Women's Health Mavericks_11. Jackie Rotman: Audio automatically transcribed by Sonix

Women's Health Mavericks_11. Jackie Rotman: this mp3 audio file was automatically transcribed by Sonix with the best speech-to-text algorithms. This transcript may contain errors.

Abby Mercado:
Hi, I'm Abby Mercado, co-founder and CEO of Rescripted, former VC investor and ever entrepreneur, fierce advocate for women, and mom of IVF twins. Welcome to Women's Health Mavericks, a podcast dedicated to shining a light on the people who are moving the needle when it comes to women's health and wellness. From inspiring entrepreneurs and innovators to leaders of big brands, defining culture to movers and shakers of biosciences, companies dedicated to treating women well introduce you to the people, the ideas, and the businesses that are changing the face of women's health in America and across the globe. With these changemakers on our side, the future of women's health is bright. Now let's get into it.

Abby Mercado:
Good morning Women's Health Mavericks listeners. Today, I'm so excited to introduce you to Jackie Rotman, the founder and CEO of Center for Intimacy Justice. Jackie was drawn to start Center for Intimacy Justice, a social change organization committed to equity and well-being and people's intimate lives. After being raised in a family that talked loudly and proudly about sexuality, as well as a traumatic event she faced while attending an Ivy League institution. In January of 2022, Center for Intimacy Justice published a report describing Meta censorship of health ads for women and people of diverse genders. 100% of the 60 organizations they studied experienced Meta platforms rejecting their advertisements, and 50% had their entire advertising account suspended by eta at some point. I wanted to chat with Jackie to get the behind-the-scenes take and to hear more about what she's doing to fight discrimination on behalf of companies just like Rescripted. Welcome Jackie. Thanks so much for joining us today.

Jackie Rotman:
Thanks, Abby. I'm so happy to be here.

Abby Mercado:
Awesome. Well, we're talking before the podcast, and I said, Jackie, I'm just so excited to talk to you. I think we have about a million mutual friends in the women's health space and the reproductive and sexual health space. And she said, is there a particular person who you might have heard about me from? And I was like, I think everybody knows who you are in this space. You are our hero. So thank you for doing what you do. So let's talk about what you do. Just tell us about yourself. Who is Jackie? Tell us about your background, how you got here, and how you decided to found and become the CEO of the Center for Intimacy.

Jackie Rotman:
Thank you so much for those beautiful words. I feel like every person in the women's health space is impacted by tech censorship, which we'll talk a lot about in this podcast. And like everyone in this space who's doing something to change something about women's health, they're my heroes. And so my favorite job, where literally my job is to take down barriers in the ways of the people who I think are superheroes to help them make a bigger change. So, I feel like everyone in this space is a hero. And that's why I'm doing this work because I feel like society should treat them that way. They shouldn't have barriers in the way. So

Abby Mercado:
Amazing. We're both smiling ear to ear for people who can't see us because this is a podcast. So yes. Continue Jackie.

Jackie Rotman:
Yeah. So in 2017, I was a grad student. I was doing a joint degree in public policy at Harvard Kennedy School and then just had just started business school at Stanford. And it was a time when I was both really passionate about basically, I had a really sex-positive dad who was actually really empowering in the upbringing, both for me and my brother, where when we were teenagers, my brother got his first girlfriend. My dad gave my brother a lecture about the female orgasm that was science-backed, promoting the importance of basically like cliteracy or like understanding. He didn't use those words but about the importance of the clitoris and women's pleasure. And it was so unusual of an upbringing, and I just thought my dad was quirky and didn't quite appreciate it when I was 19, getting a lecture from my dad about women's orgasms. But when I was in grad school, I started to realize how powerful that was because I shared a story about him in a class, and so many people were so impacted hearing it and wanted to talk about parenting and pleasure and topics around sexuality. And so I started wanting to build a company related to women's sexual empowerment and women's pleasure. And then, as I learned about the space, I saw this article with a photo of Polly Rodriguez from unbound in the New York Times.

Jackie Rotman:
It said, Women of Sex Tech unite, and I learned in the summer of 2017 that there was a whole industry of young women, many of them in their 30s or 20s, building businesses. And I realized I really wanted to help the overall infrastructure and the overall ecosystem of women's sexual health. So I started meeting and becoming friends with everyone I could talk with who was founding and growing a company to help women's intimate and sexual lives. And every single woman I talked to said that Facebook and Instagram weren't allowing them to advertise, and they often said this was the biggest barrier for them in growing, scaling, and helping other women. And so before realizing how huge that problem was, I thought I wanted to start a VC fund in women's sexual health. But I realized that just like you, then grow their businesses and this censorship was stifling every aspect of the entrepreneurial ecosystem in women's health. And then it was much broader than women's pleasure. And so I started a Center for Intimacy Justice started the work for it when I was in grad school, with the goal of changing the digital censorship of women's sexual health. And it's also reproductive health so that more women can help more women and non-binary people and people with vulvas and support reproductive and sexual health globally.

