Kama: can this new mindful sexual wellness app help you have better sex?

Orgasm workshops and audio erotica — Flora Gill trials a new app preaching the art of mindful masturbation
Flora Gill
Rachel Sherlock
Flora Gill15 January 2021

This morning I put on my comfortable workout gear, prepared a space to lie down on and loaded up my 36 minute instructional video. Just like thousands of others across the country, I’m sure. But while most will be preparing for pilates or meditation, I was getting ready for a half hour session of some guided masturbation.

No, Headspace has not diversified —this is a new app, called Kama, which describes itself as “a sexual wellness app designed to optimise your sexual pleasure”. It launched late last year and is an easy-to-use library of original, sex-related content, alongside friendly-looking mascots of anthropomorphic clitorises hugging. All of this bagged Kama a jaw-dropping $3.4 million in seed funding last year — the largest pre-product seed round ever raised in this category.

And so, in an effort to find out what the multi-million dollar fuss is about, I spent weeks on a Kama odyssey to try and work out if it’s worth getting hot and bothered about.

Perhaps the best way to explain it is to run you through some of the sessions I took. I released tension with laughter as I followed an instructor to prepare me for a series on “expanding my orgasm”. I spent several minutes “connecting my heart to my genitals” by breathing the air from one organ to the other. I took a guided audio tour to “re-sensitise my clitoris” where every time I touched my clitoris a corresponding wind chime sound satisfyingly played like my clit was on its way to Neverland with Tinker Bell. I twerked along to women in leotards like an Eighties aerobic class to improve my “hip moves for epic sex”. 

I took part in a sex gym session with two topless male instructors as we thrust into the air to better the muscles and movements used in the bedroom. I listened along different meditation sessions where smooth sounding women and husky-voiced men told me when to breathe and how to relax, deeply sighing into my ear like erotic ASMR. I will note that my boyfriend was not such a fan of this session as he returned home from shopping only to storm into our room at the sound of a man loudly panting as I moaned back as instructed (luckily the only injury was to half a dozen broken eggs).

Kama

It’s worth noting that if you’re the kind of person that thinks Piers Morgan identifying as a two-spirit penguin was the height of hilarity, the brand is not for you. The app goes out of its way to be inclusive, labelling sessions as best for ‘penis bodies’ or ‘vulva bodies’. If I were writing a lazy PR pitch for it, I might describe it as “woke wanking”, with users reminded to ask for their bodies’ consent and ticking a series of commitments like “take things as slowly as my body needs” and “forgive myself for any initial resistance”. 

But in reality, orgasm is not the goal of most of the sessions. Instead the content is more like sexy homework, with video and audio sessions focussing on every element involved with pleasure from your physical movement and flexibility, to your emotional strength and wellbeing.

Founder Chloe Macintosh — formerly an architect at Foster and Partners, who founded Made.com and was until recently the chief creative officer at Soho House & Co — spent 12 years researching sexual wellness before she launched Kama. 

“It started when I was a young mother and I was looking for educational content around sexuality that targeted me. There was very little online and I didn’t find I was being talked to, especially when it comes to female pleasure”. Until recently, the start-up world was squeamish about sex, but there’s nothing seedy, nasty or exploitative about Kama’s approach.

So am I a convert? Could the app be the start of a new sexual revolution for the Roaring Twenties — or is it just a fad? Truthfully, I felt very mixed about a lot of the sessions. Some of the more meditative and explorative sessions I genuinely enjoyed and I do believe it’s incredibly beneficial for everyone to properly explore their wellbeing and the role pleasure plays in it. 

But some of the content involved already buying into a lot of practices I don’t. For me reflexology and reiki are two elements that don’t hold much weight, so when I was told to press my finger an inch below my thumb to connect with my anus, I was mostly thinking about what was happening to my favourite characters on Bridgerton.

Kama founder Chloe Macintosh
Kama

This could limit its audience — I suspect the majority of people are quite sceptical about too much woo-woo. Macintosh acknowledges this. “We’ve created quite an advanced concept. We were first to market and we weren’t sure where the consumer’s mind was. I think we did go a little deep. So now we’re going back to sex 101: tutorials, tips and videos.”

Chloe is a single mother to two teenage sons — who are both, surprisingly enough, on the app. In fact she’s working on sensitive adolescent-friendly content with advice from her 15-year old. It’s this simpler information I think will make the app more widely usable to teenagers and adults alike. And sure — you might wonder if we need any more videos on how to master fingering and oral sex, given that most of the internet seems to be sex-related, but according to a 2019 YouGov study, only half of Brits could even identify the vagina on a diagram. 

Kama

There’s currently so much sexual content in our lives and our devices but very little of it is educational and the idea of people learning how to have sex from porn is terrifying. It’s like learning how to be an astronaut by watching Alien (often just as messy).

By the end of my Kama sex odyssey, I don’t think I was having noticeably better sex. On the other hand, I’m also positive that if everyone I’ve ever slept with had done a few sessions on Kama before we got to it, I would have been far less disappointed much of the time. So I think you should download it, and not just in case we have sex again one day, but for yourself. The sessions you don’t like will make you laugh and the ones you do may make you scream. And let’s face it, you probably have a fair amount of free time right now and learning how to please yourself is certainly not a waste of it. 

As a retort to the po-faced ‘Dry January’ this month, Kama has launched ‘Wet January’ — focused on teaching women how to ... erm, well you can guess, with a series of live events and workshops. (Kama’s PR tells me it’s not just a party trick. I’m suspicious — it puts me in mind of ‘one size fits all dresses’ that never are). But what the hell, I’ve got no other plans, and I’m prepared to be proved wrong.

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