About The Project
PSIgasm was conceived in 2010 by an HIV prevention specialist and an experimental physicist, both of whom moonlight as queer porn performers and are active in the Bay Area sex positive scene. The project revolves around measurement devices that can be used as sex toys, simultaneously getting people off and monitoring physiological responses correlated with arousal and orgasm. The first prototype was completed in January 2011, capable of recording and displaying the contractions of the pelvic floor muscles in real time. Since then the pace of work on the project and the interest it is drawing have grown exponentially. We are creating more complicated devices, building a web presence, teaching classes featuring the device, and collecting as much data as possible. All of the hardware and software is open source and the design is freely distributed, because we need as many people as possible investigating their bodies.
I’m curious, why are you using PSI as the measurement for muscle contractions? Plenty of medical bio-feedback models exist for very successfully measuring muscle contractions in the vagina, anus and penis, and anywhere else that you might want to measure muscle contractions. I understand that you want to use a device that looks semi-realistic not medical, but I’m sure there are ways to use existing technologies (and technologies routinely used in medical science) look as you would desire them to look.
I’d be happy to talk more about what I know over email.
Great question Rose. The short answer is that we chose this measurement method because we wanted something accessible to as many people as possible. That means it had to be cheap, portable, and relatively non-invasive. I’ll go through some of the research and reasoning that went into choosing this measurement scheme, but you are absolutely correct to point out that there are many other ways to make these measurement and the method I’ve chosen is not necessarily the best. Let’s start a discussion about the different options and their feasibility!
When I was thinking about how to do this measurement, I looked through a bunch of science literature for different measurement schemes. As you correctly point out, there are whole journals devoted to measurements of muscle function, so it was a daunting task. Electromyography is used heavily in clinical settings to evaluate muscle health, but usually requires inserting electrodes into the muscle tissue, which requires advanced training and safety procedures. Surface Electromyography, which uses electrodes on the skin surface, is less sensitive but is a promising possibility for this project. The next generation PSIgasm device will have two surface electrodes, and although their position is optimized for EDR measurement rather than EMG measurement they should be sufficient to evaluate EMG as a possible measurement scheme. Ultrasound is also used effectively to measure muscle contraction noninvasively, but is too expensive and bulky for our purposes.
I also wanted a measurement scheme that has been proven to work in the vagina and anus, because orifices provide unique challenges for measurement stability and repeatability. Interesting results have been obtained by radiotelemetry, but repeatability between subjects is poor with this method. Repeatability is very important to me, because I am interested in comparing data between individuals of different gender identities and sexual backgrounds. The cheapest and most reliable measurement of muscle contraction in the vagina and anus that I found was developed in the late 70s by researchers at the University of Minnesota, and it is very similar in concept and design the PSIgasm device. I was attracted to this design because it was cheap, repeatable, and provided proven results measuring orgasmic contractions in both men and women. It can be used vaginally and anally, and requires no precise anatomical understanding by the user to achieve repeatable results. Furthermore, recent advances in microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) engineering have created incredibly small, cheap, and precise sensors to measure air pressure, such as the one I use from AllSensors. That makes this measurement scheme easy to digitize on a single circuit board, with no need for bulky lab equipment.
I’m definitely interested in your views on the subject. Feel free to write them here for everyone to see, or email me privately at [email protected].
Thanks for the input Rose!
Ned
I’m a bit confused about the claim that you are looking at sexuality with ‘rigor’. What kind of rigor do you mean? Most forms of research have clearly stated aims and objectives and even qualitative research makes attempts at either reducing bias or at least acknowledging bias.
I’d be really interested to know what the point of this is, how the results could be used and what the benefits of it are.
Thanks for the input, Liz. You raise important points, and we definitely need to flesh out our goals and present what we’re doing clearly.
Liz’s good point #1: There’s currently no rigor on PSIgasm.net
The project page states that “we’re all about studying human sexuality with the rigor and candor that it deserves.” That is more of a mission statement than a description of the current state of the project.
Let me be clear that we have not studied anything rigorously yet. Good hard science is the goal, but we’ve just started and we’re definitely not there. We’re still developing the tools necessary to approach the interesting questions of sexuality with scientific rigor. What I’ve posted on the site so far is just some preliminary data; a proof of concept. The rigor will be demonstrated in the next six months, or the project will fail.
The reason I use words like “rigor” on the website now is to make our values on the subject clear. We are a project that values scientific rigor, and I want to get people who share that value to get interested in the project. Like you, Liz, they will supply insight and constructive criticism throughout the process of developing and refining our methodology.