Abby Mercado:
Oh wow, I love it. Okay, so let's rewind a little bit. I want to know more about your dad. Like, who is your dad? Also, how did you know this was unusual, the way that he talked about Cliteracy, as you said? Really obsessed with that time. Um. But. Yeah. Who's your dad? Like, tell us about your dad.

Jackie Rotman:
My dad is awesome. I'm giving this talk in a couple of weeks in December. And, like, before, I could even find out if my dad was allowed to have a pass. He lives in Santa Barbara. The talk's in LA, and he already booked a home exchange, booked a vacation for him and his wife and, like, is planning to be there at this talk. Um.

Abby Mercado:
Oh my God, I love him.

Jackie Rotman:
He's so special. He's also very quirky. My mom passed away a few years ago, and so he had to. I used to get these notifications where my dad would accidentally use my credit card to like open up a JDate profile or like an online dating profile. So I would know, like when he broke up with his girlfriend and at the time and when he was looking for new love and his I think at one point he had a Tinder profile. He also this is not about women's health, but he went on,

Abby Mercado:
That's okay. This is not some podcast about Jackie. So, I want to know more about Jackie and why Jackie does what she does.

Jackie Rotman:
But, um, what my favorite Ken Rotman story is he went on a second date with someone he met online, where the second date was an 11-day trip to Burning Man.

Abby Mercado:
Yeah.

Jackie Rotman:
So that's Ken Rotman that he, like, burned this poem about my mother at the temple at Burning Man. But the reason I brought up his online dating is his dating profile says something like Rule Breaker. He loves to break rules and be independent. So he definitely taught me like the importance of breaking rules in a good way. And it was like "Rule breaker", something I don't remember, and then "knows how to love and adore a woman".

Abby Mercado:
I love that I'm sure there were so many people being like Ken, like, let's go, let's go on a date I also love.

Jackie Rotman:
I Gave it.

Abby Mercado:
He calls himself a rule-breaker. I mean, that's I mean, to me, it's kind of say that about my like, I don't really that's kind of why I'm an entrepreneur. Like I don't like to follow rules. I think a lot of entrepreneurs don't like to follow rules. But yeah, it's almost like, sure, we like to break rules, but I think there's kind of a flip side to that. We're just really curious what would happen if I didn't do things the way that they've always been done. So I feel like if Ken is a rule breaker, it can also raise a rule breaker who was just like, super curious.

Jackie Rotman:
Yeah, and so many rules are wrong. Like, I once did a personality test and it said I was the one that they were calling morality following rules. And I actually think so many rules are so immoral. And so I've got like 11% on that one because, um, just like challenge rules and challenge systems that are problematic.

Abby Mercado:
So, Jackie, I feel like in the spirit of digging into how you got here with the Center for Intimacy Justice, I think being a women's health maverick is all about what led you here. You had a career in being a dance entrepreneur prior to the Center for Intimacy justice. Would love to learn more about that and just a little bit about your passion for dance, which is something I cannot do at all. So please educate me. I have no rhythm.

Jackie Rotman:
I mean, it's everyone can dance. I feel like it's like intuition. Everybody has these abilities. You just have to expand them, which include dance and movement, which is a part of our birthright. So my foray into entrepreneurship was when I was 14, I started an organization that was called Everybody Dance Now. We actually just changed the name to Creative Network about 18 years in. So that's why I say was and I was doing a hip hop dance performance for teenagers with disabilities when halfway through my dance performance, the music stopped working. So we ended up inviting the audience members on stage for them to perform and them to dance. And seeing how full of self confidence and joy they were and seeing how connected the room was, I knew that I wanted to do something using dance for self-esteem and community building, and I was 12 at that time. So a year and a half later I started Everybody Dance Now. We provide free dance programs to kids who otherwise can't afford them, and we've expanded. So we've been in close to 30 US cities since we started. It was youth-led for the first decade. Now we're in Chicago, New York, and a couple of different cities in Southern California, and it's led now by a woman named Kelly Forman and a global master teacher from Chicago named King Charles, who's the leader of Chicago footwork.

Jackie Rotman:
So that was a huge part of my journey. And I still we were just in Thailand last November to speak at a reproductive rights conference, and we were walking into some learning activity about reproductive rights. And there was a group of 4 or 5 kids doing K-pop in the room next door to the sexual health presentation, and I was like, nowhere to be found. The rest of the presentation was the last one to board the bus, because I just felt so at home at this teen center, and I learned K-pop. And then we did Thai dance, and then I led them in a cipher, and it's just like you're in a totally different language or not language, but totally different part of the world. But I still think dance is such a powerful connector, and this 14-year-old boy was crying at the end of it because he was so happy. And I just love dance to bring people together and for connection.

Abby Mercado:
I love that, and I love how you describe what dance means to you and how it can be a connector. So hopefully someone at some point connects with me and teaches me how to dance because it's really embarrassing for my family to be around.

Jackie Rotman:
It's more about how you feel. I started putting, I now tried when I do my I have a morning daily practice routine, and after I meditate, I do my prayer, and I do my writing. I dance every day, and I have a coach who encouraged me to do that. And I was like, wait, you can just make dance a part of your daily practice? Like, it's so much more fun to me than meditating. So I've been doing it. And I think no matter how your moves are; it's just a good way to connect with your body and your thoughts and your feelings and so healing.

