Not to go all Freudian right off the bat, but I admit that the giant digital vulva throws me off a little bit. I get the idea at the core of OMGYes, the website introduced late last year that promises to teach women techniques to improve their orgasms. Data, information, and hands-on instruction (plus feedback!) is the best way to teach new tools to women and their partners. Well, not tools, because this is all about digital manipulation, with nothing so far about things like vibrators. Digital as in fingers, not digital as in virtual. Except for the big vulva. That’s virtual.

Sorry. I’ll start again. The fact is, I don’t usually talk about sex in public—which in a way makes me an ideal target for OMGYes, since another core tenet of the site, predictably, is "communicate better." Also, stipulated, I do not have a vulva, but I am in a relationship with a person who does, and when this person is happy, I am happy.

So, yup: I aspire to be a lifelong learner.

Nevertheless, the idea of using the screen of my phone to push around a photorealistic clitoral hood, labia majora and minora, and (as warranted) clitoris while the OMGYes voice coos words of encouragement is, well, weird. I get it—it’s modeling how to communicate with a partner. And yet ... it was even harder to do on my laptop. Let’s just say I will never look at my trackball the same way again.

The ideas behind OMGYes, though, are not weird at all. The folks who made the site—a “lesbian and a straight guy,” as they put it, named Lydia Daniller and Rob Perkins—combined a start-up approach to funding and investment with a dedication to qualitative research unusual outside academia. After 1,000 one-on-one interviews1 with women about their sexual preferences and styles of masturbation (among other things), the OMGYes team compiled a dozen or so demonstrable practices for having good or better or more orgasms.

OMGYes uses infographics, videos, and statistics to do what even the best how-to books rarely do: give data on how to get off.

Their site now sometimes goes by the unfortunate nickname “Khan Academy of the clit,” which gives you the idea. Tastefully designed and well-produced, OMGYes uses infographics, videos, and statistics to do what even the best how-to books rarely do: give data on how to get off. “It’s this epidemic where women’s pleasure is taboo, partners aren’t asking and women aren’t telling, it’s omitted from sex education, and there’s a lot of misinformation,” Perkins says. “When we put a call out to women to share and set the record straight, we had an outpouring of support.”

Most striking, though, is the part of the pitch that says nobody else is working on the science of pleasure, of what actually helps and doesn’t help women have orgasms. Depending on the survey you read, only about a third of women have orgasms from penetrative vaginal sex alone (though a vastly higher number do when you add in clitoral stimulation). And about 10 percent of women don’t have orgasms at all. If you ask OMGYes, nobody’s really studying how to optimize all that and bring those numbers up. If clitoral stimulation is the key, what kind of clitoral stimulation? What patterns? What rhythms? The people demand answers.

The Information Gap

Now, at this point in a WIRED story, we usually go all science on you. But when it comes to coming, that’s no easy move. “When we went to experts and academics and asked why this hasn’t been researched, we got different and opposing answers,” Perkins says. “One was, everyone is different, there’s no rhyme or reason. Others would say that some things shouldn’t be researched. It’s private.”

Excuse the use of the phrase, but that’s quite a gap. “What’s missing is experience,” Perkins says. “Practical stuff. Ways of touching a clitoris that are pleasurable, there are literally no words for it in medicine.”

Sex research does tend to focus on dysfunction rather than optimization. “There’s real difficulty, I can say confidently, in getting funding for basic research on sexual function,” says Cynthia Graham, a sex researcher at the University of Southampton in England and editor in chief of the Journal of Sex Research. “But if you frame it as a problem, as ‘this is going to help preserve heterosexual relationships,’ it’s easier.”

Argh, right?

Some of that science is out there, but the connection to your own sex life isn't obvious. OMGYes consulted with sex researchers2 during the company's ramping-up phase, and one of them gave Perkins and Daniller a journal article titled “Self-assessment of genital anatomy, sexual sensitivity and function in women: implications for genitoplasty,” from the British urology journal BJU International. It’s fascinating—basically, it uses a survey called the Self-Assessment of Genital Anatomy and Sexual Function, Female version, designed to study how women perceived their genitalia both visually and tactilely, and to assess if anything changed after surgery. The researchers administered the survey to 50 women who hadn't had any kind of surgery on their genitalia, and then uses their answers to provide guidance to doctors about which parts to leave alone and which parts they can operate on during genital construction surgery. So it's like function hidden beneath medicalization.

Studies of the neuroanatomy of the clitourethrovaginal complex have come a long way since Grey’s Anatomy couldn’t even find the clitoris in 1948.

Sex research has plenty of work on the physiological mechanics of orgasm, sure—like in the first season of Masters of Sex. But that’s descriptive, not prescriptive. Surveys of specific behaviors—Have you in the past year masturbated? Did you receive oral sex? And so on—go all the way back to Alfred Kinsey’s groundbreaking (and sometimes earthmoving) work. Again, descriptive.

But after more careful study, it’s hard to argue that you couldn’t get anything helpful out of that body of research. In terms of what Perkins sees as mere physiology, well, let’s just say that studies of the neuroanatomy of the clitourethrovaginal complex have come a long way since 1948 when Grays Anatomy couldn’t even find the clitoris. (The textbook, not the show; the show finds the clitoris three times an episode.) Maybe it’s just my style of learning, but maps of the innervation of the vulvar region seem super-useful to me. (You guys! Pudendal nerve leads to the clitoris, inner lips, and anus; posterior femoral cutaneous nerve is outer lips, clitoral region, and inner thigh. It's all connected! Seriously, this is great stuff.)

