We Can Track Everything Now. The Real Question Is: Should We?

Not long ago, the things women tracked were largely the things society deemed important enough to measure. Our weight. Our calories. Our fertility. Our productivity.

Today, thanks to an ever-expanding ecosystem of apps, wearables and health platforms, we can now track almost everything: Steps, sleep, heart rate variability, stress levels, moods, fertility, menstrual cycles... the list goes on.

As of 2026, we can add to this list another area to measure; our sex lives.

Recently, I came across an advert by period underwear brand Snuggs promoting their sex and period tracking app. It enables users to add detailed insights into their sexual activity, including frequency, number of partners, number of orgasms, whether sex was protected, what kind of sex took place, how it was rated and any notes users wish to add. From this, they can generate a personalised "My Sex Report".

As someone who spent months tracking sex while trying to conceive, it shouldn't have caught me off guard in the way it did; but instead of scrolling on by, I stopped.

I understand the value of having a simple way to record intimacy. When you're navigating fertility treatment, ovulation windows or pregnancy planning, sex can become surprisingly logistical.

In those circumstances, tracking serves a clear purpose. It provides information that can help you make decisions about your health and reproductive goals.

But this app feels like something different. It isn't simply about remembering when you last had sex. It's about turning one of the most intimate parts of human life into a stream of comprehensive and highly personal data points.

Instead of rushing to download, I was left musing on a question that we are increasingly being forced to ask in the age of optimisation: where do we draw the line?

To be clear, there is something undeniably positive about the existence of tools that centre women's sexual experiences. For centuries, women's pleasure has been sidelined, ignored or treated as secondary to reproduction.

An app that asks whether you had an orgasm, whether you enjoyed the experience, and whether your needs were met is, in some respects, a small act of cultural correction.

It puts the woman's focus directly upon her everyday emotional and sensual needs, and not just her reproductive capabilities. The very existence of a metric for female pleasure is arguably progress.

Likewise, there is something empowering about recognising women's sexual autonomy. The ability to track relationships, partners and experiences without shame reflects a world in which women are increasingly free to define their own sexual lives.

For generations, women's sexual histories were something to conceal; now they're something an app can chart in a neat annual report. The question, however, is whether empowerment and quantification are always the same thing.

Once something can be measured, it inevitably becomes something we start evaluating, and the data is ultimately available to be sold and utilised as required by companies looking to profit within this space.

The wellness industry has spent years convincing us that more data equals more self-knowledge. Sometimes that's true. Monitoring blood glucose can reveal important health insights. Tracking periods can help identify hormonal conditions. Recording symptoms can support medical diagnoses.

Yet data collection has a habit of expanding beyond necessity. We start by tracking information that serves a practical purpose. Then we begin tracking because we can - and eventually we find ourselves staring at dashboards of personal metrics, wondering whether we're having enough sex, enough orgasms, enough fun.

Am I above average?

Am I below average?

Am I doing this correctly? Did I actually enjoy that? Should I have enjoyed it more?

The irony is that many of the things that matter most in life are the very things least suited to measurement. Connection. Chemistry. Desire. Intimacy. Trust.

No annual report can tell you whether a relationship feels deeply and mutually fulfilling. No graph can capture emotional closeness or longing. No metric can adequately explain why one encounter felt meaningful, while another did not. No orgasm can truly be tallied up to a 1 to 10 chart, neatly defined on a line of potential. Humans, in all their complexity, are so much more than simply numbers. We are messy, diverse, nuanced, deep, and unpredictable. We are influenced by so many factors around us that cannot be monitored through one single app.

There is also the question that hovers over every modern tracking platform: who benefits?

The answer, ideally, is the user. Better awareness, better decision-making, better health outcomes. Yet increasingly, personal data has value beyond the person generating it.

Even when information is anonymised, aggregated or securely stored, it's worth asking why companies are so eager for us to document every aspect of our lives.

Data has become one of the most valuable commodities in the modern economy. Every new category of behaviour that can be tracked creates another source of insight, engagement and commercial opportunity.

That doesn't mean these apps are inherently harmful. It simply means we should remain curious about the incentives behind them. Tracking is never neutral. The act of measuring something changes our relationship to it.

Perhaps the healthiest approach is not to reject tracking outright, but to ask a simple question before downloading the next app: what problem is this solving?

Was there ever really a world in which we needed to track the number of orgasms we were having, the exact locations in which they occurred, and to have this neatly packaged into a regular report for our inspection?

If you're trying to conceive, monitor symptoms or better understand your body, the answer may be obvious.

If you're tracking your orgasms because it helps you recognise patterns, communicate needs or prioritise pleasure, that may be valuable too.

But if the primary outcome is simply generating more arbitary statistics about your life, then perhaps it's worth pausing.

Not everything meaningful needs a dashboard.

In an age where we can track almost everything, the challenge is not deciding what technology allows us to measure.

It's deciding what is worth measuring in the first place.