Why are platforms that could be closing the information gap on women's health instead making it worse?
This is Mathilde's solo deep-dive into the systematic censorship of medically accurate women's health content on social media platforms. Words like vulva, vagina, vulvodynia, and vaginismus are routinely flagged, shadow banned, and suppressed - while equivalent men's health content is not. In this episode, she covers the data behind the censorship, the companies and creators being penalised, the double standards baked into platform advertising policies, and why self-censorship may be the most damaging consequence. She also goes back to where this problem starts: centuries before the internet existed.
The historical roots: shame built into the language of female anatomy
The censorship happening on social media platforms in 2025 didn't emerge from nowhere. Mathilde traces the historical roots of the problem, drawing on Rachel E. Gross's "Vagina Obscura" to explore how shame was literally built into the language of female anatomy - in the etymology of words, in the deliberate exclusion of women's bodies from medical investigation, and in the centuries-long cultural tradition of treating the female body as something to be obscured rather than understood.
Women's bodies were studied predominantly through the lens of fertility, and it took a US federal mandate just thirty years ago to require their inclusion in clinical research more broadly. The information gap that social media censorship now amplifies was not created by algorithms - it was built much earlier, and the algorithms are its most recent expression.
"Women face a systemic exclusion from comprehensive scientific investigation, leading to a knowledge base that isn't truly universal."
Shadow banning, algorithm suppression, and who is being affected
The practical reality of content censorship for women's health creators and organisations is documented in this episode with specificity. Health educators, clinicians, patient advocates, and companies working in the vulvovaginal health space regularly find their content suppressed, their accounts restricted, or their paid advertising rejected - for using medically accurate terminology that platforms classify as offensive or adult content.
The double standard is stark. Mathilde covers what happens when men's health advertising is submitted alongside equivalent women's health advertising for platform review - the approval rates diverge significantly. Organisations including the Center for Intimacy Justice and the CensHERship project have documented this systematically, and Mathilde draws on their data to build the argument with evidence rather than anecdote.
"These platforms should be closing the information gap but instead exacerbate it by treating words like 'vulva' as offensive."
Self-censorship: the most damaging consequence
Algorithmic suppression creates a secondary problem that may be worse than the direct censorship: it trains health creators, educators, and patients to self-censor. When the word "vulvodynia" reliably reduces reach, creators learn to substitute asterisks for vowels, to rephrase, to obscure. The effect is that even when people want to speak plainly about women's health, the platform environment has made plain speech professionally costly.
This is how misinformation gains ground: not only because bad information spreads, but because good information learns not to name itself. Mathilde discusses what this means for the specific population of people with vulvodynia, vaginismus, and chronic pelvic pain - who are already underserved by medical education and who rely on online communities and creators to find the information and community that the formal system doesn't provide.
What changing this looks like - and what you can do
Mathilde closes with what is actually being done to push back: policy advocacy organisations, platform transparency campaigns, and the simple act of refusing to self-censor - speaking plainly even when the algorithm penalises it. She also covers what listeners can do: how to support creators who are doing this work, how to report discriminatory platform decisions, and why using correct anatomical terminology in your own posts and conversations matters beyond the individual exchange.
For people who have found this podcast by searching in terms they had to decode - using asterisks, searching euphemisms, finding their way through the linguistic maze the algorithms have created - this episode names what that search experience is a product of, and why it matters.