Sex toy brands come together to protest Facebook’s sexist ad policy

As far as promoting sexual products, a new report claims that there is a blatant double standard when it comes to men and women. Facebook and Instagram have been steadily making it harder for several female-focused brands to promote their products with their unjust advertising policies.

Brands like Dame, which is a female-founded sex toy company and Unbound, a sexual wellness company have claimed that they are facing censorship and have banded together to tackle these double standards. These brands have come together to protest outside Facebook’s NYC headquarters to raise awareness of its policies that quite obviously favour male sexual wellness products and not women’s.

These companies have also launched a website called Approved, Not Approved which shows how Facebook’s ads for sex toys are male-focused and are more than likely to be approved instead of those that cater to women, trans and non-binary individuals.

Upon visiting the site, you are greeted with a fun game of “Approved, Not Approved” where you merely choose if the ad has been approved or not by the advertising giants.

In this game, you will find an ad by Him, a company that deals with erectile dysfunction medications which shows a shirtless man that Facebook has allowed on its site. In contrast, an ad for “O.school,” which is sexual education website shows a clothed female in bed and has been disapproved by Facebook.

It isn’t just companies that sell sex toys for women that are victimized by Facebook’s unjust ad policies. A report by TNW states that Nick Boyajian, the COO of Wild Flower, a company designing non-binary sex toys, faces varying degrees of obstacles when it comes to advertising on social media sites. Boyajian states, “Waves of our content has been taken down — typically images of people of colour and other marginalized folks. To find us, you have to type our entire name into the search bar (and even then we’ll be low down in the results), and we almost never show up on Instagram’s ‘explore’ section.”