Femtech Founders Confront Tech Giants’ Sexist Ad Censorship: “We Have to Use the Peach Emoji”
Menopause ad censorship on major social platforms highlights a deep digital double standard that routinely suppresses women’s health terms while approving male wellness campaigns.
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Erectile dysfunction has had a thirty-year head start. It’s been advertised on national television during football games, covered by insurance as standard care, and normalized to the point that “ED” barely reads as a euphemism anymore. Vaginal dryness, post-sex irritation and the dozen other things that come with perimenopause get a different treatment. Flagged ad accounts, banned keywords and, for a while, an outright ban on the word “menopause” itself.
That gap is the starting point for a recent episode of the ‘Live & Well’ podcast, in which host Melissa Magsaysay spoke with Colette Courtion, founder and CEO of the intimate-health device company Joylux, and Dawn Halkuff, CEO of LiviWell. Their conversation traced the mechanics of a censorship problem as the platforms women use to research their own bodies are, according to both executives, still built around the assumption that female sexual health doesn’t belong in the same conversation as male sexual health.
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“Why can you advertise ED on national television or on social platforms when women experience the same things, but we can’t talk about it,” Courtion said on the podcast. She traces the double standard to family planning. “A man apparently can’t make a baby unless he has an erect penis. So everybody says it’s okay to talk about it... whereas a woman, we may not be experiencing an optimal environment... we may be having dryness or pain, but we could still have a baby.”
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The logic, as Courtion pointed out, doesn’t hold up against the numbers. Erectile dysfunction is most common in men well past their reproductive years, which undercuts the idea that ED coverage exists purely to protect fertility. “Erectile dysfunction mostly impacts men later in the years, so not even in their baby-making years,” she said. “It makes no sense.”
How Platform Censorship Silences Honest Conversations About Intimate Health
Until roughly a year and a half ago, the word “menopause” itself was frequently rejected by ad platforms, according to Courtion, who said the confusion traced back to how automated moderation systems classified the term. “These platforms were so uneducated they thought menopause was a disease,” Courtion explained. “And you can’t talk about diseases like that. And we’re like, no, it’s a life phase. Just like puberty, it’s a life phase.”
The word itself has since been cleared on most major platforms, but Courtion said the specific symptoms that come with menopause, like dryness, pain during intercourse, the mechanics of why a product might help, are still routinely flagged. The industry’s workaround has become something of an open secret: swapping anatomical language for a peach emoji and hoping the algorithm reads it as vague enough to pass. “Then we have consumers say, why don’t you just say it,” Courtion noted. “We want to say it. Trust me, we want to say it.”
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Halkuff, who spent the first half of her career in pharmaceuticals, including work on hormone therapy at Pfizer, and the second half in consumer wellness, described the same pattern from the advertiser’s side. “When you’re on platforms like Meta, you have to use certain words and you need to avoid certain words,” Halkuff explained. “They’ve been flagging us nonstop and then we change it. But we can use the words on our own, on our own platform. So it’s complicated.”
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That complication has a price tag. A shoe brand can describe its product in plain language and let the ad do its job. A women’s health brand has to spend extra time and money working around restrictions just to say what it sells, according to Courtion. “It’s really hard for a women’s health company to talk about these sensitive topics, these taboo topics, from a business perspective, and get the same results as a company that’s selling shoes,” she said. “We have to work so much harder at getting our value proposition across, but with limited guardrails.”
Supporting Your Body with Red Light Therapy and Vaginal pH Care
Both executives run companies built around a specific physiological claim, and both pointed to research to back it up, separate from their own products. Joylux’s flagship device uses red light therapy, applied to vaginal tissue, which Courtion said is designed to stimulate mitochondrial activity, the energy-producing part of a cell, in a way that supports collagen and elastin production.
The underlying mechanism isn’t unique to Joylux: studies have found that visible and near-infrared light can shift cell-signaling pathways in skin fibroblasts tied to collagen output, which is the general biology Courtion said her company applied to the pelvic floor. Courtion also cited internal company research, tracking more than 23,000 women over three years, that found fatigue was the most frequently reported symptom among women in perimenopause, ahead of hot flashes or sleep disruption.
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LiviWell’s product, set to launch in August, works differently. It’s designed to be inserted after sex to absorb semen, which Halkuff said can otherwise disrupt vaginal pH and lead to odor, dripping, or irritation for women having condomless sex. Halkuff’s explanation lines up with studies that have found semen exposure alters the immune and microbial environment of the vagina and is associated with an increased risk of bacterial vaginosis.
Navigating the Collective Physical Symptoms of Perimenopause
Part of the problem, according to Halkuff, predates advertising entirely. Menopause is clinically defined as a single point in time, twelve months without a period, even though the transition leading up to it can last a decade or more. “The drugs are only indicated for post-menopause, leaving doctors to sort of fend for themselves in terms of what do I do in that ten-year period,” she said. That gap has pushed patients toward a familiar routine: describe fatigue or brain fog to a doctor, and walk out with a prescription for an antidepressant instead of an explanation.
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Courtion said her company’s data suggests those symptoms are more interconnected than the medical system currently treats them, and that they show up in how women’s bodies handle exertion, not just in mood or energy. “If you have fatigue, you likely have brain fog,” Courtion added. “Our medical community needs to not treat this one symptom at a time, but really look at the collective symptoms.”
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Halle Berry came to Joylux already living the same symptoms behind so many of the company’s messages, according to Courtion: vaginal dryness, atrophy, pain during sex. Someone recommended the device to her. It worked, and what was supposed to be a thirty-minute call with Courtion turned into two hours. “She believes so many women were suffering in silence and she could help,” Courtion said. And Halkuff added the importance of why voices like Berry’s matter. When a celebrity openly discusses experiences that have long been treated as embarrassing or taboo, “it makes it really natural to be a part of the conversation.”
Listen to the full episode of Live + Well with Dawn Halkuff and Colette Courtion on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.
