The video shows Asa Akira lying on the bed, naked from the hips down, with her legs splayed open. Her hair is thrown into a messy bun. Then she reaches for some lubricant and a long, curved device.
“You might want to insert it,” she says, “but that’s not the idea.”
The device is a perineum massager, designed to help those who are pregnant gently stretch the area between the vagina and the rectum. Some studies indicate that massaging this area may help reduce the risk of severe tearing during childbirth, but it takes some dexterity to use the tool.
Ms. Akira is not a pregnant model but rather a well-known porn star. “Push down,” she says, as the camera zooms in. “You’re going to make a U-shape.”
The video was created by the mother and baby care brand Frida, which makes the massager. It’s featured on a new website, Frida Uncensored, alongside a series of other explicit videos. In one, Ms. Akira instructs viewers on how to insert a cup designed to help with conception by keeping sperm close to the cervix. In another, she demonstrates how to do a breast massage for milk flow using another Frida product.
Frida started its baby care brand in 2014 with NoseFrida, a mucus-suction tube for unplugging stuffy infant noses, which made the brand popular among parents. Its products now appear in 30,000 stores across the country. In the decade since its launch, the company has expanded into pregnancy and postpartum care, with items like frozen pads and witch hazel foam for postpartum swelling and pain.
The brand has always focused on the more unpleasant aspects of this life phase, and in recent years its advertising campaigns have reflected that, featuring vignettes that show lactating breasts and pained postpartum mothers in the bathroom that pushed the boundaries around when women’s bodies are and aren’t deemed appropriate for public viewing. Those ads were banned from social media platforms and network TV for being too explicit. For Frida to now cast a porn actress takes the provocation one step further.
“We deserve to know about our bodies,” Ms. Akira said in an interview. “As young women, we don’t even know how to insert a tampon unless our mom shows us in person.”
Chelsea Hirschhorn, Frida’s founder and chief executive, said she often sees sexualized images of the same female body parts when scrolling through Instagram, primarily on accounts geared toward men. “But theirs is allowed,” she said. “Ours is censored.” The new website, she added, helps the brand circumvent those rules to show unfiltered content about women’s health.
Frida is not the only brand to embrace explicit videos on the subject. Three years ago, the baby-care brand Tommee Tippee debuted an ad for breast pumps, featuring lactating breasts; it was also rejected from social media platforms and by TV networks. In 2022, the nonprofit organization Center for Intimacy Justice surveyed 60 women’s health brands — including those that make breastfeeding and menstrual products — and found that Meta had rejected at least one of each brand’s ads, said Jackie Rotman, the nonprofit’s founder, even if they contained no nudity. The report prompted members of Congress last year to call on the Federal Trade Commission to investigate Meta’s policies.
Meta said in an emailed statement that it adjusted its policies in late 2022 to “welcome ads for women’s health and reproductive sexual wellness products and services” though it continues to “prohibit nudity” and has “specific rules about how these products can be marketed on our platform.”
Those updated rules continue to be vague and inconsistent, Ms. Rotman said. For example, Meta’s new policy states that it allows images of breasts in lactation-related content. But in October, Instagram took down a post by Frida about lactation that showed a breast without nipples.
Confused customers were another reason the company decided to bypass social media platforms and create an educational website, Ms. Hirschhorn said. In 2023, when Frida launched the perineum massager, its customer service inbox and Amazon reviews were full of questions about how to use it. She was intent, she said, on providing answers while avoiding the typical euphemistic options, like fruit in place of breasts and vulvas.
Ms. Hirschhorn said they landed on Ms. Akira because she is a mother of two and, given her line of work, was willing to have her naked body and face filmed. But she also conceded that the team didn’t audition or approach anyone other than Ms. Akira.
The target audience has had mixed reactions. “I did Google ‘how to do a perineum massage’ when I was pregnant, and there are how-to videos, but they don’t show you any visuals,” Lexi Duksin, 36, who had a baby last year, said at a recent gathering of new parents in Manhattan. She did find a video demonstration that used a papaya, though. “You’re like, ‘What does that even mean for me?’ So I think it is helpful to see the visuals.”
On Instagram, where Frida posted an image announcing its new website, others praised the brand for providing a resource that, as one person put it in the comments, helps “us see how stuff actually works on our bodies.”
But casting Ms. Akira, who has had liposuction and breast enhancement procedures, felt jarring to Ali Beacco, 33. “When I was pregnant and shopping for maternity clothes, I didn’t like it when you could clearly tell that the models are not actually pregnant,” she said. “It would probably look better for the brand if they actually had a pregnant woman doing it.”
“I would prefer to see a body that feels more relatable,” said Angela Garbes, the author of “Essential Labor: Mothering As Social Change” and a mother of two. Studies have found that, for many women, self-esteem drops after childbirth, which can contribute to postpartum depression and anxiety. It might be fraught for a woman in that frame of mind to watch a porn actress engage in activities associated with pregnancy and childbirth, Ms. Garbes said.
The company is making additional how-to videos with more realistic postpartum bodies, Ms. Hirschhorn said. A mother on Frida’s marketing team, who has been dealing with mastitis, an inflammation of the breast, volunteered to be filmed from the neck down demonstrating how to care for cracked nipples and engorged breasts using Frida products. Other videos that will be released next month depict a two-week postpartum mother showing how to treat a C-section scar and a four-week postpartum mother demonstrating techniques for helping the vagina heal after birth.
Dr. Aviva Romm, a physician who works as a doula and midwife in Massachusetts, took issue with the videos’ implication that you need to buy products to help you with things like perineal massage and mastitis.
Most of these products are not proven to be particularly useful, she said. She has been able to effectively demonstrate to her clients how to do perineum massages and tend to uncomfortable breasts with just her hands. “There is more evidence in recent years that gentle massage, emptying your breasts and using ice packs as well as ibuprofen can be helpful,” she said. “But nobody needs to buy an ice pack for that — you can certainly just get peas from your freezer.”
Dr. Romm did appreciate the realism of the videos. “For women to see something real is, in some ways, quite powerful,” but, she said, “it’s just more clickbait than it is actually effective.”
