How censorship is harming your relationship with your sexual health

A sexual revolution has been taking place over the past decade. It’s not loud or brash, because it’s not allowed to be. The women leading it are entrepreneurs, sexual health practitioners, sex toy company founders, sextech disruptors, non-profits, thought leaders and digital creators.

They’re fighting a historic smear campaign that has stigmatised sex and undermined female and queer sexual agency for centuries. I am one of them. A clinical sexologist, certified sex coach and writer, who’s worked in this space for almost a decade helping women and couples rescue their sexual relationships.

My peers and I offer the perspective that sexual wellness is an integral part of our overall wellbeing. We exalt sex-positive values around consent, pleasure, communication, inclusivity and body autonomy. We empower people to define the kind of sex and pleasure they want, on their terms.

This work cuts across every stage of life – from helping teenagers unravel porn-fuelled myths about sex and millennials worrying about the pleasure gap to dismantling the view that sex should fall off a cliff after menopause. In fact, the sexual wellness movement has inspired midlife women to re-write their sexual script and reclaim sexual agency, without shame.

We’ve all seen Stephen Graham’s hit show Adolescence and grasped what it represents. We’re living through a societal crisis of viral digital misogyny. Easy-access porn is shaping children’s sexual attitudes and gender-based violence is on the rise. Sexual wellness initiatives, such as modern sex education platforms, consent-focused workshops, age-appropriate pleasure-positive books and shame-free digital conversations are the antidote.

While public interest and need for services like those I offer are sky-high – a 2022 study by Sex Education Forum showed that only 35 per cent UK students believed they had received “good” or “very good” sex education and 90 per cent of girls had been sent explicit pictures or videos they did not want to see – building a sustainable business within sexual wellness is a constant uphill battle. The industry is vulnerable to fragmentation, fraught with significant financial challenges and faces global censorship which leaves us all teetering on the edge of burnout.

At the crux of this is a serious PR problem. Our businesses are routinely misclassified and lumped into the “adult” industry, discouraging investors, spooking banks and terrifying the algorithm.

Funding sexual wellness

As Cindy Gallop, founder of the educational and ethical erotica platform Make Love Not Porn, expressed in her inspiring SXSW 2025 talk: “Every piece of business infrastructure other tech start ups take for granted, we can’t. The small print always says ‘no adult content’. I can’t get funded. I can’t get banked. [We were] debanked three times in the last two months.”

This is not an unfamiliar experience for Kalia Bolton and Holly Jackson, co-founders of SheSpot – a pleasure product and education platform for women. Securing insurance has been a major hurdle for them, with male brokers struggling (or refusing) to understand the nature of their business.

Bolton explained: “One insurance company cancelled our policy mid-term.The brokers said our businesses breached their company values, but when we asked to see these ‘values’, they said they ‘weren’t written down’. We were rejected by twelve insurance companies before finally securing cover but with a high premium. They charge us thousands more compared to regular retail businesses, and with extensive exclusions.”

SheSpot also had its Paypal account suspended and was refused savings accounts “on the grounds of us being a ‘high risk’ business, with our services being lumped in the same restricted category as firearms.” says Bolton.

Sex sells, but only under certain conditions. The result? Innovations have been stifled due to lack of business infrastructure and investment and growth in the sexual wellness category has been hindered. This is an industry awash with small start-ups and exhausted solopreneurs clawing through a system that feels like it’s rigged against them.

“A real challenge is collaboration with non-sexual wellness businesses (those that are more strictly health related) who may be fearful of being associated with ‘higher risk’ partners”. Jackson notes.

We are satellites in orbit, unable to collaborate, scale or sustain each other. Largely unable to reach our full potential because we cannot operate like other businesses.

Censorship and misclassification

But it gets worse. A digital gag censors us online. Education content about “seggs” (yes, that’s how we have to spell it to dodge algorithmic policing) is censored and routinely “shadowbanned”. In my experience, content I publish that uses sexual language – regardless of its empowering or educational context – will reach less than 0.01 per cent of my followers.

This constricted reach impacts sales for those of us relying on social media to stay visible and advertise our services. And on top of that, without warning and with no explanation, Meta – and other major platforms – can remove content, suspend our accounts and block us from running ads. Cindy Gallop’s Make Love Not Porn Instagram account was recently disabled by Meta with no warning.

As sex coach Amy White explains, “it’s not just the censoring on social media, I’m pretty sure my newsletters end up in most people’s junk boxes. It’s so frustrating and disheartening. How are we supposed to promote healthy, shame-free sex when we’re banned from using the word?”

Part of Big Tech’s compliance policy is a vow to crack down on content that facilitates sex trafficking, but the maths doesn’t quite math here. Is the algorithm really so archaic that, despite the giant leaps we’ve made in modern technology, it can’t differentiate between empowering sexual content and criminal activity?