Abby Mercado:
Yeah, I do agree with that, I do. I have done Megan Roup's Sculpt Society, which I'm really, I'm really enjoying. So it's cardio dance. So it's a great way to get in a workout. And even when I was traveling for ASRM a couple of weeks ago, and I was just feeling very tired in my hotel room, I just landed, and I had to, like, goose myself up for a dinner. And I did a ten-minute cardio dance class, and like, no, nobody should ever watch me do that whenever I do a cardio dance.

Jackie Rotman:
It's for you.

Abby Mercado:
Totally. I'm like, I told my husband, like, Sean, do not come anywhere near this room, do not watch this. But I felt really good. So you're right. In terms of connecting with others, I'm sure it's great, but in terms of connecting with oneself and one's feelings and one's birth rates, you know, which is, I love how you just spoke about. So anyway.

Jackie Rotman:
Yeah. I will say related to your embarrassment of not wanting other people to see it, my chief of staff, we have a video being made about Center for Intimacy Justice, and she talked with the filmmakers before and she was like, yeah, you should have Jackie dance on camera. And I heard about this, and I was like, what? Like, I'm gonna dance in a work video. What? So I was nervous, too, but I got out of it because it ended up being moved to a park in Oakland, so they didn't ask me to do it.

Abby Mercado:
Thank goodness for Oakland. Okay, so fast forwarding. So we've done kind of a shallow layer of this discussion, but I want to get a little bit deeper. So after the dance stop you'd already been to college at that point, did you decide to go to the Kennedy School after that and the GSB after that? How did that go, and how did the Center for Intimacy, just as like, at what point in your education did CIJ come out of that?

Jackie Rotman:
Yeah, so I went to grad school about four years after college. I was working in women's rights, but I hadn't faced as many personal experiences that made me as passionate about gender equality as I am now. And then I went to grad school, and I'd worked for four years, started school again, and the second semester at Harvard Kennedy School, I experienced a sexual assault by a Harvard Law student, and it was just 2 or 3 weeks after I had told my dad I wanted to start, I told my dad my words were I wanted to figure out this was unrelated to the assault. And before it, and completely separately, I said I wanted to figure out an innovative business model to close the orgasm gap for women. So, I was just starting to think about wanting to create a business around women's sexuality. And I had this very positive relationship to sexuality that was not full of shame and was really empowering. And then I found myself having to also heal from now a much more complicated and a much more traumatic relationship to intimacy and to connection and to my experiences. And so, anyway, it was the second semester of grad school that I just from seeing how my university silenced me and seeing how unjustly they treat campus sexual assault, it sparked and instilled this huge passion in me to take on these issues from a much deeper part of my heart and soul and body, and from having to heal a lot of trauma in the coming years. And so that happened second semester at Harvard, then a few months later moved to Stanford because it was a program where you spent some time at each. And that's when I started interviewing women in my second quarter at Stanford, and I was really shy about it. I would go to entrepreneurship events and be totally unable to say what I was doing because I was so afraid that if you talked about women's sexuality, that it would make you a subject of more danger. And I never talked about it publicly.

Abby Mercado:
Wow. It's kind of like I didn't even expect you to say like a subject of more danger. That must have been completely opposite to your. And first of all, I'm so sorry that that happened, Jackie. And, you know, I know that that's like a part of a story that you publicly share. And for me and like, obviously from the followers of the podcast, I'm so sorry that that happened. It's so shitty and so not okay. What I'm curious to learn is how the university handled it and how you wish that universities handled these events because they are going to happen. What's kind of your vision for how this is dealt with in the normal world? First of all, that it doesn't happen, but in the unfortunate case that it does, how should the university deal with it?

Jackie Rotman:
So the way that they handled it, it happened three months before this guy was supposed to graduate. And investigations typically take about six months at Harvard. And so I wasn't going to report it. And then I learned that 90% of campus rape happens by repeat offenders and 60% of it. Yeah, and 60%. I learned this from a company called Callisto, a research study that also showed that someone else had written that showed that 60% of campus rape could be stopped if people were stopped after their second attempt. Wow. So when I read that. I felt a desire to help other women to not be harmed by the same person, and I wanted to do whatever I could in my power to prevent this repeat harm. So I wanted a solution that I thought could prevent repeat harm, and also support healing and try to change this person's behavior. And so for how I think universities should do it differently. I mean, I feel like right now you have two options for reporting sexual assault. What if it's campus-related? You can report it through a title nine investigation with university. You can go to the police, you can do both, or you can do neither. And most people I don't know the stat, I think it's about over 90% do.

