Advertising restrictions can have harmful effects on women’s health. Here’s what one company is doing about it

Anyone who menstruates will tell you: a period often doesn’t look or feel like the rapturous dancing portrayed in a typical tampon ad.

Anyone who menstruates will tell you: a period often doesn’t look or feel like the rapturous dancing portrayed in a typical tampon ad. Taking aim at the sanitized and euphemistic nature of mass advertising aimed at women, personal care brand Frida launched an adult-only online platform Wednesday of tutorial videos showing customers how to use its fertility, prenatal and postpartum products. The platform, developed alongside health professionals, is in large part a response to many marketing platforms and social media sites taking down or rejecting reproductive and women’s health ads that show more authentic representations of women’s bodies, said Frida founder and CEO Chelsea Hirschhorn. “You can go on Instagram and learn a 10-step beauty regimen … (but) there’s just no avenue available to brands like ours who make products to help women during these times,” she told CNN. “We show women how to do saline nipple soaks when you have raw or cracked nipples. We show women how to stretch their perineum before labor and delivery to mitigate the risk of tearing, we show them how to properly clean their vagina after vaginal delivery.” Hirschhorn said she does not expect this explicit content to be shown on social media or television networks given their content guidelines but, since some platforms allow sexualized and suggestive material, “showing female bodies needs to be allowed in non-sexualized circumstances, as well.” When it comes to more explicit content and nudity, she argues there should be a safe, age-restricted space for this information to be informatively and frankly disseminated to people who need it.