There’s a stigma around lube. These brands want to change that.

As a culture, we’ve become more open to talking about sex and sexual health, and for the most part, this has been to our benefit. Teen pregnancy is down. Condom use is up. And despite moralists clutching their pearls over free online porn, the vastness of the digital landscape means there’s a fair amount of sex-positive NSFW content out there: If you’re looking for porn that doesn’t feature women getting choked, slapped, or hit in the face with a penis, it’s never been easier to do so.

Still, there’s one sexual health product that remains surprisingly taboo, even though it theoretically would make our sex lives a lot better: lube.

When you talk to people about their aversion to lube, the same critiques pop up over and over again: It tastes weird. It smells weird. It “doesn’t seem necessary and it makes everything messy,” as one man told me on Twitter.

Some brands, such as the sexual health startup Sustain and the skin care brand Necessaire, are trying to sell lube to a new generation, using millennial-friendly aesthetics and Insta-savvy digital marketing. But even these companies and their zeitgeist-y branding still have to overcome a common misconception: that lube indicates a less than healthy sex life.

For heterosexual people in particular, there seems to be a great deal of resistance (pun absolutely intended) to using lube. It’s rare to see a tube of KY or Astroglide make an appearance during a one-night stand (as sex writer Maria Del Russo put it, “I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve spotted a bottle of lube in a guy’s nightstand drawer”); it’s even rarer to see lube use depicted in popular culture, even in the grittiest HBO prestige series sex scenes.

Even when lube does make an appearance in popular culture, it’s usually in a mocking context: In the movie Superbad, Jonah Hill’s character makes fun of the virginal Michael Cera for bringing a bottle of lube to a party, while both Rihanna and Nicki Minaj have boasted of not needing to use lube due to being in a perpetual state of vaginal humidity.

The result is that young people use lube inconsistently, if at all. A 2009 sexual well-being global survey found that only 29 percent of more than 26,000 respondents used lube during sex. A 2014 Journal of Sexual Medicine study found that while 65 percent of women reported using lube at some point in their lives, only about 20 percent had used it during a sexual encounter within the past 30 days. (The study was partially funded by Church & Dwight Co., which sells Trojan condoms and lube.)

Katy Zvolerin, director of public relations for Adam & Eve, says that while lube sales have increased slightly over the years due to increased public awareness and more brands entering the market, lube sales still constitute “a very small percentage of our overall sales,” or about 3 percent.

“There’s certainly still some stigma surrounding the use of lubricants,” says Zvolerin. “Some women are too embarrassed to request it. Some men (and I’ve heard this quite often) feel that if their partner isn’t producing enough natural lubricant, there’s something wrong with her or the relationship.” Or with themselves: For Brian M., 33, needing to use lube is a sign that “I haven’t done the foreplay right/enough and she’s not physically ready to go, and I guess we need help,’” he said. “Lube seems like you’re admitting defeat.” (Instead, they use coconut oil.)

This cultural aversion to lube is a problem for many reasons, chief among them that a lot of couples could actually benefit greatly from it. While we tend to think of vaginal dryness as something only the sexually disinterested and premenopausal experience, “not all vaginas self-lubricate the same amount, and vaginal dryness is extremely common and for an incredibly wide variety of reasons,” such as where you are in your menstrual cycle or what medication you’re taking, says Alicia Sinclair, a sex educator and CEO of the sex toy companies Le Wand and B-Vibe. (Some hormonal contraceptives, for instance, have been linked to vaginal dryness, ironically indicating that perhaps an effective way to prevent teens from having sex is to put them on birth control.)

Insufficient lubrication makes sex not just uncomfortable but actively painful. And painful sex is common: According to data from the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, an estimated 70 percent of people with vaginas report having experienced it at one point or another. “Lube isn’t the solution for all sex pain, but it can help many situations,” says Christina Cerqueira, director of digital education for the sex education startup O-School.