Jackie Rotman:
They just never report it or take any type of reporting action, and only a small percentage of them even seek counseling. It's just so common. So I think for those that do, do investigations, I think there's lots of with title nine, I think there's lots of ways they can be improved to be less retraumatizing and that universities can better understand trauma responses to make more accurate and informed decisions. And also, for Harvard, they almost never find someone responsible if it's rape and they don't publish the statistics specific to sexual assault, they just lump them in with all their other stats. So you can't really publicly see that they're not having responsibility findings. So I think that's wrong. But for me, I actually wanted a restorative justice process, which was totally different and is more a facilitated process in which you don't even have that process unless the person who's caused harm admits harm. It doesn't. Instead of being about proving, did this happen? You say yes, like harm was caused. And then the process is actually about asking, how can we repair the harm? How can we address needs, how can we prevent this from happening? And you both bring in your support systems, families and communities in trying to rectify it. And that was not heard of in 2017.

Jackie Rotman:
And I tried to create what would have been one of the very first restorative justice processes ever for a campus rape because it was so not in the paradigms that people were thinking about for justice. And it was also legally disincentivized for universities. So that's something that I'm reviving work on because some amazing women in my community are also really passionate about restorative justice and creating alternatives and additional options. And I think it's probably less. My estimate of just survivors I talk with is I think it's probably less than 10% of the survivors that I know who actually want a restorative justice process. I think many people either want a punitive process or do nothing, and I not to do nothing, but to just not have to confront it in that way. And I respect all of that. And what I want is more options on the menu so that if people voluntarily are seeking that and asking for that, and it's not for every situation, but I think we need more options than the existing ones that we have, and then people can choose where their soul is called and what would be helpful for them, but I think that would be an additional one on the menu.

Abby Mercado:
Yeah. Wonderful explanation. Thank you. This is not a topic that I feel super educated on, but I feel it that much more educated. And I think your curiosity and learning this stuff, hopefully, that's also another thing that we can start doing more of. Just the repeat offender conversation.

Jackie Rotman:
Yeah, totally.

Abby Mercado:
Just the awareness of those statistics. I feel like that can be a little bit of good versus women who encounter these situations, and they're just absolutely heartbreaking and they don't understand. They don't have the pay-it-forward attitude that you had, but you went out and sought those statistics. I think that's so. Thanks for sharing that. Well, fast forward to the GSB. So tell us more about CIJ.

Jackie Rotman:
Yeah.

Abby Mercado:
So you started these interviews.

Jackie Rotman:
Yeah. I love that you care so much to ask so much about like the person. It's like we haven't even gotten.

Abby Mercado:
Of course. The business is nothing without the person.

Jackie Rotman:
Oh, it's nice to like for people to get to know you and what motivates you and hopefully see other parts of their stories in it. Okay, so fast forward about the GSB. I'm leading all these women every winter break. In spring break, I just fly to New York and interview entrepreneurs and sex tech and developed the idea of creating a Center for Intimacy Justice as an advocacy organization, with our first issue area being, well, our first goal for the first few years was specifically change Facebook's at the time it was called Facebook, now it's Meta, but to change Meta's global advertising policies in which it was this policy called the adult product services and policy that people are most commonly citing as the policy that made it so they couldn't advertise. So interviewed a couple dozen women or more. And then a pelvic health company called Origin initiated a survey that we did together. And to get collectively, we had 60 women and non-binary entrepreneurs in this space surveyed or interviewed, and 100% of them said that Facebook rejected their ads at some point, Facebook or Instagram, and 50% of them, yeah.

Abby Mercado:
I can be number 61.

Jackie Rotman:
Yeah, yeah.

Abby Mercado:
We liked I mean, obviously, it's like not even a question.

Jackie Rotman:
Oh my gosh.

Abby Mercado:
Of course, we had ads rejected.

Jackie Rotman:
Totally. And that was a couple of years ago. So now we have hundreds well into the two-three hundreds of companies and nonprofits and content, you know, even more, if you count content creators. So they all say they'd experienced this. The public didn't know this, and 50% of the ones we surveyed also said that their entire accounts were suspended at some point. And so we and all of us working in this space know this, but the public didn't know it. There had been some media articles, but it would be about 3 or 4 examples. And so after business school and before that, I published an op-ed in the New York Times, which is awesome because I think I was like 26 or 27 at the time, and it was the title that the editor picked was Vaginas Deserve Giant Ads, too, and it was published right when Dame, the sex toy company, was suing the New York City subways and the graphic artists made this designed cartoon of painting of, we had this whole analogy saying, we have all these cactuses to represent erectile dysfunction, as that were everywhere in the subways at that time in 2019. And we were saying, where are all the papayas? Where are all the vulva ads.

Abby Mercado:
Yeah.

Jackie Rotman:
I think the week or two after business school, I published that op-ed and it was a display piece in print, right in between Eli Broad and Thomas Friedman. So I was super excited and.

Abby Mercado:
Holy hell yeah. For any founders, for any founders, or literally anyone listening, like, what is it like to try to get an op ed published in the New York Times?

Jackie Rotman:
It's addicting. When it happens, you're just like.

Abby Mercado:
Who to contact? How to do it? Who do you contact truly? Like practically? Did you have a con person who was helping you do this? What was that like? You can't just write the New York Times and be like, hey, I have an idea. Here's the piece. Please publish it. Or was it like that?

