silicon Valley. Though earnest, the metric-based attitude is extremely clinical. Example: “One beta tester was able to talk to her partner and say, ‘Look, here’s data. We should have foreplay for this long.'” Granted, that information is potentially sex-enhancing, but geez, what a bloodless way to present it! Oh baby, gimme them statistics.

To be clear, I don’t think that the SmartBod vibrator is an entirely terrible idea. I’m all for dispelling shame and having unabashed discussions about sexuality, especially female sexuality. Helping people have more and better orgasms is a good thing. What I am saying is that I agree with Jim, a commenter on Yollin’s article:

“Hard to imagine this going mainstream. […] I just don’t think anyone wants to turn pleasure into some kind of lab experiment, homework, study topic, [or to] and share this kind of info, presumedly on Facebook or something.” I feel ya, Jim.

1950's relaxation — Photo by frankieleon.

There is something about SmartBod that actually disturbs me, rather than merely setting off my “dumb startup” alarm. Rampant gender essentialism. Which is true of most sex-toy companies, and basically most of the world, but if you’re going to position your company as enlightened and progressive, perhaps you should attempt to actually be progressive. From the SmartBod website:

“Using advanced biometric sensing and statistical methods, we help you characterize your sexuality—how fast you get aroused, how long it generally takes to orgasm, and when sex would feel best—both individually and within the diverse sexual spectrum of the aggregate female population. Finally, as a company with strong female technology, design, and executive leadership, our product is women-centric at its core, from our choices to use the same materials as those used in medical devices to tailoring our device’s ergonomics to how woman [sic] actually hold vibrators.” [Bold added.]

It’s great to be a feminist company with a “women-centric” product. (Although I must note that they steer clear of citing feminism by name.) I am all about lady-focused businesses that put their money where their mouth is. However, conflating vaginas with womanhood is transphobic. The end. Doing so is violent to women who don’t have vaginas, and violent to men who do.

As always, I’m interested to see how this plays out. Send me links (@sonyaellenmann). Hat tip to Dave Pell’s newsletter NextDraft. For more brand-behavior mysteries… The Miraculous Bumbling Starbucks!

The New Machine Has A Soul

Posted on March 18, 2015April 2, 2015 by Sonya Mann

You ask the computer to call you “sir”
and it doesn’t
because that was the wrong menu.
You’re frustrated
but you click around the options
and yell,
“Sir, sir, sir!”
The computer requests that you
please calm down.
You refuse.
The machine asks
would you like a lozenge,
for your throat,
because you sound hoarse.
The available flavors are cherry and lemon.

Your fingers on the soft keyboard
that you don’t dare to pound
even in your rage.
The anger is worst when the computer stays
so calm.

Starbucks Competing For Corporate Cluelessness Award

Posted on March 18, 2015April 6, 2015 by Sonya Mann

Joe Berkowitz for Fast Company: “This Is What Happens When You Walk Into Starbucks And Talk To The Barista About Race”. The entertaining article points out some of the ludicrous aspects of Starbucks’ #RaceTogether campaign. I emailed the link to a friend, who prefers to remain anonymous for job reasons, but commented:

“This reminds me of Netflix saying it was going to split the company into two brands and no longer have a single brand aimed at people who wanted to watch movies. I mean… it’s true that I pay separate fees for the DVD’s and the streaming… but two separate brands was just stupid. I mean, one of those ideas that you didn’t test on anyone. #RaceTogether is just such an idea. Massively stupid and damaging to the brand… but probably not forever. It will go away, and then people will forget about it after a few months.”

Basically. To enforce my friend’s point, I had totally forgotten about the Netflix fiasco! Remember how bad the new name was? Qwikster. Bahaha. I love when brands phenomenally mismanage things.

Starbucks UGLY SIDE !!! — Photo by Ahmad Ziyad Maricar.

See also: Hamilton Nolan mocking the Starbucks initiative, Khushbu Shah rounding up salient tweets, and Hayley Peterson reviewing the hilarity of a Starbucks exec deleting his Twitter due to #RaceTogether criticism. Bruh. How can you lack self-awareness so profoundly?

Jokes aside, Tressie McMillan Cottom makes the most humane observation:

“It takes a lot of training and a lot of institutional support to teach people things they would rather not hear. I wonder what kind of training and support the hourly wage baristas at Starbucks will get.”

Picking Up A Sick Rat

Posted on March 18, 2015April 2, 2015 by Sonya Mann

Yesterday I found a rat on a suburban road. I was driving home, taking a blind turn. The rat was just before the bend, left side of the street. He sat a quarter of the way into the road, not in the middle but close enough that he would be crunched against the pavement if he didn’t move soon. And he showed no signs of moving.

I pulled over in front of someone’s driveway, got out with my keys in hand, and jogged to the rat. He was large enough that I briefly wondered if he was a baby possum. Red-brown fur. The rat was breathing hard, heaving air out of his little body. But he didn’t run away when I got close, which I knew was very strange. I cooed to him, typical baby talk for cute animals.

