This Website Provides Uncensored, Unfiltered Sexual Health Education

The phrase “There is a censorship problem in the United States” is a reference to political and social division – and immediately evokes a sense of concern about who is saying it and for what purpose. But it’s also true. From continuation legislative attacks on inclusive education To digital “shadowbanning” Due to the number of accounts in social media algorithms, content is often protected from the masses.

Frida uncensoreda new website, launched alongside the cult favorite pregnancy brand’s new fertility products, addresses this ongoing problem from a different perspective: one that hopes to circumvent the censorship surrounding product education on conception, pregnancy, postpartum and breastfeeding.

Frida Uncensored offers Frida customers completely uncensored, anatomical tutorials on how to use their fertility and postpartum products – like a real-life version of the completely useless cartoons seen in the comically folded instruction packs for things like tampons and menstrual cups. The first videos available today feature adult entertainment actress and mother Asa Akira using tools like the Frida Mom Home Insemination Kit and Peri Bottle. Future videos will feature more real customers who can now apply to participate in the Uncensored campaign.

“Traditional and social media are really powerful tools for raising awareness of the existence of such sites,” Frida founder and CEO Chelsea Hirschhorn told Mashable. “Still, we find it difficult to advertise using the word ‘fertility.'” We’re at the whim of the algorithm, so to speak, and the algorithm needs a more human touch. The algorithm is not structured fairly. Recent reports have examined a consistently hostile advertising and content landscape for women’s health brands, with social media algorithms routinely picking up words like sex, vagina, vulva and period and flagging them as explicit content.

The videos were created on an all-female set and shot on an iPhone with no script or direction to create a sense of reality and candidness. “We intentionally selected women who are mothers and have been through the physical experience themselves to … speak authentically and openly about their experiences,” she said. “We prepared them with the products. We shot it on an iPhone. We wanted to do as little post-production filtering and editing as possible. We wanted it to feel like multiple women coming together to chat about what to expect.”

Frida Uncensored isn’t for everyone, either literally or metaphorically. The optional “stripped-down resource” is age-restricted, but not age-restricted, and Frida expects pushback from her usual trolls.

“More than a third of women say they feel physically unprepared for the experience they have just had when it comes to pregnancy, delivery and postpartum recovery. “If we can help a large majority of these women reduce that fear and anxiety beforehand.” From that experience, the platform should and could speak for itself,” Hirschhorn said.

The website is supported by the nonprofit advocacy group Center for Intimacy Justice, a collaboration that Hirschhorn says underpins their own calls for change. In 2022, the Center for Intimacy Justice released a detailed report Meta‘s systematic rejection of reproductive and female health advertising – the company later have revised their content guidelines, which had viewed the ads as explicit. Despite the change, the center found continued rejection of women’s health content. In 2023, she filed a complaint and accompanied it Petition the FTC call on the federal organization to act, supported by senators Elizabeth Warren, Amy Klobuchar and Mazie Hirono, as well as Congressman Adam Schiff.

“Frida’s Uncensored campaign uncovers alarming gaps in online access to accurate health information that leave women and people of underrepresented genders uninformed and underprepared in important aspects of their lives,” the center’s founder, Jackie Rotman, wrote in the Website announcement.

To be clear, it’s not just metadata that blocks this type of educational and advertising content. Last year, TikTok was accused of removing educational posts about medical abortion. Last month, both Meta and Google were found to be suppressing abortion information in global majority countries. According to a 2024 survey by the social media company CensHERship campaign90 percent of organizations that publish women’s health education online have experienced censorship of their posts. These limitations exist despite growing concerns about them sexually explicit (often simply pornographic) Advertising on the same websites.

“My hope is that there is an opportunity for effective, appropriate content and advertising used equitably – to promote women’s health and particularly the reproductive experience,” Hirschhorn said. “None of this is sexual in nature.”

Just this month, Instagram removed a Frida post that promoted nursing pads with a picture of a nipple. Another rejected ad for Frida insemination kits did not show any obvious nudity, but instead featured the seemingly controversial phrase “Just add sperm!”

As a decades-old brand, Frida has addressed this environment head-on. “We are battle tested,” Hirschhorn said. They promoted it uncensored pictures of nursing breasts after giving birth. You have created sharing campaigns real birth stories public – they are literally attached to the sides of buildings. Stories about the brand being banned from using the word “vagina” on billboards and blocked from promoting its products during the Oscars are part of the company’s history.

But despite years of experience and effort, Frida is still fighting the Goliath of digital advertising. When just an illustrated outline of a breast is enough for Amazon to flag and remove a product listing—an example Hirschhorn cited incredulously—the environment for informative, anatomically-based tutorials is suspect at best and downright hostile at worst.

Frida Uncensored bypasses traditional and social media to offer a new website that is not bound by the limitations of advertising algorithms and content curation.

“Censorship is such a polarizing word,” Hirschhorn said. “But if we’re going to allow ‘Girls Gone Wild’ content, there has to be a way to filter age-appropriate, relevant content for women. We have been on a crusade for many, many years to prepare women authentically and openly.” That’s the next challenge for us, so to speak: to take matters into our own hands.”