Jackie Rotman:
Yeah, I can share each time because I've now had three things in there and hopefully more ahead. So, each time was different. But one piece of context was I will answer the question of tactically, but just as context for like how much I wanted this. About a year before that, New York Times op-ed was published. I was with my partner at the time, and I was having a flashback because it was about five days after Harvard had finished my investigation of rape, and Harvard said, I thought that they were going to say; basically they said that no penetration ever happened. They said that the entire thing just didn't happen, not that it was consensual and happened, but just oh, I just made up that this person was inside me. And so it was actually like making love to my partner at the time. And I just started screaming because I hadn't talked about the findings with anyone. And I was so angry, and I was pointing out the irony that I was obviously screaming about something that never happened to me. Like the most painful thing, of course, I'm screaming about something that just doesn't exist sarcastically. And then once I stopped screaming, I sat up and I felt like all the legal tools had failed. Everything I had researched and looked into, like all the tools were broken for survivors and for people trying to take on challenging systems. And so I remember sitting up in bed and saying, I sat up really straight, and I said, I need to learn how to use the media, because at least just a few months into me too. But the legal tools were not helping us. And so I was on a mission to figure out how to use the media to effect change. And I never published an op-ed before. I'd never done any PR campaigns, and I was just like, we have to win. So then my only New Year's resolution for 2019 was publish op-eds, because I think that op-eds are really powerful in terms of building credibility. It's in your voice, it's your story. And so.

Abby Mercado:
Like you also said, I mean, told me a little bit about yourself over email prior to this interview, but you are a very passionate writer. You love to write. So that was a muscle that you have that you can use to your advantage in getting across things that you want to change about the law.

Jackie Rotman:
Yeah, you're so sweet. I'm trying to, like I say so much about my relationship to writing. I'm trying to hone into it more. But yeah, because I was censored a lot when I was younger, I wasn't allowed to actually do creative writing for 11 years, which was a very long story, but it was considered too stimulating. Like the ways that women are censored are so many ways. So I literally just didn't do creative writing because I thought it would make me like too mystical, which was not allowed in my family. Which is true. I do get very connected to source when I'm doing creative writing, such so, but it's not too much. It's like a superpower, anyway. So okay, I really wanted to publish an op-ed. So then for how it happened, there's a 72-year-old or I don't know how old he is now. He's in his 70s. I thought he was in his 60s. He might have been 68 at the time, but white man, who had been an editor at the New York Times for about a quarter century, who was a writing professor at Stanford because he very publicly talks about how he, like he calls himself an American idiot because he left the New York Times to, like, follow a woman to California for love.

Jackie Rotman:
And now he's teaching at Stanford. Anyway, he is, along with my dad and maybe some others, has become like one of the biggest allies for women's orgasms and for women's sexual pleasure. So, he is my professor. And I told him I had 12 ideas for op-eds, and I called him like three months before the class about op-ed writing started. And he was just like, wait, he wants me to be an investigative journalist because he was like, all of these are really amazing. And then so he read my op-ed drafts about this op-ed, and actually, Nick Kristof came to class, and this professor, Glenn Kremen was like, thank you for making me look really good in front of Nick Kristof because and I was like, well, as a writer, I'm used to fundraising where you ask people for favors, but when you're creating the ideas and the content, you're giving other people favors. So it's like, I'm doing you a favor.

Abby Mercado:
I was like.

Jackie Rotman:
You're like an asset.

Abby Mercado:
Yeah, this is kind of like raising capital here.

Jackie Rotman:
Yeah.

Abby Mercado:
Putting together drafts. You're asking mentors for review. You're asking for introductions. And that's the core KPI for an entire year.

Jackie Rotman:
Yeah.

Abby Mercado:
You hone into it as though a founder would hone into fundraising. So that makes a ton of sense. But yeah, totally.

Jackie Rotman:
So he helped me, and he said.

Abby Mercado:
Yeah, you make the.

Jackie Rotman:
Yeah.

Abby Mercado:
report good.

Jackie Rotman:
Totally. Yeah. So he like after like many conversations where we're like, is orgasm a verb or a noun? And people are overhearing us and they're like, what are you doing at Stanford Business School? But I'm like, Glenn, it's a verb. So we can like, save a word there. It's both anyway. So it's like, great guy became like, I felt like we were like besties because he reminded me of my dad. So, I was very comfortable talking about sex with him publicly. So anyway, he basically sent it to the head of opinion and said, like, this is I don't know if I'm allowed to, but he said, like, this is the best investigative update I've ever sent you. He sent it to the gender reporter and they. Yeah. And then once that was published, I was like, I want to do this.

Abby Mercado:
Yeah.

Jackie Rotman:
More. It was a really good feeling. So that was 2019. And then in 2022, we published an investigation. We wanted to specifically focus on Meta, and this time we did hire a consultant. We work with Rachel Johnston, who was one of the people who also broke the Lords of Carlos story she had worked on well, back when CES didn't allow the sex toy company. She had done a lot of that PR, so she had a very activist lens. So we actually sent it to 75 press outlets.