Liz’s good point #2: The PSIgasm project hasn’t even defined “rigor”
This is important, especially in the early stages of the project before we have developed actual rigorous methodology to point to. I would define “rigor” in the scientific sense as a scrupulous dedication to a logically consistent presentation of data that is as unambiguous as possible. This really just means applying the scientific method consistently. We will present as clearly as we can exactly what we did (our methods) and what we observed (our results). We will not claim to have proven anything that we have not actually proven. This seems obvious, but as a physicist I get seriously annoyed reading “scientific” journals that confuse speculation with conclusion. It happens constantly.
So what does rigor mean practically in these experiments? We will be measuring physiological variables that have been shown to correlate with arousal and orgasm. In this context, rigor means calibrating all of our sensors accurately and publishing the calibration procedures for criticism. It means testing the repeatability of the sensors over time during one session with a subject, among different sessions with the same subject, among different subjects, etc. It means using blind control groups for every correlation we claim to observe. It means publishing our data analysis routines. Most importantly, it means acknowledging the inherent shortcomings of our experiments: volunteer biases, limited sample sizes, and environmental circumstances beyond our control that might affect our measurements.
Liz’s good point #3: What’s the point?
This is obviously an important question. I could study the optical properties of the a blind man’s apartment, and no matter how rigorous the measurements were nobody would care. I started this project because I think many people will care. Sex is an experience common to almost every human being. It affects how we interact socially, how we bond with each other, how we fall in love and how we stay in love. And of course, it is the very mechanism through which our species continues to exist.
It is widely acknowledged that a “healthy” sex life is important for a strong relationship. Usually we think of this need in the context of psychology or psychiatry; completely separate from the physiology of sex, which we associate only with reproduction and fertility. In reality, the two are strongly connected. Whether we have orgasms, how they feel, whom we decide to have them with and what we want to do afterwards are connected to how our bodies work physiologically. Understanding the physiological sex responses can give us a context for how we interact with, or judge, our fellow humans. It is no surprise that Masters and Johnson, the pioneers of rigorous sex research, were also the inventors of the field of sex therapy for couples.
I hope this reply helps address your concerns somewhat. Of course, my ideas on the subject will be much more convincing when I can back them up with useful data that I’ve acquired through rigorous scientific methodology. Until then, it’s all just talk.
Thanks again, Liz, for your input.
Cheers!
Ned
First off, this is an interesting effort.
However, a question I have is whether Psigasm will remain focused on measuring females’ sexual response, or will it expand (sorry for the pun) to include male sexual arousal and orgasm in the scope of research. If so, can you comment, even generally, on the planned approach to measuring males’ sexual response and/or orgasm? If so, I can point you at some relevant research papers and patents.
Thanks for reading,
E. P.
This is a very important question.
The PSIgasm was designed from the start to be able to measure sexual response regardless of sex, gender, or genital anatomy. The devices we have created are designed to be inserted anally. This allows us to compare variables like the contractions of pelvic floor muscles, genital vasocongestion, and thermal properties of genital tissues across the gender spectrum.
A big problem that we have with existing research into sexuality and sexual response is a strong bias toward a gender-binary viewpoint. Male orgasms and female orgasms are typically treated as entirely separate phenomena, to be studied using totally separate equipment without any expectation of related results. After reading papers and taking data, this seems to us to be an inaccurate and limiting picture of human sexual response. Males and females both experience wide varieties of orgasms, and these experiences do not appear to be fundamentally gendered. The trends that we do see in orgasm can be explained by the same genital tissue displaying different morphologies in the two genders, making certain types of stimulation more convenient for one or the other. With this in mind, we wanted to create an apparatus to measure orgasmic response in a sex-agnostic fashion, to test the extent to which orgasms are or are not dependent on sex or sexual anatomy. One of the first research efforts we hope to undertake is to compare orgasm data from cis-men, cis-women, and trans-people at different stages of hormone treatment and/or reassignment surgery.
At some point we do plan to develop tools to take data from vaginas and penises, despite the difficulties comparing the two types of datasets. A vaginal insert would look similar to the present PSIgasm design, but naturally a penile device would have to look different. Our plan is to embed an elongation-sensitive resistor in a silicone cock-ring to monitor tumescence and penile contractions, in addition to the PPG and EDR sensors that the device would share with the vaginal (and anal) sensors.
Thanks for your interest in the project! I hope this helps answer your question.
-Ned Mayhem
Here’s a suggestion for future designs of the anal sensor probe. If the goal of the Psigasm project is to observe and analyze sexual response from both males and females — as well as straight and LGBT folks, then, IMHO, making the anal sensor probe gender neutral might well make it easier for a broader sample of subjects to accept. I think modelling an anal probe on a penis may make a significant fraction of the potential sample population either drop out of experiments or make them (both emotionally and physically) uncomfortable. I suggest changing the form of the probe to be both gender neutral and narrower where it contacts the anal sphincter. Putting “butt plug” into Google’s image search will show you lots of alternate, gender neutral (and arguably more comfortable) shapes to consider.