00:00Why is it legal to advertise Viagra but not vibrators?
00:03It can't be that we value men's sexual pleasure over women's, can it?
00:08It just can't be.
00:11We've all seen ads for things like breast implants and erectile dysfunction drugs.
00:15But when Polly Rodriguez wanted to advertise her women's sexual wellness company, Unbound,
00:20every social media platform out there said her ads were too sexual.
00:25The fact that this ad was deemed too sexual but this ad wasn't illustrates a huge double standard we have
00:32when it comes to women and sex that I didn't even know about until I talked to Polly.
00:38For men to procreate, they need to orgasm.
00:42But for women, that's not necessarily the case.
00:44And so I think because that is a requirement for men, a lot of the times products that are associated
00:49with male sexuality
00:50can fly under the radar under this guise of family planning.
00:53Whereas for women, family planning is really just about fertility and pregnancy and having babies.
00:59Female pleasure and female orgasm kind of fall into no man's land for lack of a better term.
01:07If you are a male product, you can advertise because men's sexuality has to do with procreation.
01:12But if you're a female product focused on women's pleasure and not on procreation, you can't.
01:18Right, so what you'll see happening is there'll be a lot of condom brands or erectile dysfunction drugs
01:25that are able to still very much focus on the act of having sex,
01:30which is ultimately what men are using these products for,
01:34but they still fall within the guidelines, which is family planning, to your point.
01:39And that explains why when Polly tried to advertise her company's lube and vibrators to women,
01:43no one would let her.
01:46We were really surprised that we were banned across the board from, effectively,
01:50every platform that most consumer products companies use to scale.
01:53So Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Snapchat, all of these platforms basically draw the line as
02:00if you're not a family planning product, you cannot advertise, like, full stop.
02:04And yet women's bodies have been used since the dawn of time to sell products in a very sexual way.
02:10The business of female sexuality is a lucrative one.
02:13While the condom market makes $450 million a year, the vibrator market brings in more than double that,
02:21at over a billion dollars a year. And that's just in the U.S. alone.
02:25Sometimes I'll pitch investors and they'll be like, this is such a niche category.
02:28And I'm like, actually, it isn't at all. Like, it's a massive, massive market that's more than twice the size
02:32of the condom market.
02:34Whether it's investors or, you know, executive boards are historically have been predominantly male.
02:41I think oftentimes female sexuality is misrepresented as a really small market,
02:46when the reality is it's a massive market and a massive opportunity.
02:49And Unbound plays a really important role in this space.
02:52Because the industry has been mostly run by men, the products made for women's pleasure have historically been focused on
03:00large phallic toys.
03:03But Polly pointed out an important distinction.
03:06Seventy percent of women need clitoral stimulation in order to orgasm.
03:10And that really has nothing to do with a phallic shape or the size of that phallic shape.
03:14And so I think as we started to see more women entering the space of sex tech,
03:18we started to see design and products generally just become elevated.
03:23So that it's less phallic, it's less from the male gaze,
03:26and it's more focused on how do we bring the same quality of product design to sex tech
03:31that we've seen in beauty and in health and applied to an industry that for so long has lacked innovation.
03:38Yeah, and now it's finally coming. No pun intended.
03:41So Polly's trying to advertise her products without exploiting women.
03:45And at the same time, she's also trying to convince the industry that women have pleasure beyond large phallic objects.
03:51But while she's doing that, she's also run up against another setback.
03:56We were considered a massive, like, liability.
03:58I was shocked when I realized, like, we couldn't use Stripe as a payment processor.
04:04QuickBooks shut down our accounting account.
04:06Yeah, we couldn't use JustWorks for HR software.
04:11I'm just shocked that QuickBooks was like, no.
04:14Yeah, I know.
04:15And one of my investors was able to get one of the original founders of QuickBooks on the phone with
04:20me within 48 hours.
04:21And he even said, I don't agree with these policies, but they're actually written by the banks that back QuickBooks.
04:27How can businesses like Polly's that sell vibrators, lube, and accessories be seen as so corrosive to society that they
04:35can't even use QuickBooks?
04:37It's so hard to me that what we're doing is considered a greater threat than some of these other things.
04:44Seriously, selling vibrators is a bigger threat than selling guns and breast augmentation.
04:49People feel threatened by women who feel power and control and autonomy over their body.
04:55The good news is that despite the setbacks, Unbound has raised $3.7 million in funding from big investors.
05:02That amount is unheard of in the industry of sex tech.
05:05And it illustrates how women's sexuality and pleasure is just beginning to be explored and documented.
05:12After all, the structure of the clitoris wasn't fully discovered until 1998.
05:18Did you know that?
