Gilian began working with Dame Products, a sexual wellness company in 2016 when they were launching as the first-ever sex toy on crowdfunding platform Indiegogo. Through research with their community, we coined the term ‘the pleasure gap’ to represent our finding that cis women are four times more likely to say that sex isn’t pleasurable. We launched the project with the mission of closing that gap by shaping paths to shame-free sexual pleasure.

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2016 - ongoing

NYC MTA 

Founder and CEO: Al Fine 
Images courtesy of Dame products 

In 2019, Dame sued the New York transit authority over discriminatory advertising practices after the MTA rejected its ads despite approving similarly suggestive ads for dating websites and male-focused sexual products. The campaign #DerailSexism!  involved a participatory element in which Dame prompted their community to affirm their belief that sexualities and genders deserve equal access to public forums by taking a screenshot of the ads and sharing the story with the hashtag #DerailSexism, and mentioning them @dameproducts and @MTA online. Huge numbers of people in their community took the task on personally and stood with the importance of pleasure in health and their disappointment with the MTA.

In 2021, after three years, Dame announced that it settled its lawsuit with the MTA and became the first female-founded pleasure product brand able to advertise its wares on the subway. Dame's “Get In Touch With Yourself” campaign begin appearing in the subway last November and ran for three months. It was a "huge milestone, not just because it marks the end of the lawsuit, but because of what it means for the perception of pleasure, specifically women’s sexual pleasure, as part of the wellness conversation." Founder and CEO Al Fine spoke about this work as being a crucial step forward in closing the pleasure gap.