If months of deleted photos and banned accounts are anything to go by, it’s clear to see that Instagram has something it wants to get off our chests – although, truth be told, the ones on my own wouldn’t be that much of an issue.
In recent weeks, many female celebrities on the world’s most popular photo-sharing app have laid bare their thoughts on Instagram’s attitude towards the female form, rallying behind such causes célèbres as period stains, pubic hair, and size shaming. But it's the nipple that's poked out the most, with images of teats sending moderators teetering over the edge to censor, remove, and ban.
Pop stars Madonna, Rhianna and (recovering Disney child-star) Miley Cyrus, comedian Chelsea Handler, and model Chrissy Teigen have all fallen foul of the rules governing what constitutes Instagram indecency. Having revealed their seemingly innately-obscene areolas as part of the #FreeTheNipple movement, they've entered into a pop-culture battle of the most inexplicably absurd – the right to add images of tastefully-filtered, unsexualised breasts to the Internet.
As it currently stands, posting any pictures showing the female nipple – barring some exceptions for women breastfeeding or displaying their mastectomy scars – will see the bare breasts hastily removed, the hasty removal of the poster, or both. While Instagram did recently make an effort to clarify its policies regarding what is and isn’t kosher when it comes to getting your kit off, it still bans the nipple with a kind of vigour bordering on puritan.
American model Chrissy Teigen goes to great lengths to push the boundaries on Instagram's policies
Last June, Instagram's co-founder Kevin Systrom explained to a BBC reporter the company's stance on nudity; the app's terms and conditions seek to create "a safe place [where] content that gets posted is something that's appropriate for both teens and adults." Hardly surprisingly, given that millennials with smartphones make up the bulk of the app's users.
Make no mistake, however, the teenage boys and girls whose moral rectitude Instagram and its parent company Facebook would wish to protect and keep clean are more than capable of finding whatever they want to see on the Internet. Pictures that come in every flavour of indecency.
And images that might make parents' – and advertisers' – skin crawl abound on the app; the hashtag #HallOfMeat proudly display blood-spattered injuries of skateboarders going toe-to-toe with gravity, dragging their asses on asphalt, and showcasing the results while in hospital waiting rooms. Several variations of #Sexy will lead to images that invite the viewer to fill in all the blanks, while #SexyToes, which stuck out like a sore thumb, led this writer to a place he'd rather not have gone to and the most NSFW he'd ever seen in his W-place.
If sex is what Instagram finds so offensive, there are arguably millions of accounts that are pushing a more brazen sexiness than a line drawing of American Vogue's Grace Coddington in a deck chair. And yet the fashion editor's self-portrait was pulled from the app, where Instagram feels even bare Biro-line breasts need to be nipped in the bud.
Grace Coddington's sketch of herself was removed by Instagram moderators
But when the gender roles are flipped, it comes as no surprise to see that Instagram has zero issue with images of bare-chested men in varying degrees of perkiness. Actors and male models, fitness bloggers and average Joes are all free to draw in followers and favourites with pecs appeal, without so much as raising an eyebrow. The underlying message is that topless men are safe. Topless women are dangerous.
This, in and of itself, seems to defy logic; the male nipple is just as much a source of sexual pleasure as the female one – in fact, sexual pleasure might well be its sole value to a man’s anatomy. More than half of men questioned in the Journal of Sexual Medicine said that playing with their own nipples heightened their sexual arousal, making the male chest and its inherent erogeneity arguably just as taboo as women’s.
@freethenipplelives #freethenipple
A photo posted by Cara Delevingne (@caradelevingne) on Jul 10, 2014 at 9:22am PDT
British supermodel and actress Cara Delevingne questions Instagram's double standards
Sex and sexuality are, of course, a thorny issue to deal with for a lot of the world. But the fine line between provocative and perverted gets even more blurry when apps decide that one gender is, by the flick of a chromosomal coin, more boundary-pushing than the other one.
While it’s easy to reduce #FreeTheNipple to nothing more than a celebrity fad, fads can at least raise questions about social-media censorship and how the Internet treats the female body. Women should be allowed to take images of their bodies on their own terms, and not have to deal with such glaring double standards.
After all, it’s just a bit of skin at the end of the day.
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