I guessed he was sick. I remembered that it’s stupid to touch a sick rat, but I felt like I couldn’t abandon him to be smushed. So I ran back to my car for a fabric tote bag and turned it inside out to pick him up, the way you pick up dog poop. Before I returned to the rat, another car drove around the blind turn. Their tires rolled very close to him, and I was anxious.

Eating brown rat

Photo by Tambako The Jaguar.

I brought the rat home and put him in a small cage that I found in the backyard, along with a dish of water, some rabbit pellets (we have pet bunnies), and a paper towel for bedding. I left the cage next to the woodpile by the barn. I checked on him a couple of times that evening. At roughly 10:30pm, he was dead. I looked at him again in the morning. Yup, dead.

In the afternoon I cleaned up. The weather was gorgeous, fresh yellow sunshine heating my back. I carried the small corpse down the hill and laid him next to a patch of wild calla lilies. (We live right on the edge of a regional park.) Goodbye, little rat. I tossed the leftover rabbit food over the edge of the hill, because I didn’t want to risk contaminating the other critters. I put the water dish next to the kitchen sink. Threw the paper towel in the trash. Washed my hands thoroughly (which I did after every interaction with the rat).

Now I feel sore and sad. Not sore like being miffed, but sore like a bruise. I know it’s trivial, one little rat who was probably poisoned for being a nuisance. I realize that I was an idiot to handle a sick animal from a species notorious for communicating diseases to humans. It just didn’t feel right to leave him.

Human Character, Defined by the Junk We Accumulate

Posted on March 17, 2015August 9, 2016 by Sonya Mann

Let’s juxtapose some quotes to force a narrative:

“[People] are not passive victims of an inherent, accelerating logic of digital technology. We can and do make choices about how we interact with machines. […] Human beings build the present and imagine the future with tools designed for certain purposes, and there are more reasons than ever to think about what kind of society we want those tools to advance.”

Judy Wajcman on how digital technology makes the world feel accelerated.

“Do you really think it’s a coincidence that most of the buttons you press on the web are labeled with the word submit?”

Dave Pell of NextDraft on Mark Zuckerberg’s privacy needs. (See also: “50 Shades of Apple Watch” lololol.)

“Objects — even ones that seem beautiful or benign — communicate ideologies and narratives, and sometimes those ideologies and narratives are ugly and oppressive and violent.”

Collette Shade on colonialist toile fabric. (The quote that inspired this blog post.) Finally:

“Things don’t work out the way you expect, and then they come back in a context you couldn’t have imagined. I guess that’s history.”

Brian Phillips on the lost-and-found World War II battleship Musahi.

Phillips is talking about “things” in the sense of “general events”, but his observation is equally true when “things” are material objects. Humans have an uneasy relationship with stuff. We want it — lots of it — but we also worry about being tethered to our possessions. We wonder, “Will I be distracted from what’s really important?” We wish we could suppress the desire to acquire. Someday our warehouses will subsume us, those buildings formerly called “homes”.

Photo of a yellow apartment building by Toni. — Photo by Toni.

I’m happy to worry about this; the alternative is misery porn on Hoarders. At the same time, anti-materialist fretting is odd, because we are physical creatures and therefore inherently bound to a material world. (Should we all be as unabashed as Madonna?)

Stuff is scary because it occupies a stunning amount of mindspace, without us noticing that the mental real estate is taken. We intellectual types prefer to understand what’s going on — control is even better. Interacting with the basic layer of life, the touch-smell-taste experience, tends to be fairly unconscious. Sure, there are think-pieces aplenty about the Apple Watch and every other new comm-tech offering, but when you use something all the time — for instance, the internet, which to be fair is not exactly an object — you can’t constantly meditate on the implications of your habits. Brew K-Cup coffee every morning and I promise that you’ll stop thinking about the environmental impact. (Or just buy a reusable steel version!)

We don’t notice until after the fact, but the expectations paired to objects are fluid. Look at the history of the telephone. What began as a device for limited audio communication is now the most boring feature of a pocket computer. What started as a newfangled contraption only used when the great expense was worth it has evolved to be a prerequisite to American normalcy. Alright, “normalcy” overstates the case, but circa 2013 more than 50% of American adults owned smartphones. Also in 2013, my parents got rid of their landline. The meaning of the word “phone” has changed substantially. The concept of a thing begins to morph immediately after its inception.

What do we do about any of this? What’s the call to action, the kicker? IDK. Maybe: we need to pay attention to our stuff and what we do with it. Archaeologists and anthropologists will tell you, a society is defined by its material residue. So is an individual life. To which we must respond…

“The whole point of being a person and not a brand is to at least try to get some dumb enjoyment out of things.”

Jia Tolentino of Jezebel in an interview about ladies self-promoting on Twitter.

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