Jackie Rotman:
And the one I cared about the most was The New York Times and kind of obsessed with them for affecting change. And out of the 75, Valeriya Safronova is the one who covered it the most closely. And I think I didn't know at the time how to explain that I wanted an exclusive, but I think I only would have published it if probably the New York Times had done it. Otherwise I would have sued Facebook or something until we got the New York Times to cover it. So I was really I mean, I'm glad we didn't see them, but I was really glad that Valeria picked it up. And that was like the first person we pitched there. One thing I will say is I have submitted something blind to the New York Times before for a letter to the editor, and they do take those. So I really encourage people who are trying to publish something like you can also just submit. I've also done Boston Globe, where I didn't have a connection, I just did the open submission process and had an essay published. So it's really powerful to get your voice published. And so you can also the letter to editor was just totally cold through the regular process. And people can do that too.

Abby Mercado:
So you launched this investigation and so you gathered all these interviews. You said, wow, I'm on to something. And then you launched this investigation. What did that look like? Tell us a little bit more about the nuts and bolts and how you kind of start to finish, how you collected data, and then the point. But one of the largest organizations in the world.

Jackie Rotman:
You said, how you went.

Abby Mercado:
How you proved a point. Yeah.

Jackie Rotman:
It was this is why I feel so. The power of investigations and sharing truth is amazing, because what we did is we said, this is the problem, this is the data behind it. We didn't even at the time, it was just revealing the problem. And I was amazed at how much could happen just from putting data in the public and shining a light on it. So we shared the results of these 60 businesses. It was valuable for the people writing about it to have the data where we collected it for 60 instead of 3 or 4 so that we could point to a clear pattern. And basically, we shared it with a few reporters. We found out the times was covering it and a few others. And then literally I was up until like two or 3 or 4 in the morning with a friend, Adam Alcock, who was volunteering to help me update the website, because at the time, I was the only staff person with Center for Intimacy Justice, and we'd raised some money from the case for her and some other anonymous backers. And also Polly Rodriguez from unbound at that time had put money as a donation in and RNW media. So we had a little bit of funding, but we were tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny, like just me basically, and like friends helping me at night. And one other consultant. So we published it and then responded to the there was like amazing support and outrage and follow up about the Meta investigation. But what was really exciting and I think speaks to the power of why I love sharing investigations is a few things happened very soon after we published The New York Times story. One is that a US senator named Senator Patty Murray, who headed the health, education, Labor and Pensions Committee, wrote a public letter to Meta demanding answers from Meta. So Meta did answer to Congress, and the letter was, what are you going to do about Center for Intimacy Justice's report? This is the evidence. What is your response?

Abby Mercado:
And you're like, I'm just Jackie over here in my office with my friends, helping me at night. That is amazing. Yeah.

Jackie Rotman:
Go, Patty. Go, Senator Murray. And then Hillary Clinton, we think she we think this was really her and that was organic. So Hillary Clinton tweeted at Patty Murray a couple of weeks later saying, hey, Patty, just curious, has Meta responded yet? And they had a whole back and forth and Hillary Clinton's like, oh, they must be really busy with their stock price. But thank you so much.

Abby Mercado:
She was like, just.

Jackie Rotman:
Yeah. So Hillary was like, thank you, Patty, I know you'll stay on them. And that was organic. And I somehow saw the tweets two days after it happened. I hadn't even known about the senator's letter. And so we were like, oh my gosh, she's.

Abby Mercado:
Friends and all this like, come on, guys. Yeah.

Jackie Rotman:
And like, literally, friends were just mentoring me about, like, you need to do. I was like, what do I do now? Like, what do I do with the senators? But I think it's one thing that people don't realize. Nobody on the CIJ team had any experience with D.C. law. I mean, I did like high school youth group trips where you talk to your Congress people, but we never worked with D.C. We'd never I mean, we did that op-ed, but we'd never hired a publicist. We'd never had any experience. And I think when you're just really passionate, and you really want to change something, and you want to help these women, you can access these superpowers, and you can ask people for advice and find allies when and is now 70. And, like, you can do things without having to go and work for, like the World Bank or Meta for 10 or 20 years, we can just do a lot.

Abby Mercado:
What an amazing story. So what is Meta doing now? Like, has meta done anything about this?

Jackie Rotman:
Yeah. So next answer also I'll pick up like chronologically from. So Hillary Clinton did that. There were some other things that happened that summer with more action on this. And we don't get to talk about all of them. But basically what I'll say is that, like, government agencies did take this seriously, and there was a lot of questioning for Meta. And so it's a mixed answer in terms of what Meta has done on this, because as I'm sure you know, Abby and like people watching this. So we saw in fall 2022 that Meta had made changes to their adult product services policy. They'd also updated also their nudity policy to say that if the ads had medical or educational purposes when it came to breast health, they were supposed to be allowed. And so at that point when we noticed, okay, there's 180 new words to what used to be 120-word policy. So 60% of it is just like entirely new wording. We were really excited because there had been no movement on this for like the five years that I'd been aware of it and for the over a decade that anything had happened. And so we did celebrate. Wow. There was some movement here. We were able to build enough collective power together that there's 180 new words. And even though regardless of what Meta says, what we noticed is that basically, Meta added examples of things that were allowed, and they said that ads about relieving pain during sex were supposed to be allowed, which was exactly one of the examples of ads that we had shown that we said wasn't allowed in our report, in our investigation, they said that symptoms to relieve menopause was supposed to be allowed, sex education was supposed to be allowed.

