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Silenced in Plain Sight: The Hidden Cost of Censorship on Women’s Voices
By Slyde Body x Temple of the Feminine (Amy Lavinia)

The Disappearing of Women’s Voices
In an era that promises inclusivity, connection, and freedom of expression, women’s voices - especially those speaking about sexuality, embodiment, and feminine power - are still vanishing.

Not in a dramatic, headline making way, but in a quiet erosion: shadow bans,
deleted accounts, rejected ads, disappearing posts, and shrinking reach.

Recently, I had my ads for Slyde Body all shadow banned on meta. I watched the app
quietly drop off my reach and although my advertising money was being spent - it wasn’t
being sent out to the audience. It makes it impossible to advertise sexual wellness and
intimacy products out to women that want and need them.

Amy Lavinia, founder of Temple of the Feminine, also experienced this firsthand. Her
Instagram page and home to a community of more than 16,000 women was deleted without warning just over a week ago. Years of devotion, education, and storytelling disappeared overnight. This wasn’t just the loss of a page. It was the erasure of a body of work, a lifeline for women, and a business built with care.

And Amy and I are not alone. Across the digital landscape, sexual wellness brands, body
educators, and facilitators are being systematically suppressed. Content that speaks openly about women’s cycles, sensuality, pleasure, or intimacy is often flagged as dangerous, while exploitative material slips through unchecked.

It raises an unsettling question: Are we watching a slow burn of women’s work being
silenced online?

When Education Is Mistaken for Obscenity

The irony is sharp. Posts about women reclaiming pleasure or healing intimacy wounds are treated as obscene, while hyper sexualised portrayals created for the male gaze are allowed to flourish.

Brands like Slyde Body and Temple of the Feminine exist to do the opposite of harm. We
create safe, grounded spaces where women can explore:

- The rhythms of their bodies, hormones and themselves.
- The nervous system’s role in intimacy.
- The shame and silence many of us inherited around pleasure.
- The ways midlife, motherhood, and trauma reshape our relationship with our bodies.

This isn’t pornography.
This isn’t titillation.
It’s education, empowerment, and healing.

Yet to algorithms and ad policies, nuance is invisible. Sexual wellness gets thrown into the same bucket as explicit adult content. And when that happens, the impact ripples outward. 

The Human Cost of Digital Erasure Behind every account is a woman’s livelihood. When an account disappears, so too does the income that sustains her, the years of effort she has invested, and the fragile trust she has built with her community.
For Amy, losing her page meant:
- Thousands of women were cut off overnight. Many of whom may never find her again.
- Courses, workshops, and offerings disrupted. Revenue streams silenced without warning.
- Years of storytelling, vulnerability, and education erased. Work that cannot simply be reposted. 

Imagine a library burned down - not in flames, but in a quiet digital wipeout. That is what censorship looks like for women in sexual wellness today.

History Repeating Itself
None of this is new. Women’s voices, particularly those speaking of body, pleasure, or spiritual power, have always been subject to silencing.
- Witch hunts targeted women who practiced herbal medicine, midwifery, or spiritual guidance.
- Victorian morality demanded silence on female sexuality, painting pleasure as deviance.
- Medical institutions pathologised women’s desire, labelling it “hysteria.”

The digital age may look different, but the pattern is familiar. Women who share wisdom
outside the sanctioned narrative are punished - not with fire or imprisonment, but with invisibility.

Every vanished account echoes the centuries old message: your voice is too unruly, too dangerous, too disruptive to be heard.

The Bigger Picture: Evidence of Suppression
This isn’t just personal experience - it’s a widespread, documented problem.

- A CensHERship survey found that 9 in 10 women’s health accounts experienced censorship in the past 12 months. Posts about menstruation, menopause, and sexuality were disproportionately flagged or removed compared to other health topics.
- Femtech World reports that content containing words like “vagina,” “vulva,” and “breast” is frequently blocked or shadow banned - even when used in medical or educational contexts.
- A UK company providing education around endometriosis and vaginal health had its LinkedIn campaigns removed for allegedly promoting “illegal products or services.” The irony? Their content was medically accurate, fact-based, and life-changing.
- Essity, the global hygiene and health company, has openly spoken about being “shadow banned” when running campaigns on menstruation and sexual wellness - an issue so common that they launched awareness drives to highlight the bias. These are not isolated glitches. They form a pattern: women’s work on sexuality and embodiment is systematically more vulnerable to censorship than almost any other category.

The Psychology of Silencing Beyond the practical impacts, censorship creates a psychological toll. Every flagged post, blocked ad, or vanishing account sends a subtle message: be quieter, be safer, be smaller.

Creators begin to self-censor. Language is softened, images are diluted, truths are cut down to fit what the algorithm deems “acceptable.” Over time, the very essence of this work - its rawness, its honesty, its refusal to apologise - becomes muted.

We have to dim and dull so we can still use the platforms and reach the community that is asking, wanting and needing the work. That self-censorship is perhaps the most insidious effect. Because if women learn, yet again, that their pleasure is unspeakable, the silence doesn’t just exist online. It seeps into real life. 

A Slow Burn That Shapes the Future If this suppression continues, the consequences extend far beyond individual brands. It shapes the cultural narrative of what is acceptable for women to know, say, or explore.
- Education is denied. The next generation of women loses access to tools that could transform their relationship with their bodies.
- Communities are fractured. Safe spaces for connection and truth-telling are destabilised.
- Economic independence is undermined. Women’s businesses and entrepreneurial growth are made fragile by opaque, arbitrary rules.

And the most dangerous part? It’s happening quietly. Unlike political bans that make headlines, censorship by algorithm often goes unnoticed. A slow drip of silence that conditions us to believe women’s pleasure is still taboo.

Where Do We Go From Here?
So, what now? How do we continue to create spaces for truth, embodiment, and liberation when mainstream platforms feel increasingly unsafe?

We believe resilience comes through community, creativity, and decentralisation:
1. Build beyond the algorithm. Email lists, websites, and private communities are lifelines - spaces we own, not ones rented from corporations.
2. Collaborate and amplify. When brands like Slyde Body and Temple of the Feminine come together, we build networks that can’t be erased as easily.
3. Diversify platforms. Podcasts, Substack, in-person gatherings, and even emerging decentralised networks provide alternative avenues.
4. Call out the double standard. By speaking openly about censorship, we raise visibility of the issue and demand accountability from platforms.
5. Refuse to disappear. For every post removed, let there be ten more voices rising. Women’s truth cannot be erased if we continue to speak.

A Call to Remember
If you’ve ever felt the sting of silence - The flagged post, the shadow ban, the vanished
account - you are part of this story and we should all be raging mad about it.
This is not just about Amy’s lost page, or one brand’s struggle. It is about the ongoing
erasure of women’s wisdom, labor, and truth.

We invite you to reflect:
- What does it mean for our culture when women’s pleasure is censored but women’s pain is not?
- What future are we creating if intimate education is silenced, but exploitation is allowed to thrive?
- How can we, as a collective, safeguard women’s voices from being swallowed by digital black holes?

Refusing the Silence This is not the end. It is the beginning of a louder, braver, more creative movement.

Platforms may try to erase us. But history shows: women’s voices always return. Stronger, wiser, more impossible to ignore.

We will not go quietly.
We will rebuild, together.

We will keep speaking - because our work matters, our communities matter, and women’s freedom to know, feel, and express themselves is not up for debate.

With love, rage, and resilience,
Slyde Body & Temple of the Feminine (Amy Lavinia)