Flirtmoji
Month
For the past few weeks Flirtmoji has been releasing sneak peeks of our upcoming BODIES pack. So far, we’ve added penises and pussies. Today, we’re sharing 5 beautiful breasts. As we roll out this art, Flirtmoji artists Katy and Jeremy are pulling back the curtain and revealing their thoughts and sketches as they developed these ideas. This week, Katy wrote a piece on Ayden LeRoux, whose lovely breasts were drawn live and are included in the pack.
I love to behold (or hold) a breast. I love them in their infinite array of volumes and shapes and areola sizes. I adore a pert nipple as much as a sloping soft one. I love my boobs, I love your boobs.
A few weeks ago I had the privilege of hosting the first live-Flirtmoji drawing session. Two lovely ladies, Hallie & Ayden, bared their chests for me and candidly shared their bodies and stories while I drew and water-colored.
Newsflash: the simple shape of a breast is radically inversely proportional to the stories it contains. Drawing a boob, you’re like, “Cool, circles on circles on circles, donezo!” But talking with someone about their relationship to their breasts? Man, those globes have some INTENSE and FUNNY and SAD and COMPLICATED and BEAUTIFUL things to say.
Ayden is an artist and writer based in Brooklyn, NY. She’s a powerhouse who just finished a book about her practice with the performance group Odyssey Works. She’s freakishly smart, makes the world’s best scones, reads diligently…the list goes on.
For a 26-year-old women, Ayden has a very complicated relationship with her breasts. Two years ago, rather abruptly, she found out that she is BRCA1 positive. When the doctor called to tell her about these results, he introduced it by saying “You’re young and beautiful but we can keep you that way. You wouldn’t believe what implants can look like these days” and wrapped up with “You’re now my most important patient. Call me anytime.” Far from being reassuring, it Ayden remembers it feeling fake and he never got in touch to follow up with his “important patient.” Who wants to be any doctor’s most important patient? When departing my doctor’s office, I like when he says, “Hopefully I won’t see you for a long time!” For Ayden, this initial pronouncement was only the beginning of a series of even more devastating revelations.
BRCA1, Ayden’s genetic mutation, basically means that she doesn’t carry the gene to suppress breast cancer. This means that there is an 88% likelihood that she’ll develop breast cancer. Doctor’s orders? Prophylactic double mastectomy.
On top of that she has a 50% chance of getting ovarian cancer. That doesn’t sound as bad as her chances for breast cancer, but couple that with the fact that there are currently no fool-proof ways to screen for it, and it can be a pretty deadly odds.
Before this, Ayden describes her relationship with her breasts as not one of particularly intense erotogenesis, but they were certainly an intrinsic part of how she experienced her femininity and her sexual body.
“There is something perverse about cutting off a part of your body when you’re not sick,” she said, “That’s one of the things I’ve had to constantly remind myself as I process this: I’m not sick. But sometimes it feels like it’s so inevitable that I am.”
Further, almost exclusively talking with male doctors about the procedure would often leave Ayden irate. She states, “There is a constant whatthefuck moment with a lot of male doctors where they assume that I want to proceed as a woman who wants to be a mother and still come across as fertile and nubile. It feels so problematic to have a man be advising me what to do with my breasts, which are not part of their anatomy.”
This was all compounded by Ayden’s huge fears about how preventative surgery could impede her sexuality. “No one really talks about how it affects sexuality,” she told me. “It still ultimately comes down to breasts are about nursing children and ovaries are about having babies nobody wants to talk about the sexual ramifications like losing sensation in a major erogenous zone or going into early menopause. People look at breasts in relation to motherhood and fail to see them in their myriad beauties and all the other arenas they are a part of.”
“I used to be disparaging of women who felt the need to get fake breasts. I still cringe at the awful ads on the subway for them.” Ayden reflected, “Now when I’m faced with this possibility of having tits, which is what they become when they’re fake or plastic. I have more empathy with how women sculpt and make their bodies.” Envisioning an intimate moment with a new lover always spiraled into the intensity of having to explain her reconstructed body, the pain of losing her breasts, the outpouring of emotions that would ensue. It’s not that she didn’t love to get down emotionally, it’s that being consistently faced with a traumatic experience makes being happy-go-lucky in a hook-up not an easy or available option.