Jackie Rotman:
So they added examples that were the exact same examples that we had profiled when we picked a few categories, in addition to obviously, many more types of health were included beyond those 3 or 4. So they added all these examples that were clearly in our report. So we do believe that we impacted the policy regardless of whether they will say so. What was interesting is that, as it had before this particular policy, the adult products and services policy still said that pleasure was not allowed. But in the very same addition to the policy, they said that erectile dysfunction drugs ads are allowed and premature ejaculation ads are allowed. So it's like saying we allow pleasure, we don't allow pleasure ads. But yeah, and then the examples that they called out for the pleasure ads that weren't allowed was they specifically said that sex toy ads are not allowed. And they always say that in their comments about what is and isn't allowed. And I don't like the word sex toy because it infantilizes things to call it a toy when like this is a powerful device that can, like, lubricate you, like make penetration like more possible when it might be difficult otherwise. For me, a survivor like I also think vibrators can be really helpful if you're recovering from trauma and you're trying to experience intimacy. And it's if there's all that stimulation, really, you're just more. For me, it makes intimacy a lot easier if I'm engaging in other things. So. Or like penetrative sex. So and it's amazing. It's all these benefits of vibrators around pain and other benefits beyond pleasure in terms of lubrication, and other aspects of sexual function. So vibrators are like a powerful device. I think we should.

Abby Mercado:
And like no doubt vibrators and like look at the business of vibrators. Right?

Jackie Rotman:
Oh my God.

Abby Mercado:
It's like all you ever do, right? Yeah. All you have to do is look at the business case. Right.

Jackie Rotman:
It's such a bigger market than Ed. So anyway, we think that they should still change that. We think it's totally sexist to not allow vibrators, that they need a better medical understanding of the multitude of benefits, including in menopause and pain, which Facebook says are allowed. So those are the policy changes. And then so, you know, mixed and nuanced. But we did celebrate what was different and what was better. But I will say that in 2023, we surveyed many, many founders. And with the exception of one that said her business is like saved because of CIJ's work, and some that might say that the appeals process could be better for them. The vast majority of businesses and vaginal health and breast health are saying that absolutely nothing has changed. Even Joy Lux, which had two huge photos in the New York Times article with our investigation in 2022 and was interviewed in that article, like, even with all that press, 11 months after the investigation was published their entire ad account was suspended for two months starting Black Friday week. So, and it's like very little change.

Abby Mercado:
To think about the marketing mix. So a lot of these I don't know maybe characterize a little bit like I can imagine who these companies are and what they do. But if I had to take a gander, they are probably a lot of direct-to-consumer businesses. That truly Meta ads are a huge piece of their marketing mix, and they're a lot of them are venture backed. They have really aggressive growth KPIs. They absolutely have to run ads that they can sell products that people want to buy, so they can prove out numbers to their VCs, that they can get more money to continue to build their businesses. Like it's a really bad problem. It's a really big problem, obviously.

Jackie Rotman:
Totally. Yeah. There's no replacement to digital advertising. You're never going to grow as much from subway ads or billboard ads, and commercial TV and radio podcasts is so expensive compared to Facebook ads. So the founder of Femtech Insider retweeted a tweet that I think put things well where they said, let me explain to you, either Silicon Valley or VC like VCs give startups money, startups give Facebook and Google Money or Meta and Google Money. And then there's growth. And then that makes VCs money. So when you can't like that's the business for many of these startups. So when you can access digital advertising, it is, I won't call it, a death sentence because people are finding ways to survive and grow, but it's incredibly crippling. We've seen that the couple of erectile dysfunction startups that were founded back in 2017, when a lot of these other businesses were seeking to advertise erectile dysfunction, became allowed to advertise pretty early into those business's trajectories because investors knew that that was essential and were able to get Facebook to make certain changes that extend it to other ED companies, you know, which is obviously so understood as like, this is medical because. And anyway, and there's a reason.

Abby Mercado:
Huge bro accent.

Jackie Rotman:
Anyway. And the reason, I mean, I think ed ads should be allowed. I think part of why it was allowed is because they found correlations between heart disease and erectile function. So that was a great creative piece. I'm sure if we studied women's pleasure and how it's linked to other types of health, we would find everything. Everything.

Abby Mercado:
Yeah. Mental health, most importantly, like what's that connection. Right.

Jackie Rotman:
But anyway, the ED companies are valued at $5 billion, but just a few years later, but a lot of women's health businesses couldn't reach that same growth.

Abby Mercado:
All right. Well, thank goodness for you and CIJ. So as you, it's crazy that we're almost at time. But as we think about kind of the future of CIJ, like, what are you looking to rescript or reframe or rewrite the narrative on? How are you thinking about kind of the future of CIJ?

