Why Women Are Using Selfie Sticks to Look Inside Their Vaginas

Developed two years ago by the luxury sex toy company Svakom, the toy sought to address a gap in the market: the lack of high-end, waterproof vibrators with internal cameras on the tip. The stick boasts not only a waterproof and "whisper-quiet rechargeable" vibrator but also a software disc "for those with a PC." It's unclear how many units were initially sold, but last spring, when online sex stores cleverly rebranded it as a "sex selfie stick," the little-known toy began to elicit a round of strong reactions around the web.

The Independent called the "nightmarish love child of an endoscopy and a vibrator" further "proof that the sole goal of mankind is now to take selfies absolutely everywhere possible."

"Everything down to the last muscle-twitch. Sexy," noted a blogger at the Huffington Post, sarcastically. Few, it seemed, wanted to understand why the device existed, let alone might have been desired.

Humans have been producing images of sex and genitalia for thousands of years, which is why, in an age of solicited and unsolicited dick pics, the amount of unironic hate directed at the sex selfie stick seemed puzzling. No doubt, the selfie stick adds fuel to the already heated debates around selfie culture: critics diagnose the images as a narcissism epidemic while celebrants claim the practice as revolutionary self-love. To alarmists, the sex selfie stick takes the masturbatory metaphor of the selfie's "looped gaze"—the idea that the author, sitter, editor, and viewer of the photo are all the same person—and makes it literal.

But the quest to see inside the female body's unseeable moments of pleasure is not just an outgrowth of our generation's obsession to document and share every second of our lives; the desire to capture the internal signs of pleasure and arousal has long existed on the margins of culture and science. The repulsive fascination provoked by the selfie stick, in particular, stems from a longer debate—one that has long sought to define the contested boundaries between pornographic and medical imagery.

Each century has had its own technology for reproducing images that are at once arousing and anatomical, Thomas Lacqueur, a historian of medicine and of sexuality, told me when I asked him about the connections between anatomical images and smut. Long before the video camera, scandalous Renaissance texts like Three Books on the Dissection of the Parts of the Human Body and Aristotle's Masterpiece displayed salacious engravings alongside legitimate medical advice.

These medical and anatomical displays of the body have long been subject to aesthetic, erotic, and artful interpretations. Even as late as the early twentieth century, Lacqueur notes, birth control materials were being prosecuted as pornography. Genital "selfies," specifically, can be traced back to eighteenth-century Florentine waxes depicting the insides of human bodies. Historians still argue about whether these waxes were clinical, arousing, or both.

The border between the two, Lacqueur added, has always been hazy. "Almost from the beginning of pornography, medicine is tasked with reproducing a more respectable pornographic image," he says. "Medicine is about the body. And on the one hand, it's cold and scientific, but on the other hand, how it's presented matters."

In the twentieth century, engravings, wax models, and illustrations of the body gave way to photographs, Super 8 film, and VCR tapes. With the arrival of the endoscope, and similar minuscule, lightweight devices, it was finally possible to produce images of interiors that had once been inaccessible. While men have been able to take pictures of themselves, and of naked women, for at least two centuries, Lacqueur pointed out that women "couldn't take a picture of their insides until pretty recently."

Before there was the sex selfie stick, there were the 60s mechanical dildo-camera contraptions created by sex researchers William Masters and Virginia Johnson. As reproduced on the Showtime series Masters of Sex, the couple generated data on the female orgasm by asking women to masturbate using a high-tech dildo, which their clinic's staff nicknamed "Ulysses." Johnson and Masters biographer, Thomas Maier, recreated the Ulysses maiden voyage in his book, Masters of Sex (the primary text for the Showtime series): "No one had ever photographed the inside of a woman during coitus, documenting the female reaction to the entry and penetration of the phallus. This rather ingenious contraption allowed for….filming in living color without distortion."

In 1995, the Dutch scientist Pek van Andel successfully captured a couple having sex inside an MRI machine for the first time. "We showed that an MRI scan of sexual intercourse in two positions is feasible and artistic but not as artistic as the images drawn by Da Vinci," his team's paper explained, fully acknowledging that the MRI images had both physiological and aesthetic value. Despite the scientific veneer of his study, van Andel says, the experiment was repeatedly rejected by reviewers—some of whom saw it as a lewd joke. van Andel himself does not see his images as pornographic, but understands them, if rather artistically, as an homage to Leonardo da Vinci's classic Renaissance drawing of a copulating couple. "The image is in the eye of the beholder," van Andel told me over Skype. "It's just a question of from which side you are looking at it."

As it turns out, the sex selfie stick's medical resonances are not accidental: the toy was originally marketed as a way for women to check their own sexual health, and even described in its promotional videos as an "endoscope vibrator." Emmeline Peaches, a sex toy critic, has tried the sex selfie stick herself, and thinks that the experience is "actually more clinical than most have typically suggested."

Peaches told me she was eager to try the "distinct" toy and says she made sure to buy a speculum to use in tandem with the stick—what she described as a "must-have" for lucid images. But when Peaches actually tried the high-tech Svakom, the whole experience felt "clinical," instead of sensual. "When everything was inserted and I finally saw my vagina on screen, the experience was incredibly surreal. The image was mostly pink, rather blurry, and partially obscured by internal fluids and lubricant," she explained to me over e-mail.

"At first, it didn't seem real until I began to contract my muscles and saw the movements mirrored back to me on screen," she says. "It was at that moment that I realized I was totally detached from what I was seeing. No matter how much I moved my muscles, the experience never quite felt harmonious for me." While she says she had hoped to "end up marveling at the motions [her] vagina would muster," the experience "just wasn't sexy."

Given the medical overtones of her own experience using the sex selfie stick, Peaches thinks it's likely that many other users will ignore both "the gimmick and pleasure potential of this device" and use it, instead, to "to get to know one's body a bit better."

In this view, the sex selfie stick recalls not just ambiguously medical images but a longer tradition of feminist self-health. Lay medical uses of the sex selfie stick can be traced back to the efforts of the Boston Women's Health Book Collective. In 1969, at the height of the women's liberation movement, second wave feminists created a pamphlet to help women learn about their bodies outside of the medical establishment and its clinical, male gaze. Republished as Our Bodies Ourselves in 1971, the pamphlet quickly spread as an underground success, encouraging many women to look into themselves using a speculum and a mirror for the first time. As part of this lineage, the sex selfie stick can be seen as "just another stage in the self-documentation of sex," Lacquer says.

For now, the sex selfie stick remains a niche product. Like the MRI sex video, or the revelatory films of Masters and Johnson, the technology provokes ire because of its borderline relationship to practices both medical and pleasurable.Then again, it's also a 'selfie-culture' product marketed to women, which basically makes it troll-bait regardless.

"I definitely think there's a gendered element there," Peaches explained in an e-mail to Broadly. She believes that the negative cultural reactions to female genitalia generally might contribute to the unease over the stick's offerings. In contrast, the Belfie stick—a selfie stick for taking pictures of your butt— has not received the same the level of scorn from the online commentariat. "Part of me wonders how its reception would have differed had [the sex selfie stick] been presented as a pleasure device for 'him to use on her' rather than as a product for 'selfies,'' Peaches added.

Whether or not the sex selfie stick is a beacon of liberation, both its haters and its images are hardly new. What makes the selfie stick unique, in the end, might be its users. "I haven't heard of unsolicited vag-cam videos being sent to people in the same way that dick pics are," Peaches pointed out. "Take that as you will."