Zestra is the over-the-counter "female sexual pleasure aid" that you may or may not have ever heard of. If this product is news to you, you have the television networks to thank for that: its advertisements have basically been banned from TV. According to the Faster Times,
the ad uses direct sexual language like “arousal” and “sex life,” but besides that, it’s remarkably tame. The clearest comparison to make is to the ads for Viagra and Cialis…. But as Tracy Clark-Flory points out, those pills are for a recognized medical condition, and there is (technically) no medically equivalent condition for females. Technically, then, it’s not a double standard.
Actually, the double standard is that men who have boner problems suffering from a "dysfunction," while women who can't get turned on are just "frigid." Of course, we can debate that until eternity, but let's move on:
Looking at the evidence, one could infer that male sexual satisfaction is so important that we must see ads for it during daytime football games and family prime time TV shows, but female sexual satisfaction is so dirty it can only come out during the phone-sex and psychic-hotline time slot. Clark-Flory argues that it’s less about sexism but more about a general discomfort talking about sex when it’s not medicalized. [The Faster Times]
Of course, we all know this has a lot to do with the ol' male-dominated corporate media, which, four decades after the sexual revolution, still isn't comfortable with empowered, sexual women.