“I think part of me, I’ve always assumed I will have reconstructive surgery and not just a mastectomy because in a similar way of performing as a femme, it is one less thing you have to explain. There’s a level of passing to it that I’ve thought a lot about.”
Ayden started to go through with the process. She made appointments, scheduled time off work, talked to doctors. About this time, she says, “The first 6 months I was reeling and in a very dark place and felt this cold need to take care of it.” In the midst of planning for the mastectomy, she was wrought with anxiety about never having been in a relationship. Eating dinner after appointments at Massachusetts General Hospital, her mother imparted a piece of wisdom: “When you feel your strength is not something that makes you stand alone, you will be met and received by a loving partner.”
Then, Lucas came along. He was a game-changer: “Falling into a reciprocated love for the first time, amongst a few other events, and wanting to share my body with that person as much as possible made me realize that I didn’t need to be hasty, I just needed to have a plan in place.” She still needed to be hyper-vigilant and have frequent screenings, but she decided to delay the surgery for a few years. “I think being in love kind of saved me from acting too quickly, in many ways,” she said.
“I knew that I could trust [Lucas], when I met him and I knew I would tell him when the time was right. There was part of me that didn’t want to shield anything, knew that I couldn’t. We weren’t playing by other people’s rules, or following dating etiquette about how fast or slow to move. He was vulnerable with me from the get go and when I told him his immediate response was ‘I’ll love you no matter how your body is.’ I’m so glad I’ve decided to wait a bit to have surgery because it’s given me time to really appreciate and love and experience my breasts. ”
When Ayden was first grappling with the knowledge that she would lose her breasts, one of her first instincts was to memorialize her breasts in some way. “There was something about having them appreciated in art, that felt necessary in mourning their loss. So there’s something that tickles me about having people sext with them.”
“It was cathartic to have you paint and draw me,” she told me “I’ve been a model for figuring drawing on and off throughout the years, but it’s taken on a new level of depth for me to model for people. Because in some ways I feel like I want that part of my body to be appreciated while I still have it. And to feel empowered, even within the complication of that beauty.”
Flirtmoji is sorry to say we’re being accused of plagiarizing a few of our new vagina emojis. We’ve made a mistake and owe recognition to another artist. Here’s the story.
When I first saw this image floating around on twitter with an accusation of plagiarism directed at our new vagina emojis, my first reaction was to immediately recognize the yellow one as being on my Flirtmoji inspiration board. I immediately knew one of the new vagina emojis looked exactly like it. From Twitter, I learned that the vaginas on my inspiration board were from a tremendous project called What Do You Like About Your Vulva and Vagina? and they are by the artist Erin Tobey.
Then, I saw this:
This image made me feel strange. Sweaty, ashamed, angry, confused.
The pair at the top left and middle left are obvious copies. We’re calling it plagiarism. We called it that as soon as we became aware of this on twitter. In those two emoji, Flirtmoji plagiarized Erin’s beautiful work. We’re tremendously sorry, embarrassed, and humbled by this. Not just to Erin, but to the entire community that have been using our site, loving our art, and believing in our sext-positive mission.
But this copying wasn’t done intentionally, thus my confusion when first accused. I pulled out my sketchbooks and workbooks to investigate how this happened. After investigating, I can tell you it happened quite easily, actually. And, despite the accusations, it happened without any malicious tracing. Here’s how we explained it in an email to Erin:
However, they’re absolutely not traced. I work by looking at my mood board (and apparently at your vaginas) and doodling in my sketchbook. I scanned that sketchbook back in and refined it along with dozens of other half-conceived vaginas. I swapped clits, folds, played endlessly with strokes and colors. There are like, 100 vaginas on one document. In some part of this back and forth process, I lost any concept of attribution or the original source of those particular lines.
I’m attaching the 2 images that were on my ‘Flirtmoji inspiration’ mood board. Looking at it now, the bottom yellow one and the top right one look very, very similar to two of our vagina emojis. I see the resemblance, down to some of the little details in the curves. I’m obviously absolutely uncomfortable with those similarities and understand it looks like malicious theft of art.
That’s the sloppy work process that led to the unintentional theft of Erin’s wonderful art. We’ve apologized to her privately. We’ll apologize to her here. We’re sorry for this act of plagiarism.
Okay, but how about the other four vaginas being marked as plagiarized?
