Did you know that over 67% of heterosexual women STILL regularly fake orgasms compared to only 28% of men?
The orgasm gap is a little-discussed aspect of women’s sexual health and wellness, and it’s a systemic representation of how little women are taught to prioritize themselves.
Women fake their emotions, their smiles, and even their appetites, all in the name of trying to please others.
Vella Bioscience, Inc is a femtech company driven to put science in service of every woman’s sexual empowerment. At the company’s core, women come first. Vella teamed up with Acadia to raise awareness for the orgasm gap and encourage women to #StopFakingIt once and for all through a month-long social media campaign.
Social media loves to censor sex. But when women’s sexual health and wellness is constantly swept under the rug or outright denied, we struck out to challenge that ban and have loud, authentic conversations about sex and pleasure.
In order to get our important message across and reach as many women as possible, this campaign had to rely almost wholly on organic-owned media and strong user-generated stories to spread awareness. With National Orgasm Day approaching at the end of July, it was important to deepen the conversation about how to prioritize women’s pleasure. This month and every month!
INSTAGRAM: We let users lead the conversation on Instagram. Weekly anonymous question stickers in Instagram Stories encouraged women to get real about faking it. We received hundreds of personal and heartbreaking responses to questions like “have you ever faked it?” or “why do you fake your orgasms?” We turned the anonymous responses into a video series that showed women that they weren’t alone. As the conversation grew, we worked with sexual wellness influencers and Vella’s sex and intimacy expert Karinna Karsten to provide tips for how to break the cycle and raise the topic with their partner.
TIKTOK: On TikTok, where social media censorship around sex is ruthless, we focused on highlighting the many things women fake outside the bedroom too, all to protect the feelings of others at the expense of their own mental health. We finally let out our true feelings by smashing phones, exploding coke bottles, and crying in the shower to demonstrate that vulnerability is more than okay and release is necessary. Our custom audio track sang it loud and clear: no more #oopsIfakeditagain moments.
In the end, we saw a huge impact on our social media communities.
2.2 million social media impressions across platforms
418% growth in social media followers compared to the previous month
Over 110k engagements
We received and engaged with nearly 700 messages containing personal stories from women who admitted that they’d felt alone or unable to talk about this topic. Many thanked us for helping them realize that they can change their own narrative and prioritize their pleasure.
We were able to drive record-high users (50k+) from social media to deeper resources on our website like our expert blog, and our flagship product that promotes more frequent and more intense orgasms for women.
Our favorite moment of impact came in the form of a testimonial we received on the site:
“Life changing. I gave up having pleasure in sex 40 years ago. Just faked it, be done. I’m 69 and it just keeps getting better. Thank you. I’m still learning!”
