• by Barbara Lippert , Columnist, July 11, 2024

Debuting in 1993, Eve Ensler’s play “The Vagina Monologues” liberated the V-word, lessening some of the shame, stigma, and squeamishness associated with talking about -- or celebrating -- a natural anatomical part that 50% of the population shares. It seemed a humanizing, democratizing breakthrough for our culture, from which many educational workshops sprang.

And, here we are, 31 years later, and the average 12-year-old girl is denied the power and rights that her grandmother had to choose her own reproductive future,

Post-Roe, not only have we lost the 50-year-old federal constitutional right to abortion, but legislators are now going after contraception. Punitive legislative impulses toward women won’t end. We haven’t reached full Handmaid’s Tale, but the quickness with which our freedoms are disappearing is indeed scary.

Still, I wasn’t aware that even advertising about vaginal health faced the same verboten and disappearing treatment.

“Are you based in NYC? Keep an eye out for these ads on the streets and see if you can spot one before they get taken down,” Jenny Dwork, vice-president of marketing at Wisp, a telehealth service offering comprehensive care (and prescriptions) for various vaginal conditions, wrote on social media. 

Earlier, she’d posted, “Advertising that gets specific about vaginal health has a tendency to disappear…”

She speaks from experience. And yes, Wisp’s latest OOH ads, now up in Soho in downtown NYC, feature three eyeball-arresting red-and-white panels. One says, “We love healthy vaginas.” Another features an abstracted pixilated vagina in red, with the Wisp logo over it. The third reads, “Get vaginal care faster than this ad will be censored.”

And yes, previous ads were “disappeared.”

That recalls the infamous “lactating cookie” incident in Times Square this past May.  The double standards involved were mind-blowing.

In a place known for extremely provocative, body-revealing ads for both men and women, a digital billboard for lactation cookies -- a recipe to stimulate milk production that chef Molly Baz developed in partnership with the breastfeeding start-up Swehl -- was in rotation.

Baz was photographed standing with her pregnant belly, sporting a sequined bikini bottom, holding large enough cookies up over her breasts to cover them.   “Just Add Milk,” said the tag line.

The ad was supposed to run over the week leading up to Mother’s Day, playing for the first minute of every hour. But by Thursday, it was pulled.

A Clear Channel representative said the ad violated “guidelines on acceptable content.” It  was replaced with another image of a more-covered-up Molly. The original was funny, open, full of energy, and hardly X-rated. It was far more memorable than the second.

So, presently in some billboard advertising circles, a sexualized breast is allowed to run, no problem, but a nursing or lactating boob is censored and shamed. The start-up Seed later gave Swehl its own billboard space to run the original, and it was restored.

Back to Wisp. “Vaginal health should be a normalized part of our overall wellbeing and Wisp campaigns will always reflect that,” Dwork said.  “These campaigns and creative approaches are meant to normalize the conversation and bring it to the forefront, rather than allowing it to disappear due to roadblocks.”

Wisp is clever to advertise the possible censorship within its own ad, to get attention, gather press coverage, and no doubt attract people who’ll  steal its ads as collector’s items.

But by being transparent about getting the message out, Wisp is not only supporting the right to get uncensored healthcare information in ads, but also standing up for women’s vaginal health education in general.