Opening up Instagram , I was annoyed to find an alert pop up immediately. ‘Your page can’t be recommended to non-followers,’ it read, and I rolled my eyes. Hard.
This was not the first time I’d faced repercussions on my account. It wasn’t even the second. In fact, in nine years, I’ve had this eight times.
And each time the reasons get more and more ludicrous. As a sex educator and sex worker, I understand that my content isn’t for everyone, but the work I do is important. On my feed, I cover everything from sex education and body honesty – the less toxic version of body positivity , which is when you talk about the times you love and hate your body – to mental health .
That means I often post about things like LGBTQ+ rights and pointing out the hypocrisy in what men can post but women get flagged on, especially those in the sex educational industry. But I’m also one to push the boundaries when it comes to my images. I’ve posted pictures of everything from my nipple hair, cellulite to my shaving rash .
Yet this recent ban came after I uploaded an image of me in a bikini where I wasn’t showing anything more ‘untoward’ than a belly. That post was meant to help other women celebrate their bodies, but Meta’s insistence that it ‘cannot be recommended to followers’ perpetuates the idea that only one type of physique is beautiful. As I have discovered, that is simply not true.
Growing up, the relationship I had with my body was complicated, at best. .