We certainly understand the inclination to look for further plagiarism, but when we look closely at the art, we just don’t see it. There are similarities … they’re both colorful, interesting vaginas. Some of them do have a similar form. The one at bottom left is like bizarrely, bizarrely similar. But the vaginas we previewed this past Friday are diverse in shape, form, and color. I think maybe if two artists set out to draw purposefully diverse vaginas there must be some overlap. But none of these were copied into my sketchbook and then back onto the page like the other two. None of them were traced.
We have over 300 other emojis on the site that we are very, very proud of. Many of them, including all of the vaginas discussed above, are free to use. They represent a boatload of thoughtful work and investigation into sex, identity, fetish. From an experience like this, we hope to learn even more and incorporate those lessons into our art, our process, and our identity as a company.
So, to recap, we’re sorry. We were careless and we did something wrong. We’re actually speaking with Erin about all of this today and will find a way to give her attribution and compensation for her contributions to this project. If it’s her preference the vaginas come down, we’ll take them down.
Over the next few weeks, Flirtmoji will be releasing sneak peeks of our upcoming BODIES pack. Check back each Friday for new emojis featuring penises, vaginas, butts, boobs, and other beautiful naughty bits. As we roll out this art, Flirtmoji artists Katy and Jeremy are pulling back the curtain and revealing their thoughts and sketches as they developed these ideas.
When we first started making Flirtmoji, body hair posed the most significant design challenge. We knew it was important and we wanted to include it, but couldn’t find a way to pull it off within our design style. We maintain a minimum stroke width across all our art, and this hefty noodle of a line made our early attempts at hair look like thick extruded play-doh tubes. Not good.
So when we launched Flirtmoji most of our genitals were, sadly, hairless. Maybe bald is your thing, but in our spirit of inclusivity and body-positivity, we felt awful at not having any body hair offerings.
Katy: I believe in body hair. Body hair is honest. It traps moisture and scent. It relays information about our lineage and our ancestral history. It is revealing in the best of ways. To be naked is to be connected with your inner animal.
A few months ago, with time and dedication, Flirtmoji artist Jeremy made some headway into solving the Flirtmoji body hair solution. This is what we came up:
So we kept at it. We kept drawing, thinking, dreaming about pubes…
Jeremy: From the beginning, I was mostly stumped by pubic hair. In our early drawing stages, our style used 1 pixel strokes as outlines. In this style, I was unable to crack the pubic riddle. Check out these hot messes:
Eventually, we refined our style to use a 2 pixel minimum. I figured this new pube-problem would be twice as hard as the 1-pixel-pube-problem, so I gave up.
The first breakthrough came from drawing this very weird (and ultimately ditched) Flirtmoji. It got me thinking about how sculptors created pubes in marble, which led to me to a google search checking out some of the ancient sculpture master’s treatment of pubic hair. At times pixels feels like a very limiting and challenging medium—but it was inspiring knowing artists have succeeded with mediums as difficult as marble.
With this new curly pube style in mind, we tweaked our style. A change in stroke size allowed us to more delicately draw the pubes. Now we feel capable of capturing the beauty of a big natural bush atop a thick pussy. Or a swath of fur framing a lovely weiner.
To test out our new style, we’ve been drawing some hairy glorious pussies. The addition of those delicate tendrils, plus asymmetry and lots of labial variation, makes for a set of super diverse icons.
We’ve added these give new pussies to the site today—for free! Which one is your favorite?
Love,
Katy & Jeremy
How do you translate the glorious, seductive wonder of summer love into 21 Flirtmoji? Last month we asked ourselves the same question as we set about creating our latest pack: Hot, Wet Summer!
Most Flirtmoji packs start with a list. For example:
Boob sundae?
Girls on bikes?
Topless girls on bikes?
Beach orgy (how do you draw this?)
Itty bitty yellow polka dot bikini?
Pizza bikini?
To create the list we tap into our favorite memories and our strangest fantasies. We think about films, art, pop culture, dreams, etc. We do a lot of googling, ogling, and asking. We tend to find some of the best stuff in the deepest recesses of our reptile brains. Each idea gets run through the Flirtmoji filter to ensure it’s inclusive and sex positive. The results of this “research” get distilled down into concepts and simple graphic representations and added to the list.
Then we sketch out some of the best ideas:
We mess around in illustrator:
Once the Flirtmoji are laid out in Illustrator they go back and forth between Jeremy and Katy for refining, editing and culling. In addition to aesthetics, this process involves keeping an eye on the balance of gender, skin tone, and body type.
