Cartoon Vagina Fights ‘Cultural Stigma’ of Masturbation

We apologize if the headline created the impression of a comic-book super-hero in a cape courageously fighting a villain named Stigma. That might actually be kinda interesting. Instead, we’re talking about this weird thing:

Apparently, some women are too stupid to find their own vaginas. (Pro tip: You can Google it.) In order to assist the anatomically ignorant, designer Tina Gong has created “Happy Playtime,” a Web site that features an animated cartoon of the aforesaid ladyparts that women who flunked sixth-grade biology class could not otherwise locate.

Ladies: Is this (a) helpful or (b) vaguely creepy? Dora the Clitoral Explorer? “Happy Playtime” explains:

Mission
Getting you to touch yourself since 1989.
Sexuality is one of the most basic instincts of human beings. Being comfortable with your own sexual pleasure is a prerequisite to both being able to healthily accept pleasure from others, and pleasing others. How can you exchange pleasure with someone else if you don’t understand what your own body likes? That’s why masturbation, and learning how to masturbate is such a fundamental life lesson.
Unfortunately for many women, there has been a cultural stigma that blocks access to self-stimulation. HAPPYPLAYTIME is here to eliminate this barrier as much as possible. By talking openly and lightheartedly about female masturbation, we are taking the first step to becoming truly sexually liberated.

You may have thought you were sexually liberated, but you weren’t “truly sexually liberated” because you had never seen a dancing cartoon vagina that you can download on your iPhone (yes, there’s an app for that).

Judging from this “mission” statement, the problem that Tina Gong’s cartoon vagina is supposed to solve is not that women can’t find their genitalia, but the “cultural stigma” that makes them feel bad about … doing whatever it is they do with it, as often as Tina Gong does it, which seems to be pretty much all the time.

So far, reactions to “Happy Playtime” have been unfortunately boring. Daisy Buchanan of the Guardian tediously tells us she was one of the “clueless virgins at my all-girls school” who was ashamed of the lonely things she did to her adolescent self: “Masturbation was my biggest teenage secret. … Now I’m marginally older and wiser, I am proud to out myself as a wanker. Masturbating should not be a source of shame.”

Thanks for sharing too much information, you dirty, dirty girl!

Slightly less boring was the reaction by E.J. Dickson at Alternet, who noticed the “cuddly is the new creepy” aspect of Happy Playtime’s cutesy third-grade Hello Kitty book-bag motif:

For one thing, the cherubic mascot and peaches-and-cream color scheme make the app seem more like it’s targeting giggly adolescents than trying to educate mature adult women. Although the design is intended to be tongue-in-cheek, it comes off as condescending to its users, most of whom, even if they’re novices in the art of masturbation, probably know enough about their own equipment so as not to require an instruction manual.

A writer with the un-boring name Fruzsina Eördögh says the most vocal critics of Happy Playtime are “not conservative religious hordes,” but rather feminist writers who worry “it will pressure women to feel bad about their masturbation habits” — not “feel bad” in the Sinful-Dirty-Girl way, but in the Maybe-I’m-Not-Doing-It-Right way.

In other words, you’re going to Hell for your perverted sin, you dirty girl, and you’re not even very good at it. And who needs a weird pink cartoon vagina to tell them that? Rock-’n'-roll songs are way more fun:

 

12 Comments

  1. Pingback : Worst. Cartoon. Vagina. EVER. : The Other McCain

  2. Pingback : The American Spectator : The Spectacle Blog : Some People Just Have Too Much Time on Their Hands (So to Speak)

  3. June 28, 2013  5:22 pm by Teecee Lynch Reply

    I had a mad crush on Chrissy Amphlett's voice back when that song hit the airwaves, and then I saw the video and....

    I'll be in my bunk.

  4. June 28, 2013  5:53 pm by Robert Stacy McCain Reply

    Hey, sorry for the bummer. I had no idea she died. How old was she?

  5. June 28, 2013  6:12 pm by Matthew W Reply

    Thank God it's a "Friendly" Vagina.
    Hate to see the angry ones.

    • June 29, 2013  7:35 pm by theebl Reply

      Do you need Amanda Marcotte's number?

  6. Pingback : Yet another imagined “cultural stigma” for the Left to fight against | The Daley Gator

  7. June 28, 2013  6:44 pm by L.N. Smithee Gulag'd (@LNSinExile) Reply

    Unlike jilling-off songs like Cyndi Lauper's "She Bop," One-hit wonder Tweet's "Oops (Oh My)", or Britney Spears "Touch of My Hand," the Divinyls' "I Touch Myself" is, at its root, a love song, not just a clitoris celebration.

  8. June 28, 2013  8:02 pm by Paul A'Barge Reply

    dang. I just searched the ITunes store for "dancing vagina" and nothing came up. Did I stroke the phone wrong?

  9. June 28, 2013  8:34 pm by Mikey NTH Reply

    Austin Powers and the Fembots

  10. June 30, 2013  1:44 am by Patrick Carroll Reply

    When did the clitoris get so big?

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