Suzanne Harrington: How a pelvic floor app has transformed my friend’s life

A Sheela Na Gig, found at Tracton, and currently resident at Cork Public Museum: a pro gamer in another life?

I KNOW this is meant to be Christmassy, but having dinner with a friend after the cinema, instead of discussing the catatonic Finnish love story we’ve just watched, she tells me that she has gamified her vagina.

Reader, I was not expecting this. I choke on a chip, having momentarily confused gamified with monetised.

No, she says, she has not become a midlife sex worker. She hasn’t the energy.

There is a device, she explains, available not from Nasa or Space X but from Amazon, which you insert into your vagina, and which is linked to an app on your phone.

Relax, it’s not sexual.

No, it’s more useful than that — you use your vaginal muscles to play games like Flappy Bird (I can’t believe that title is a coincidence) in order to tighten your pelvic floor.

You use your internal vaginal muscles as the controller to play games on your phone that vaguely resemble Super Mario or Sonic the Hedgehog; if you don’t squeeze effectively up or down or right or left, the flappy bird doesn’t get the worm. Or something.

Over time, your pelvic floor transforms from Flappy Bird to steel trap, thanks to games like Aerial Firefighter and Space Odyssey.

I swear I’m not making any of this up. This app has transformed my friend’s life.

I’d say this constitutes a Christmas miracle.

At last, amid the oceans of pointless bro-tech, an app that benefits the connective tissue of the middle-aged lady.

Because middle-aged ladies can be let down by our pelvic floors, as our hormones leave the building; traditionally we have been directed towards the Tena Lady shelf in Boots, which was fine back in the olden days when being middle-aged lived next door to being dead, but not anymore.

If we can send probes to Mars, surely we can send apps to our pelvic floors. Turns out we can.

Pondering this miracle on the way home, my phone pings with news of another, more immediate, miracle.

A loved one has given birth. Labour was long and hard and brutal, but she did it. A Christmas baby.

The new dad says how the midwife told him that if men had to give birth, humans wouldn’t exist.

We’d have gone extinct.

“Damn right,” he says faintly. “No way I’d do that.”

Hurray, then, for the vagina, and its miraculous ability not just to retighten itself by playing video games on your phone, but to push entire new humans into the world.

The Sheela Na Gigs of ancient times celebrated its power, and were subsequently hidden in museum basements; Gwyneth Paltrow has done her best to honour the vagina, but we can’t take her seriously because of her stupid candles.

But ask yourself — where would Christmas be without it? There’d be no baby Jesus for a start — just a group of agricultural workers wandering around with some sheep, and some lost guys on camels.

Three cheers then for the source of all miracles.

We salute you.