Mother and baby brand Frida wants customers to have an uncensored view of how to use its pregnancy and postpartum care products.
Prisma by Dukas/Getty
A mother and baby company, Frida, has given up on working around censorship on social media and is turning to a porn actress to showcase its products instead.
After it released its perineum massager, a device designed to stretch the area between the vagina and the rectum during pregnancy, the company was flooded with messages and Amazon reviews asking how to use it, Chelsea Hirschhorn, CEO of Frida, told The New York Times.
But the company struggled to find ways to share how to use Frida products without TV networks and social media censoring them.
"Our brand is no stranger to censorship when it comes to women's health. Almost all the mainstream media we've tried to advertise on: censored, censored, censored," Hirschhorn said in an Instagram post.
Instead of working around nudity rules on social media, it doubled down and hired porn actress, Asa Akira, to demonstrate the products on its new website, Frida Uncovered.
The age-gated website shares uncensored 'how-to" videos like: how to do an at-home insemination, how to do a prenatal perineal massage, and how to soothe engorged breasts.
Akira, a mother of two, was chosen to take part in the videos as her career in porn meant that she was comfortable showing her body and face on camera, the Times reported.
''We deserve to know about our bodies," Akira told the outlet.
Instagram users have expressed gratitude for the new website. One user commented on a post by Frida: "I wish I had this sooner! Could've saved me from many dead-end Google searches."
Another commented: "We need these kind of educational videos because it shows us how it's really done."
The website offers a way for users to learn about the products in explicit detail instead of the company using euphemistic props to bypass nudity guidelines.
In 2020, Frida was set to air an ad during the Oscars featuring a visibly pained mother using the bathroom after having a baby. But the network ABC rejected the ad from airing as it said it was "too graphic with partial nudity."
Likewise, Frida had posts taken down from Instagram for showing female breasts, despite the post pertaining to women's health.
An oversight board told Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, last year that: "The restrictions and exceptions to the rules on female nipples are extensive and confusing, particularly as they apply to transgender and non-binary people."
The board is an advisory group of journalists, academics, and lawyers funded by Meta but which operates independently.
The board said that moderating internet nudity is "convoluted" and effectively "unworkable." Meta employs a mixture of human moderators and AI moderation to monitor posts, which can often get things wrong.
