There is something meditative in scrolling through thousands of photos with standing, as if on cue, members, viewing rows of images with risers of all colors and sizes, photographed in different states of arousal.
A side effect of this meditative calm is that you can be caught red-handed in the scattered viewing of these very masculine virtues. In such a situation, I was at lunch time with friends a few weeks ago.
“Why are you looking at the limbs?” One of her friends screamed, glancing at the screen of my phone and pushing her scrambled eggs away from me, as if the genitals were going to eat it.
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I offered the table a very reasonable explanation: a part of Instagram has grown into a thriving photo-sharing community with “naked”, which manages to bloom and smell, despite all the company's dedicated efforts to get rid of all the parts of the body wandering in the expanses of service. Oh, for God's sake, have they really not heard of Eggplant Fridays when users share photos of their phalluses?
Apparently, not heard.
Even my solemn oath did not convince my friends that I was not so much looking at penises as I was trying to find one particular member whose owner posted a photo just for fun, and not with the idea of ​​selling me a porn site subscription (“How do you understand the difference?” - “ Just understand, and everything! "). I also realized the following: no matter how I tried to explain, they still would not understand that after a while spent watching the photos of the members, this occupation brings untold boredom.
As for me, after a month of trying to understand the deep discord in Instagram's relationship with his, hmm, stubborn strikers (naked runners, protesting against conventions - approx. Translator), I got used to them.
Breaking through from the back door, Instagram overwhelmed not only the members, but also all kinds of sexual content: 15-second obscene videos, shamelessly uncovered anuses, and a collection of naked breasts. The latter, by the way, is sometimes part of the highly politicized “Free the Nipple” battle in this photo sharing application. And, despite the fact that the "nudity" is contrary to the rules of the Instagram community, folk art craft associated with unrighteous hashtags, has been activated to search and distribute photos of relevant content. Everything from more ordinary formulations like #seduced and #exposed (“seductive” and “frank”) for the majority of “nudity” to more specific tags (for example, #femdomme and #daddydick), for content that responds to unusual sexual attractions and perversions.
And while no one opposes the witty tags, puns like #eggplantparm, which can distract you from Italian cuisine for a decent time. These photos are so ubiquitous that I am still in search of that freak who has not yet posted at least some porn-selfie.
And no matter how many active hashtags there were, much more was quietly deleted by Instagram representatives - now the search for them does not give anything away. Beat, for example, #sex (“sex”), and you will receive in response “No posts found.” The same with #adult, #stripper, #vagina, #penis, #cleavage (the latter means nothing more than a “hollow between the breasts” - note of the translator). Even the terrific Internet sharpness of eggplant was in danger (translated as “eggplant”, the word consists of two parts: “egg” + “factory”, “unit”, which gives this plant an exorbitantly depraved subtext - translator's note). You can still put all these tags on your posts, but you just need fabulous luck to find them. In order to cope with the despotic actions of Instagram, tags appeared with intentional grammatical errors: and although #boobs went into oblivion, you can write (as I tried) #boobss, and you will receive more than 600 thousand posts.

The same with #adult - twist to #adule, and immediately get 100 thousand results. The #seduce tag may give some results, but #seduced and #seductivsaturday turned out to be really fruitful, although in those weeks when I wrote this article, they no longer gave posts. And #seductiv - the tag that started my journey through the world of porn - disappeared without a trace, like #boobss, #adule and #eggplantparm. About the loss of eggplant announced newsman BuzzFeed, who discovered that the search for emoji with the plant no longer produces results in the application. Hashtags have evolved greatly in recent years: in 2012, Bianca Bosker, a reporter from the Huffington Post, wrote about early pornography on Instagram, but then banned hashtags were more intuitive - #instaporn, for example, or #fuckme.
The puritanical and often biased attitude of women towards Instagram on “nudity” is not news - just as the fact that the company is pushing rather vague moral and ethical criteria among community members. Starting in 2010, the application is open to all users over 13 years old and with an active email account. And all this time, the company is fighting to keep the community as open as possible while protecting its members from things that are branded as offensive or disgusting, for example, naked body parts.
It is enough to drive into the search #sex - in response, "No posts were found." The same #adult, #stripper, #vagina, #penis, #cleavage.
Facebook, which paid one billion dollars for acquiring Instagram in 2012, is struggling with the same problems and has a strong team of content moderators involved in removing content from porn, cruelty and other offensive things. But Facebook in this battle has an advantage over Instagram: your friends on Facebook are usually only your friends - and the chances of seeing random posts of strangers, and even more so naked “causal” parts of the body are very small. Yes, community groups provide some of the opportunity to view the content of an unfamiliar user, but Facebook search functions are still very limited for members within the community. On Instagram, anyone who has made their profile public can “jump out” in a search.
The battle for the virtue of Instagram attracted popular attention in the summer of 2014, when famous singer
Rihanna discovered that her Instagram account was temporarily disabled after she posted photos that showed naked nipples. Scout Willis (Scout Willis) and
Miley Cyrus (Miley Cyrus), who also suffered a similar misfortune, teamed up with the creators of the film called “Free the Nipple”, which became the hashtag of this movement, and, of course, continued to post photos, defying bans. American comedian
Chelsea Handler (Chelsea Handler) chose a similar tactic to protest by posting her photo in which she was captured topless next to an unlocked picture of a half-naked man, and not just a man, but Russian President Vladimir Putin!
And despite the fact that the #FreeTheNipple group has practically nothing to do with pornography, it still shed light on Instagram's guerilla warfare with “nudity” and other “offensive content”. But this is probably not a decisive battle, but an unsuccessful cat-and-mouse game, since Instagram, even after the last major changes to the rules of the service, did not exactly determine what was going beyond the limits of the acceptable. Although the company eventually rewarded users with the right to post their breastfeeding photos without a subsequent ban from Instagram (which was previously allowed only for works of art), such things as photos of stretch marks or menstrual blood will still be subject to removal.

