Lalipop is a California, USA-based crochet artist and fashion designer who creates signature neon-coloured pieces. To kickstart 2024, she began making an orgasm blanket, a blanket to track precisely how many orgasms she has in a day. Lalipop aims to run this project all year long, creating a colour-blocked line for each day of the year. Eventually, she will have a finished blanket that tracks a year in her sex life.
By taking on this project, Lalipop hopes to bring people into a discussion about women’s sexual pleasure, a topic that’s often seen as taboo. This sentiment has, in turn, created a gap between female and male orgasms, with the former reporting fewer quality orgasms in their overall sex life. This is why Lalipop’s orgasm blanket reflects the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal of Gender Equality.
Lalipop tracks her orgasm blanket progress on her Instagram account through engaging bite-sized videos. In captions accompanying these videos, she also never forgets to include a legend for the different colours in her blanket. A white line means she had zero orgasms that day, light pink means she had one, pink means two and dark pink means she had three.
“My goal is to create something beautiful, highlight the health benefits of orgasms and do something out of my comfort zone,” said Lalipop about her orgasm blanket project.
It’s interesting to note that despite women being known to achieve as many as 20 orgasms in a row during sex, Lalipop limited her maximum daily orgasm count to just three. One explanation for this is the rampant and normalized orgasm gap in heterosexual sex. The orgasm gap refers to the difference in the number of orgasms men and women report during straight sex.
A study by renowned condom brand Durex found that straight men have four times as many orgasms as straight women. This is due to the perception that the goal of straight sex is a man’s orgasm instead of prioritizing pleasure for both parties involved. The belief that only penetrative sex counts further cements the orgasm gap.
A 2023 Guardian article on the orgasm gap recognized that the simplest solution to the issue is to encourage sexual partners to communicate about the subject. This is exactly where Lalipop’s orgasm blanket project comes in. It provides people everywhere with a think piece to kick-start conversations around the orgasm gap, something that hopefully will close it somewhere down the line.
Find out more about Lalipop’s Orgasm Blanket and their other pieces by checking their Instagram on @lalipop.design.