The survey instrument that gave the data in that surgery paper—the SAGAS-F—appears to be a respected way to get women to talk about exactly what OMGYes wants to: What specific things feel good and lead to orgasm? That kind of work has developed over the decades, into research like the National Survey of Sexual Health and Behavior out of Indiana University (home, yes, of the Kinsey Institute) or the National Survey of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles in Great Britain.

That latter one, Natsal, comprises more than 15,000 face-to-face interviews, statistically validated to be a nationally representative sample. It generates a lot of papers. But does it get down to specific behaviors, in the way OMGYes hopes to? “Yeah, they get at things like that as well,” Graham says. “I don’t think those questions are that unusual. I think the sampling is key, as is the analysis.” She suggests that OMGYes’ work might be, as scientists say, little-q qualitative, not big-q. “That’s not to trash what they’ve found,” Graham says. “Just to be aware of the limitations.”

Perkins says OMGYes' survey approach, while working with a smaller sample size and without the kind of coding you might expect in some qualitative methodologies, asks questions those big research groups do not. The SAGAS-F, for example, maps regions around the clitoris and asks which ones would produce orgasm given stimulation, and then asks for ratings of both the orgasm's intensity and the effort required to achieve it, on a scale of one to five. OMGYes' survey asks things like, for women who touch their clitoris indirectly, do they touch it through the skin above the hood, through the skin on the left side, through the skin on the right, or through both lips pushed together like a sandwich? That's subtlety other research doesn't get at. (For the record: 69.1 percent above the hood, 19.2 percent left, 20.2 percent right, 28.8 percent sandwich.)

An Education

Perkins' experience in qualitative research comes from his days in marketing and public health. Daniller isn't a researcher either. Still, the messaging on OMGYes is, indeed, great—more magazine-y than textbook-like. The design is state-of-the-art and the infographics are smart and easy to read. “By filling something with jargon and line drawings, abstracting it, you make materials that preach to the choir, to the coasts and the Good Vibrations book section,” he says. “What actually changes behavior is real people that you relate to, sharing their stories.”

That might be the most remarkable achievement in how OMGYes delivers its data. The women in the videos range across ages, ethnicities, and sexual practices. Even when they're naked and touching themselves, the videos don't look like pornography; the women have agency and are the subjects rather than objects. The lighting is soft, the women are charming, apparently honest, and often funny, and there's no actual video of orgasms. Perkins says the shoots took hours,3 and often started with everyone there, from talent to grip, playing two-truths-and-a-lie or some other intimacy-making icebreaker. Way better than a journal article.

The videos aren't at all porny. The women in them have agency and are the subjects rather than objects.

As for the actual information, the team organized what they heard into groups, gave them easy-to-grasp names like “hinting” and “layering,” and wrote copy that’d fit comfortably into a magazine. “The visible part of the clit is the tip of an iceberg. It’s beneath the entire surrounding area, so you can be touching it when you’re not directly on what anatomy diagrams call ‘the clit.’ And the exact spots where touch can generate the most pleasure aren’t necessarily dead center or even symmetrical.”

But ... that’s what I just said about the posterior femoral cutaneous nerve. Were you not even listening?

“They created an incredibly safe space for people. They hit on stuff I just adore,” says Sandra Daugherty, a sex educator and host of the Sex Nerd Sandra podcast. (Disclosures: Daugherty consulted a bit with OMGYes in its early days, and she’s also a friend of mine.) “One of the most important things is to expand the awareness of what’s possible, especially when it comes to our own bodies. If you’re told, as a person with a penis, that you’re supposed to masturbate up and down and you masturbate by holding the base without moving much, that might feel a little lonely. We don’t have language around our pleasure. For me, this is a fun way to get more experience.”

It’s true: Some science is better than no science. Perkins says OMGYes is going to present its results at an upcoming conference on women’s sexual health, and they’re working on a paper to submit to a journal.4 That’ll be a test of the size of the Q in front of that qualitativeness—whether it can pass peer review.

But meanwhile paying $29.99 for collated knowledge on different approaches to a woman’s orgasm, presented smartly, seems like a pretty good deal. Yes, bookshelves and Amazon are full of this kind of advice, and if you’re in a big enough town you can probably find someone giving a workshop, but spreading knowledge is what the Internet was always supposed to be for. OMGYes isn’t therapy; it’s not about dysfunction. Like Daugherty says, it’s more like going to the batting cage to tune up some skills.

If that means getting some practice time in with a computerized vulva, well then, so be it.

1 UPDATE 2/12/16 9:30 AM I initially said it was 2,000 interviews, but only half those were one-on-one; the other half were survey-based.

2 UPDATE 2/12/16 9:30 AM The company had no formal relationship with the Kinsey Institute, as I implied in the original version.

3 UPDATE 2/12/16 9:30 AM Both men and women were present on set; the original version of this story said the sets were women-only.

4 UPDATE 2/12/16 9:30 AM In the original version of this story I named the journal they're planning to submit to. Perkins and the researcher he's working with both asked me to delete it, because naming the journal, they fear, jeopardizes their chances of publication. So I cut it. But this isn't a correction.