If you’ve been chewing your nails lately over your digital flirt game, you may rest once more: emoji startup Flirtmoji is offering to make all your sexting dreams come true. Unfortunately, they have inadvertently turned them into a nightmare with a recently released range of 15 “va-mojis” you can fire at your lover when they least expect it. Designers Katy McCarthy and Jeremy Yingling hope their Technicolor vaginas will “empower people of all sexualities to communicate their desires, concerns, and flirtations”.
Lord knows we’re all fairly new to this game, so it would be churlish of me to claim authority, but there’s something decidedly “un-flirty” about sending a potential lover a cartoon drawing of an anatomically accurate hoo ha.
The new emoji-genitalia aren’t the only sexicons Flirtmoji has on the menu. Scrolling through the diverse catalogue of come-ons, my once sexually confident thumbs have begun to sweat, and not in a good way. Where on earth am I going to find an occasion for this desert snake slithering round a fork? Or a sad, lonely titplanet? Do I know anything about sexting at all?
I’ve been racking my brains for a moment when it might be contextually appropriate to send the fire of my loins a pair of headless green alien boobs. Wouldn’t it be more expedient to write ‘IMAGINE A SEXY THING YOU’RE INTO’ and simply pin it to the fridge?
As it’s not worked its way on to the official keyboard yet, users are still required to copy and paste Flirtmoji from their website. I decide to try one out and paste what I think is “booty call” to a man in my phonebook. He replies “bum telephone?” and we are instantly engaged in a deeply un-arousing game of late night catchphrase.
Personally, I’ve always found erring on the side of subtlety is part of the fun when it comes to sexting. I’ve experimented with the peach (cheeky), the banana (too obvious) and the corn (too … knobbly) but what, may I ask, could be more perfect for setting “the mood” than the joyful ambiguity of the humble aubergine?
Liberated from the bottom of a tagine dish (where it has been stoically disappointing vegetarians for decades), this mischievous little thing has leapt into the sexual lexicon of a generation and become the most used vegetable (OK, it’s a fruit) of all emoji time. Sending one is to jauntily pin sex on the mood board, rather than shouting it down a megaphone.
No doubt this naughty fruit (seriously, who knew?) will continue to appear in inboxes across the nation and knowing smirks will continue to spread across the faces of their recipients, even in the age of the va-moji. Nobody ever replied “You want to WHAT?” to a picture of an aubergine. Instead, legs will be shaved, taxis ordered and pillows fluffed because everyone knows what’s going down. Spoiler: it’s not babaganoush.
Without the room for imagination, all that you’re left with are some brightly coloured pixels and awkward silences that could just as easily have been created by sending suitors endless pictures of your actual crotch. In an age of communication that is to relentlessly unsubtle, I’m backing the aubergine in all it’s adorable, ambiguous glory.
