Growing up, Liz Klinger had questions about sex and pleasure, but she grew up in a community where those things weren’t discussed. After she started selling intimacy products, a job she loved, she quickly realized that everyone had questions like she did. It was then that she created the Lioness Vibrator, the first and only vibrator that helps you improve your orgasms.
“We need more ways to be able to self-explore and learn more about our own bodies, so we can get comfortable with our own pleasure,” says Klinger. “Like everything else in life, like the old saying goes, “never measured, never improved.” Lioness has been featured in InStyle, Gizmodo, Oprah Magazine, and more, and winner of numerous awards including Best of High Tech at Glamour’s 2017 Sex Toy Awards.
Why did you start Lioness?
Lioness started from my own needs — I had a lot of questions about sex growing up, but I grew up in the Midwest where sex simply wasn’t talked about. The curiosity was in the background of my mind as I took up different work like being a sculptor (still doing a lot of projects related to sex and pleasure) to working at an investment bank.
Despite how important having a healthy sex life is for our own wellbeing and relationships, it can be a sensitive subject — some people may have trouble bringing up the subject with their doctor or even their partner. Even if you do bring it up with your doctor, they often have very limited, if any, resources to direct you to, for reasons we’ll get into.
You mentioned in the Lioness FAQ’s that you think sexual pleasure isn’t as mysterious as people think it is. Why do you think it isn’t, and why do you think people think it is mysterious?
Simply put, there hasn’t been a proper amount of funding or attention towards sexual pleasure. Even the Kinsey Institute, which has been one of the preeminent institutions on sex research in the United States, has expressed this sentiment in recent years. So naturally, if we haven’t been able to put much effort into understanding pleasure, there will be a lot we don’t know.
What we’re able to provide with Lioness can make a huge difference in understanding and becoming more comfortable with your own sexuality. Even seeing it as “just a chart” can make a subject that once may have seemed nebulous more tangible and approachable.
How can people use Lioness to experiment with what gives them pleasure?
Use the Lioness like a regular vibrator. When you have a session you’d like to see, you can upload it to your app to see what happened.
You can see your body’s movements throughout the session. Each individual session usually is a bit like a Rorschach blot—it’s hard to know what to take out of it. It’ll look different depending on each individual and their experience (everyone’s pleasure looks somewhat different!). Here is what a typical chart can look like when you orgasm. It’s great to get a few baselines to learn what your orgasms look like, how long they last, etc.
The real power is from using it over time. As you start to get more familiarity with your data and how your body reacts to things, you can start visually correlating your experience with what the app displays. At most basic, you can start to recognize what it looks like when your experience is good, and when it’s not so good.
From there, you can start recognizing what your orgasm looks like, how it looks as you get aroused, how that entire set of experience changes based on the notes you keep on it (and what’s automatically set for you, like time of day/month/week).
It’s like keeping a sex diary, which has been shown to help people looking to improve their sex lives—since you start to realize things about what contributes to good sex and bad sex that you might not recognize at the moment. Normally, it’s hard to keep one though and most people drop off after only a day or two. We make it easy here where part of the diary is automatically tracked for you and the rest is made easy with an intuitive interface.
What can you learn from tracking your arousal and your orgasms?
People have used the Lioness Vibrator and app like a sex diary to try new things, track how their health affects their pleasure, and experiment with how different substances (like alcohol or cannabis or, yes even CBD or cannabis infused products) can change their experience. Hint, all of these things can affect you a LOT, but not everything is obvious because it can be hard to track nuances, especially over time.
Here is an example of an orgasm with cannabis lubricant vs. without – very interesting, we know.
Sex therapists sometimes recommend that you keep a sex diary when you want to improve your sex life. The downside to journaling and tracking is that it’s hard to keep up, and it’s not like you’d want to keep a stopwatch next to you when you’re doing your thing. Lioness makes this easier because it automates a lot of the process and is able to track nuances that might be hard to know in the moment (since, you know, you’d want to be focusing on having a good time instead).
Sources:
Lioness.io
Chanel Dubosfsky
Chanel Dubofsky writes fiction and non-fiction in Brooklyn, New York. Her writing has been published in Modern Fertility, Lilith, Rewire, Cosmopolitan, The Billfold, and more.