Jackie Rotman:
I love that you asked about Rescripting and rewriting the narrative because that's actually a very linked with exactly how we're thinking about this work. We're at the same time that we're continuing our work on tech platforms and changing big tech platforms. We know that these issues of suppressing information about women's sexuality, women's sexual health, and not just women, but people of underrepresented genders as well, and people of different backgrounds, that this suppression of our sexuality or sexual health and well-being is not only a technological problem, but is a cultural problem, and that these issues were in existence and were problematic and enforced long before Mark Zuckerberg was born. So it's critical that we change the tech platforms and these big tech companies. It's essential, and we're continuing to advocate on it and have policy strategies, legal strategies, media strategies. We're leading investigations into TikTok, Amazon, Google and Meta. But as we create our strategic plan and talk with our partners about 2024 through 2026, we're also really passionate about film storytelling, narrative change, like related to the kinds of spaces that you're doing to around narratives because technological and culture change have to go hand in hand. So people are going to be seeing a lot more film work from us, a lot more writing also about topics on consent, other aspects of them writing my first book that has all topics around women's sexuality, how it's treated in our society with tech suppression being a part of it, but a much broader story of basically like women are fighting these fights to change online censorship. And at the same time, so many women I know are dealing with rape that happens through work or early menopause that the doctors don't talk about, or these other challenges. And we're all coming together to create changes, but we're broadening the conversation beyond just Facebook, TikTok, and Google to also talk about what needs to change in our society, what needs to change in our communities, what needs to change in our stories around how we treat women's sexual health every day because the clitoris is was.

Abby Mercado:
Bringing it back to the clitoris.

Jackie Rotman:
Yeah, back to the clitoris. I think part of what my dad and what my grandfather, who gave my dad that talk my dad gave me, were leading into is that they were bringing up this knowledge in their families. And I think it was the 1960s when my dad got this lecture. I didn't tell you my dad had gotten this lecture about the clitoris from his dad. That's how it all started. Yeah. Jews in the Midwest, but in like the '60s. But from in 1960, but from the year 2080 to 1600 A.D., the clitoris was just removed from anatomical textbooks. Because one Greek physician, it didn't really fit into like the point he was trying to make. And that's 1400 years. So. And ChatGPT, as of a few weeks ago, if you asked about the clitoris or the vulva, they would say it's a content violation. But the very same questions with the word penis would answer it. I think they've since made some changes to that. But there's these broader forces that these large models are picking up, too, that make people think that our bodies are obscene and our pleasure and well-being is obscene. So we are taking on these broader societal issues, getting more information, more investigations, more ideas into people's minds and hearts, and family dinner conversations about women's sexuality in a positive, empowering way that's good for young women and for all people. So that's what we're up to next.

Abby Mercado:
My heart is bursting. I'm just so happy that it's you doing this work and that somebody is doing this work. So thank you on behalf of millions of women in America and all over the world who are also affected by these big technology platforms, like all of us are. So if anyone's listening to this and they're like, oh my gosh, I desperately want to help Jackie, where can they find you? How can they reach out?

Jackie Rotman:
And I want to say, it's not just me. We have a team of amazing women from all over the world on the CIJ team and the research team and all these other friends that thank you for. I'm obviously I'm the one communicating on this podcast. So join our newsletter at IntimacyJustice.Org because that's where we send campaigns, updates, hopefully like some possible short films coming out and events in different parts of the country that we want to launch next year in person, to build a movement collectively, in person, together as a movement. So join the newsletter at IntimacyJustice.Org follow us at Intimacy Justice on Twitter, Instagram. We're just in our full name for LinkedIn and Facebook, so join us online. Connect with us. There's also petition at IntimacyJustice.Org/ I think it's just /petition. I don't think it's FTC petition. But we are asking the US Federal Trade Commission to take action regarding Meta. And we filed a legal complaint asking the FTC to do that so people can sign the petition. And that will also lead them into the next activities. And we need to grow this movement. I think we all know in the women's health space about this, or we've known about this problem of sex censorship, we're expanding that. So now we have some allies in Congress, in DC, and in media, but most people still don't know about this. And so just sharing this podcast, part of this episode that talks about this, sharing that intimacyjustice.org/report link for our report. And sharing information is a really powerful way for people to see what they're not seeing because this is censored in ways that people don't realize is a problem yet. So share the word. Yes. And thank you so much, Abby, for, you know, creating this platform to educate more people about women's health.

Abby Mercado:
Of course. Yeah. Women's health. Yeah. Yes. Thank you so much, Jackie. And I am sure we will talk soon.

Abby Mercado:
If this podcast means something to you, be sure to hit follow or subscribe. This helps you because you'll never miss an episode. And it helps us because you'll never miss an episode. It's wild enough to be a woman without taking on the Wild West of women's health information. The good news is that Rescripted did the legwork on your body so you don't have to. And we're here. When you're ready to be an expert in you, head to rescripted.com and follow us @HelloRescripted on Instagram and TikTok.

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