The sexual wellness community has been trading horror stories about censorship for years. But in 2025, a global investigation published by The Center for Intimacy Justice confirmed what we already knew: Big Tech is actively suppressing sexual and reproductive health content, particularly for women and gender-diverse people, globally.

The report, which analysed the experiences of 159 non-profits, business and content creators in the industry across 180 countries, found that 84 per cent of sexual and reproductive health businesses had ads rejected by Meta. A further 66 per cent had their ads rejected by Google and 64 per cent had product listings removed from Amazon.

Read more: Trump’s destructive plan ‘will deny 1.4m women and girls birth control’

The report also illuminated the shocking gender bias at play. While Meta happily runs ads for Viagra and erection enhancers, it blocks promotions for breast cancer checks, UTIs and vaginal health screenings. Female-founded sex toy company Unbound noted that it only received approval for its vibrator ads after reframing campaigns to focus on male pleasure instead of female pleasure.

Blood-boiling double standards aside, this is about more than just visibility. The digital duct tape is blocking access to lifesaving information, forcing businesses to close down and “reinforcing outdated ideas around who is ‘allowed’ pleasure”, says Jackson.

Adding insult to injury, censorship decisions are erratic. Dr Carolina Are is a researcher at Northumbria University’s Centre for Digital Citizens who specialises in social media censorship of sexuality. She explains that, “this censorship is applied unevenly – celebrities for instance often don’t face it, meaning it relies on the presence or absence of offline clout.”

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Sex on the world stage

“It feels like the censorship is tightening”, says White, “I’ve seen a big shift since I started my business in 2020”. White is not wrong. Our industry isn’t immune to the global swell of conservative politics. What we’re witnessing is part of a broader cultural regression around the world, one that’s rolling back hard-won reproductive rights, imposing anti-LGBTQ+ policies, and blocking young people from accessing comprehensive sex education.

Social media platforms are “very much aware” of the over-enforcement of their policies and the damage being inflicted, confirms Dr Are. “But given most platforms’ North American origin, and the broligarchy’s wish to appease the Trump presidency, they prefer to over-moderate.The effects [of this censorship] are just not as worrisome to them as some other enforcement issues may be.”

It’s a far cry from the hopeful momentum that sexual wellness experienced during the pandemic. Lockdown triggered a “sexplosion” as sex toy sales soared, celebrities like Cara Delevingne and Dakota Johnson backed pleasure brands, and high-end retailers like Sephora launched sexual wellness lines – which have since closed. Female pleasure went mainstream, re-framed as self care, whilst an interest in sexual exploration surged. This coincided with the rollout of a new, reformed and inclusive Relationship and Sex Education curriculum which was made compulsory in all UK schools in 2020.

The pendulum is swinging the other way on the world stage today. The new RSE curriculum has been changed following political pushback, with some LGBTQ+ content deemed too “ideological” for teens, and sex education now considered inappropriate for children below nine years old. This is happening against a grim cultural reality, highlighted in the Children’s Commission for England’s 2023 report which revealed the average age children first see pornography is thirteen, whilst 10 per cent had seen pornography by age nine and 27 per cent had seen it by age 11. Against this worrying reality, conservative ideals about protecting childhood innocence feel flimsy and misguided.

Read more: Almost half of Gen Z is using AI to help with dating apps

We’re also seeing the rise of so-called “puriteens” – Gen Zers who are reappraising the sexual scripts handed down to them and, statistically, having less sex. It’s hotly debated whether it’s a sign of self-assured boundaries or a quiet fear of romantic relationships after lockdown. But what’s clear is that young people don’t have sufficient access to honest and open conversations about sex on the digital platforms they know best, bereaving them of resources to easily navigate their questions and anxieties.

Sex has always been political, but for those of us in the sexual wellness space – helping people let go of sexual shame and adopt healthier sexual expression – it can feel like we’re on the streets protesting day-in and day-out, while water cannons are fired at us from all directions.

Why do we bother? “It’s sadomasochism,” I joke to my friends. But in truth, it’s because we can’t un-see how important this work is. It’s because we see how exposure to our products and services can genuinely change lives and society for the better. Our shared struggle has fostered a unique sense of solidarity with very few sharp elbows between competitors in the space. “If someone wins we all win,” says Jackson.

And the wins are profound, not just inside the bedroom but out in society at large. Several studies prove that comprehensive RSE boosts contraception use and lowers teen pregnancy rates. Sexual satisfaction supports mental, physical, and relationship health. Pleasure and consent education reduces gender-based violence and fosters personal agency.

Sexual wellness isn’t niche, it’s necessary and like it or not, this PR problem is everyone’s problem. What I and so many others do is frontline work, but we are being sidelined. All we ask is that we are respected, funded and platformed like any other business, because we aren’t going anywhere.

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