Here's a weird secret: I'm pretty sure the orgasm sounds I make with partners have been influenced by porn.
Now you know more about me than my doctor does.
Why I'm feeding you creepy personal facts: Based on the conviction that 70 percent of Spanish people believe the heaving, animal, almost painful cries depicted in pornography are what an actual woman's orgasm sounds like, premium sex toy brand Bijoux Indiscrets has created an orgasm library, with help from agency Proximity Madrid.
It's a library! Of orgasms!
Some 23 percent of Spanish women have never, or almost never, succeeded at achieving orgasm during sex. Most feel so much pressure to do so that 52 percent of women sometimes fake it, and 12 percent always fake it. (I'm not telling you where I fall in this pool; I've shared enough secrets today.)
This is because our idea of successful sex is distorted by what we see in the media, particularly porn. The Orgasms Library hopes to change this by expressing the diversity—and strange beauty—of real female sounds.
The case study here is briefly NSFW at the beginning:
The library lets users upload orgasms anonymously; more than 100 women did so in the first week after its launch. There's a nifty incentive: Once the audio is uploaded, the site takes the sound of your most secret pleasure and transforms it into a pretty data visualization, not unlike that one time Slurpee made cups out of its own radio ads—except this somehow manages to feel less masturbatory.
Once you've made your contribution to posterity, scroll through the beautiful library of existing orgasms, download the sounds, and even grab some print ads, like these frangipani-looking wonders:
What's cool about this idea is that it's easy to say the world needs more diversity in terms of what the female form looks like. But building on that, we also need to hear diverse ways of intimate expression. We didn't realize this was missing—or that the very sounds we ourselves make for an audience were so consciously manufactured—until we saw (and heard) the results.
And it looks like there's a desire for that: The first 100 orgasms were listened to more than 110,000 times. Hashtag #OrgasmosReales was launched on social networks to kick off a continued discussion, and Proximity estimates the earned media yielded exposure to about 10 million people.
Next, brand and agency plan to release a documentary that more deeply explores how fiction has influenced our sexual behavior. It's a project worth pursuing, if only because it may draw us closer to discovering what we, as individuals facing an oddly existential sexual crisis, are actually like in bed.
CREDITS
Client: Bijoux Indiscrets
Agency: Proximity Madrid
Chief Creative Officer: Eva Santos
Executive Creative Director: Susana Pérez
Creative Director: David Despau
Art Directors: Antonio Jiménez, Cristina Luna
Copywriter: Fernando Esteban
Account Supervisor: Patricia Montero
Account Executive: Amanda Esteban
Technology Director: Rafael Zafra
Creative Technology Director: Víctor Madueño
Head of Social: Diego Alonso
Community Manager: Ainhoa Labarta
Production Director: Gemma Selga
Editors: Teresa Muñoz, Elías Maldonado
Communications Director: Laura Carrillo
Head of Strategy: Juan Manuel Ramirez