Yet for the most part, women stay silent about pain or discomfort during sex, either out of embarrassment or fear of displeasing their partners. In a culture where female pleasure is often considered little more than an afterthought, this isn’t all that surprising — nor is it shocking that there would be stigma around a product that is largely intended to make sex more pleasurable and comfortable for women.

That said, there are a few demographics that are more inclined to be lube-friendly. Among men who have sex with men, there’s a lot less stigma surrounding lube use, in large part because lube is more integral to anal sex than to penis-in-vagina intercourse (unlike the vagina, the anus does not self-lubricate). While not every man who has sex with men has anal sex, lube use is much more common in the gay community, with one study indicating that more than 75 percent of gay men surveyed used lube during the majority of sexual encounters. “It makes bottoming a whole hell of a lot easier,” says Chase, 32, a gay man who says he uses lube approximately 75 percent of the time.

Millennials who grew up in the era of sex-positive Tumblr blogs and female celebrities posting empowering nude selfies on Instagram may also be more likely to view lube as an essential part of a healthy sex life, rather than as a medicinal aid. “When you look at the statistics ... around where a category like lubricant is growing, it’s among millennials,” says Kate Fraser, the director of communications for Sustain, which makes organic, water-based lube. (One 2015 survey suggests that 43 percent of millennials use lube, but it’s worth noting that the survey was sponsored by the condom brand Skyn.)

To that end, old-school lube manufacturers are turning their attention to younger consumers. Astroglide, for instance, hosts biweekly Twitter sex education chats and recently launched a campaign, “Life’s Too Short to Fake It,” aimed at encouraging young women to take control of their sexual empowerment. By focusing on the pleasure and sexual satisfaction of women, a rep for Astroglide told Vox, the company is able to connect to a younger demographic.

In recent years, there’s been a new crop of slicker (sorry) brands trying to make lube great again. Last month, the venture capital-backed skin care and wellness startup Necessaire debuted five products, including Sex Gel, a personal lubricant. Encased in a slim white pump-top bottle, with a sleek logo by the guy who designed Jay-Z’s album covers, Sex Gel looks less like a lube and a lot more like the millennial-friendly, minimalist chic skin care from a brand like the Ordinary. The startup Maude has also debuted a $25 personal lubricant, also in a pump-top bottle, with an elegant, modernist design that would seem at home on the cocktail napkins at a Standard hotel bar.

The goal of startups like Necessaire and Maude seems to be to destigmatize lube by making it seem like any other wellness product, rather than an illicit novelty item to be used in emergency situations. “We thought body [care] did not have to be about just a basic bar of soap,” co-founder Randi Christianson told Glossy. “If you think about it more broadly, what does it start to include? Why does body wash have to be in aisle 4 and lube was at the very bottom of aisle 12?”

Other companies, such as the cannabis brand Foria, are more interested in branding lube as a way to imbue novelty into your sex life, the same way middle-aged couples might buy a pair of fuzzy handcuffs to spice things up. Foria’s Pleasure THC Arousal Lube claims to “enhance tactile sensations while decreasing tension, discomfort and dryness” — or, as one Cosmo headline put it, to “get your vagina high.”

Zvolerin is optimistic that such specialty lubes will help revitalize the market. “I do believe that we will see lube becoming more popular and considered a part of the sex act in the near future,” she says, citing THC- and CBD-infused personal lubricants as an example. The fact that the global sexual wellness market as a whole is poised to experience tremendous growth over the next few years — one estimate suggests that it will increase by 6.7 percent over the next four years — will also likely usher in more players to the personal lubricant space.

But getting consumers to change their habits is notoriously difficult, and getting people to change the way they have sex is even tougher. Even though our culture has come a long way in terms of sex positivity, the bar hasn’t historically been too high: In a country where sexual assault survivors are regularly accused of dressing too provocatively or drinking too much, and where even our vice president doesn’t seem to understand how condoms work, convincing people that lube is crucial to a healthy sex life may be a tough sell. But with the help of venture capital funding and some millennial-friendly branding, we may have a shot at making lubricant great again after all.

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