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In a lot of families, conversations about sex go something like this.
>> [LAUGH] >> Good talk.
>> [LAUGH] >> Or if words are exchanged, they're so
uncomfortable and so vague that very little gets communicated.
This was not the case in my family.
In my family conversations about sex were normal, common and open.
There's no more emblematic example than the famous orgasm talk from my dad.
[LAUGH] When my brother got hit first girlfriend,
he got the how to please a woman talk from my dad.
My dad got this talk from his father.
So when I was 19 and my Catholic mother still had not given me
the orgasm talk, my dad decided he was going to recite
the latest research literature to me about the female orgasm.
[LAUGH] I was 19, in my Stanford undergrad dorm room not far from here.
The talk went something like this.
Jackie, Hollywood makes it look like sex is all about intercourse,
but only 15% of women can have an orgasm from intercourse alone.
The vast majority of women need clitoral stimulation.
Then he said, and it's really important that a woman be pleased first in bed.
Why?
When a man has an orgasm, it's over.
>> [LAUGH] >> So the women needs to be pleased first.
At the time, I thought my dad was just so quirky.
[LAUGH] And I'm still the first to admit that he is very quirky.
But what I realize now is that there was also so much power and
wisdom in what my dad was telling the 19 year-old me.
So often in our culture, a woman's sexual well-being is valued less than a man's.
We see that not only in relationships oftentimes, but
also in our broader business systems.
[COUGH] You may have heard that this January at CES, the largest consumer
electronics trade show, a women's vibrator company got an award but
then how the word rescinded and was not allowed to present at the conference.
CES called the product, profane and immoral and yet
dedicated an entire room for VR porn for male users, and
has prominently featured sex robots and other sexual products geared at men.
What I want to show today is that CES is not a one off issue.
Our business practices systematically discriminate against
female sexual wellness compared to male sexual wellness.
I could give you scores of examples, but I'm going to talk about advertising,
financial institutions and manufacturing.
First advertising.
Ride the subway in New York and you can not escape the massive
amounts of advertising for erectile dysfunction.
Also on the radio, TV, and all across ads right now.
Hims shows erect cactuses to represent penises.
>> [LAUGH] >> Roman offers to deliver Ed drugs
directly to your door.
One might wonder, where are the ads for women's sexual wellness products.
This advertisement was for a woman's sexual wellness company called unbound.
And the same subways in New York City banned these advertisements,
they wouldn't post them.
Why?
They were considered too phallic.
>> [LAUGH] >> Again,
>> [LAUGHS],
>> Cactuses represent erect penises, yet
the women's sexual wellness company, this was too phallic for the FTA.
This is not just the New York subway, and it's not just ED.
Facebook, Pinterest, Snapchat, and Instagram have many advertisements,
not only for erectile dysfunction, but also for penis enlargement pumps, male
sexual enhancer gels, playboy, all kind of products addressing men's sexual needs.
But ban not only female sexual wellness and
pleasure companies, but also sex education companies, and
even products that prevent pain for a woman during intercourse.
Second, financial institutions.
Stripe has a policy against working with all sex toys.
Stripe itself considers this policy to be outdated and overly moralizing,
but the issue is that its partners banks and credit card companies will not
do business with sex toy companies they're considered too much of a brand risk.
The thing is,
sex toys are much more commonly used by women than they are by men.
So practices that say no to doing business with these companies disproportionately
impact companies that address women's' sexual needs.
As context, 53% of American women use a vibrator.
40% have used one with a partner.
And vibrator usage is associated with better sexual function for
women across every measure.
Arousal, lubrication, desire, lack of pain, and orgasm.
But this entire category of product is banned,
not just from working with payment processors like Stripe, but
from opening a bank account if the bank knows what the company does and
from getting loans from the bank.
This applies not only to Stripe companies but again to sex education
sites such as OMGS which conducted the first large scale study about
female pleasure and was working to educate the mass public about it.
Third, manufacturing.
An entrepreneur named Melanie Crystal left a partner-track
career in law to create a product that was initially intended to address and
prevent STI transmission for oral sex on a woman.
It got a factory that was really excited to work with it,
it was a condom manufacturer.
But as soon as the factory realized the product was for oral sex on a woman,
it backed out of working with the company and
said it was against their shareholder values.
Basic steps for businesses like getting a manufacturer, a packaging partner,
a product liability insurance are huge barriers still for
companies that address female sexual wellness.
One result of all of these norms, both in business and
in our culture today although 95% of men say they have an orgasm always or
almost always when they have sex, that figure is only 65% for
heterosexual women, which a lot of us still thinks sounds high.
>> [LAUGH] >> This
is not because women are just not orgasmic.
Definitely not the case.
In fact, lesbian women have orgasms essentially as much as men.
And research shows that women who by themselves achieve orgasm easily and
within minutes The difference is the gap is because of a lack of understanding
about female pleasure but also a lack of value in our culture
of female pleasure compared to male sexual pleasure.
We have historical precedence both for
female sexual health products being embraced
much more slowly than men's products, but also for changing this.
When it came to oral contraceptives,
the birth control pill which came out in 1968 for 40 years,
this was the only prescription drug that insurance wouldn't cover.
Women's groups long thought to change this, women were paying more and
medical bills than men because of this and they had little real success.
What changed this?
1998, Viagra came out.
It was covered by half of insurers in the United States quickly.
Prescriptions were quickly prescribed and it was only after Viagra came out that
women's groups could effectively argue this was discrimination and
successfully got birth control covered.
I believe that today we have an other landmark opportunity.
The Viagra patent is expiring next year.
We have more licensing agreements which is why we're seeing tremendous
ED advertisements.
I think this is an opportunity to once again point to the double standards and
make sure we bring women's health along.
And what I ask is will we use this opportunity to make sure that women's
sexual wellness is included?
Or will we stick with the status quo?
At Stanford GSD, our Graduate School of Business,
we talk about changing lives, changing organizations and changing the world.
You may not think that your job or your job after business school has
the potential to change sex lives, change organizations, and change the world.
But if your job touches on advertising, payments, banking,
investing, finance, packaging, manufacturing, insurance.
Or determining who has a voice accelerators or at trade shows,
let alone if you work in law, the social sector, education or
the public sector, you will actually be in a position to make decisions
that impact people including in the intimate aspects of our lives.
When I think about- well, I want to show you a picture of, this is my dad and
my sister and I the day that we moved my younger sister into college when she
was around the age I got the talk I told you about.
And when I think about 19 year old me and the messages I heard from my dad,
they are so different than the inequities that I've experienced and
from the realities I talked about today.
19 yea old me heard that my pleasure mattered just as much as any other man's,
if not more.
>> [LAUGH] >> 19 year old me heard that
I had agency over my body and that my sexuality was mine.
19 year old me heard that intimacy could be a rich source of positivity
in my life and a source of deep connection with other people.
These are the realities I want for all women and for people of all genders,
all sexual orientations, and all sexual identities.
It is time that women's sexual well-being is valued as
much as men's in business and in our culture.
>> [APPLAUSE]
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