Instagram also banned some perfectly legitimate hashtags. #iphone was blocked in 2013, although #ilovemyinstagram is still active. Company co-founder Mike Krieger (Mike Krieger) objected in 2012 that some tags “were too general and did not carry end-user value” (Instagram declined to comment on this story). But this is the logical part of the problem: along with drug taboos, child pornography, sheer cruelty and similar things, the prohibition of which is understandable, Instagram also considers itself a judge who decides what is acceptable for publication and that does not “carry values ​​for the end user” .
While the company claims that it is bound by restrictions from the side of the app stores with respect to “nudity,” and its rules are aimed at protecting young users, hashtags removed by the company speak of far greater problems with censorship. Namely: should the company impose its vision of morality on 300 million users?
Only the owners of all these members, for watching photos of which they caught me during lunch, apparently, do not care for all this hype. Their photos are not marked with hashtags like #freetheeggplant (“Free eggplant” - approx. Translator). Captions under images do not refer to politics, gender equality or moral values.
So why do nudity lovers come back to Instagram, despite the fact that the company has fallen out of its way in trying to explain to these users that this is not their place?
“Social media is a very good way to find communication and sex with people who are outside your social circle,” says Chris Donaghue, a psychologist and author of Sex Beyond: True Sexuality in Culture with Misconceptions about sex "(Sex Outside the Lines: Authentic Sexuality in a Sexually Dysfunctional Culture).
Donahoe eagerly calls for porn to become more acceptable, and often invites his patients to explore their sexuality through platforms such as Instagram, to make sure that their inclinations are not uncommon, as they previously thought. “The most beautiful thing is the use of modern technologies for combating shame and a better perception of oneself,” the psychologist states.
Only after the arrival of videotapes and then the Internet, did pornography again become part of a solitary pastime.
However, the phenomenon of shameless exchange of porn is not a by-product of the technical revolution of modern times. Historically, pornography has always been collective fun.
“Viewing pornography at certain times is a much more collective, shared experience than private business,” says Lynn Comella, professor of gender and sexology at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. A century ago, pornographic films scrolled in places where people gathered, for example, in rural clubs or communities. And in the “golden era” of pornography, in the 70s of the last century, watching porn was not something out of the ordinary.
Only after the arrival of videotapes and then the Internet, did pornography again become part of a solitary pastime. Last year, Sharif Mowlabocus, a lecturer who teaches mass communication theory at the University of Sussex, told the British newspaper The Guardian that the appearance of videotapes was the cause of pornography going underground. “Video tapes contributed to the fact that pornography left the streets and cinemas, they brought it to the cozy intimate atmosphere of the houses,” he said.

Now, thanks to mobile devices, porn has become invisible and ubiquitous at the same time. And, like most online pornography, Instagram contains obscene content of various kinds and qualities. The vast majority of content is mainly concentrated in the accounts that collect photos of naked people - usually women - seemingly for good reason, and who ask for money, transferring visitors to the account on the personal porn site of the user. All photos on accounts are not older than a few hours - most likely due to the fact that other users report on profiles with “nudity”. Then accounts are closed by Instagram representatives almost as fast as they are created.
For users who are trying to redirect fans to their personal sites, Instagram is a good tool for attracting audiences. Reddit is moderated too carefully, and Tumblr takes too long to be a good platform for spam bots and those who want to make money quickly on the “bare”. What could be better for aggregators than a platform with 300 million people who are in this application just because, in one way or another, they love to share their lives?
But among the enterprising personalities and major distributors of pornography there are a handful of users who just want to share their nude photos for a variety of personal reasons: from fun, boredom, lust, desire to find like-minded people. These users are harder to find, but they are - often they share a handful of "self portraits" with signatures inviting other users to write a message to the author of the post or contact him in
Kik , the messaging application. The latter quickly became synonymous with
sexting with strangers, since personal contact information is not shown here by default.
To be continued...