Boutique Sex Toy Makers Picket Facebook NYC Offices Over Ad Ban

About a month after high-tech sex toy startup Dame Products filed a lawsuit against New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority over a ban on the company’s advertisements in the city’s subway stations, as AVN.com reported, the company and fellow sex tech firm Unbound Babes took to the streets of New York City with a coalition of sex toy makers to stage a protest in front of Facebook’s headquarters there. The group “Approved, Not Approved,” led by the two startup companies, picketed the Facebook offices in hopes of reversing a ban on their advertisements by Facebook and its popular social media subsidiary Instagram, according to an account by TechCrunch.  The group also launched an “Approved, Not Approved” online site on Wednesday, displaying examples of various ads and asking visitors the the site guess which ads were approved by Facebook and which were rejected based on their supposed “sexual content.” Dame Products founder Janet Lieberman told TechCrunch that Facebook’s ad policy has fallen out of step with what the public is willing to accept in advertising—and that advertising itself helps to drive public acceptance of certain types of products. “Vibrators were sexual health products until advertising restrictions were put on them in the 1920s and 1930s—and then they became dirty, and that’s how the industry got shady, and that’s why we have negative thoughts towards them,” the Dame Products founder told the site. “They’re moving back towards wellness in people’s minds, but not in advertising policies."  Because Facebook and other social media platforms were instrumental in creating and developing the #MeToo anti-sexual harassment movement, those platforms have a “moral responsibility” to provide a platform to the “counter narrative” of women’s sexual self-determination, Unbound CEO Polly Rodriguez said at the Facebook protest on Monday, as quoted by Business Insider.  Facebook’s advertising policies explicitly ban ads for “sale or use of adult products or services, except for ads for family planning and contraception." And even contraception products must not mention or make any reference to “sexual pleasure or sexual enhancement” in their Facebook ads. Photo By Niamfrifruli/Wikimedia Commons