Sex tracking apps and sexual self-care

Saunders, Rebecca ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9566-4744 2024. Sex tracking apps and sexual self-care. New Media and Society 26 (4) , pp. 2006-2022. 10.1177/14614448221079631

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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.

Item Type:	Article
Date Type:	Publication
Status:	Published
Schools:	Journalism, Media and Culture
Publisher:	SAGE Publications
ISSN:	1461-4448
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	15 July 2023
Date of Acceptance:	24 January 2022
Last Modified:	14 May 2024 13:17
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/161054

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