When we’re satisfied everything is ship shape, we send them out into the world!
What do you think? Does Hot, Wet Summer encapsulate everything you think of when you think of summer love? We’d love to hear from you: [email protected]
XO,
Katy & Jeremy
Hey friends, guess what?? We are BEYOND excited to announce the Flirtmoji iOS Keyboard, launching later this year.
The keyboard will be downloadable for free from the App Store and will come stocked with a bunch of new Flirtmojis plus some old favorites. Of course, for the extra juicy stuff, you’ll still need to use our web app.
Building Flirtmoji Keyboard has been a total adventure and we can’t wait to share it with you! Stay tuned!
Talking about sex is the hardest, right?
What if you could text about it?
Flirtmoji just put together a Safe Sext pack that we think is pretty important. The Safe Sext pack (currently available FOR FREE in the Flirtmoji store) has language to help clarify intentions and start conversations about some of those hard to discuss subjects— including birth control, sexual health, and consent. We want you and your partner (or partners) to arrive prepared or informed, every time.
We also see the Safe Sext pack as a set of Flirtmoji that could open communication lines between parents and kids who are thinking about sex. This isn’t to undermine the importance of face-to-face conversations, but to act as an additional resource or tool.
We received an email the other day that our Booty Call Flirtmoji came across as culturally and racially offensive and that it objectifies black and brown bodies.
First of all: we would like to apologize for making anyone feel disempowered or objectified. This was not our goal, and something we are prepared to work on.
As with all our art, we put great thought into this Flirtmoji to avoid making anyone feel disenfranchised. In the same email, we received feedback that condemned the icon for objectifying women. These butts are specifically non-gendered (no genitals) so that humans of all genders and sexual inclinations could message this Flirtmoji back and forth.
We recently got a write up over at the Daily Dot which both excited and wigged us out a little. In the piece, author EJ Dickson wrote up definitions for a handful of our Flirtmoji in order to to assemble a “helpful emoji dictionary.â€
Obviously, some of the proposed definitions are written to be funny, which we appreciate and understand. BUT some of the definitions don’t mesh with our mission at Flirtmoji to empower people of all sexualities to communicate their desires, concerns, and flirtations.
SO, while all press is good press and we extend big thanks to Ms. Dickson for writing about us, we’re going to take a minute here to respond by interpreting the meaning of our Flirtmojis and clarifying our stance on #sext-positivity.
HEY I’m into watching responsibly made and purchased porn together because it gets me going. YADIG?Â
Here at Flirtmoji, we think sex is good, natural, important, and fun. We believe that good communication and good sex are inextricable. When we ask, explain, and consent we improve our sexual experiences.
Humans have always been sexual creatures, and now we’re sexual creatures with cell phones and wi-fi connections and we’re taking advantage of it. We are sexting. We are sending pictures of our cocks and pussies and naked bodies to each other. We’re watching, and talking about, porn. We’re making homemade sexy videos and posting them to Tumblr, etc. We are using GPS to find potential lovers within a five-block radius. We are Bluetoothing our phones to vibrating toys. And we are using eggplant and whale emoji in desperate bids to sexualize texts.
Despite all this sexual activity oozing out of our lightning ports and headphone jacks, the app stores for Android and iOS do not permit sexual content.
That’s to keep it family friendly right? But what about violent games like Grand Theft Auto of which there are seven different versions on the iOS app store? Or games that objectify women like Perfect Girlfriend where a digital female character compliments the user and responds when her body is touched — including her crotch and boobs? Or iLust where the goal is to be the best voyeur by staring at women’s boobs without getting caught? And yet, on the flipside, you have Luciano Foglia’s beautiful app Geometric Porn which celebrates sex (and good design) and was censored from both the iOS and Android app stores. Why are we allowing tech companies to define our sexualities through their misguided and repressive parameters?
We shouldn’t. That’s why we’re creating Flirtmoji, a visual language that’s playful, inclusive, and optimistic. We believe in the immense capacity of symbols to communicate complex (and sometimes intimidating) desires, concerns, and flirtations.
So, go forth and USE YOUR WORDS EMOJI! Use Flirtmoji to your heart’s content. Do it with desire and respect. As we like to say: be sext positive. And if you have any thoughts/commons/concerns, get at us. We’re just getting started.
Stay sexty,
Flirtmoji Team