I succumbed to a Black Friday offer for Hulu subscriptions and have been gradually catching up on some shows I’d been curious about. One of those shows is “Reboot,” which premiered in September. It’s a scripted series with a terrific cast—Judy Greer, Rachel Bloom, Keegan-Michael Key, Paul Reiser, Johnny Knoxville—and an amusing premise: “Hulu reboots an early-2000s sitcom, forcing its dysfunctional cast back together.”
In Episode 3, a mini-crisis develops when the reboot’s star, played by Key, gets a little too Method-y in a bedroom scene. For the retake, a solution is presented: a vajoga.
“This is called a vajoga”: Lawrence Pressman as Jerry the director
The show is just absurd enough that I assumed vajoga was a madeupical word for a fictional product. Imagine my surprise when I did a little research and discovered that the vajoga is a very real thing that’s actually used in simulated sex scenes. It’s also known as a folding barrier or a genital guard.
According to an undated blog post in Roam, vajoga—a portmanteau of “vagina” and “yoga mat”—was coined by Yehuda Duenyas, an on-set intimacy coordinator. (If you’ve forgotten what intimacy directors and intimacy coordinators do, here’s my 2019 post on the topic.)
I have many unanswered questions about the vajoga. Is it made of actual yoga-mat material, which is one-eighth-inch to one-quarter-inch thick? That seems rather bulky. Does only one performer wear it? The one with the vagina?
The vajoga is just one of the intimacy coordinator’s tools of the trade. Another intimacy coordinator, Yarit Dor, wrote a 31-page article for the Spring 2022 issue of the Journal of Consent-Based Performance—again, a real thing—in which she lists the many modesty garments and barriers she uses on the job, many of them produced by her own brand, INTIMASK. They include the Drawstring Pouch, the Side Thong, the Shield Pouch, the Round Barrier, and Nipple Pasties (which, I learned, are also called Nipple Daisies).
Note: The sex-scene vajoga is not to be confused with Vajoga! [punctuation sic], a yoga studio for women in Louisville, Kentucky.
LOL...THIS in the same week I learned of Volkswa Genitalia (the actual name of the Instagram account for Volkswagen Italia). 🤣🤣🤣
Posted by: James Asher | December 13, 2022 at 07:00 AM