Misogyny in Modernity: Female Body Censorship on Instagram
1:22 PMHello! I've
been meaning to write about female censorship online for a long time—I’ve wanted
to start a blog for even longer—so I decided to do both today.
---
Tiggered by an essay I read by Petra Collins (ultimate feminist//personal hero) [http://www.petracollins.com/?page_id=222] and the perfect assignment from my professor Dr. Hopf I decided to do some research on Instagram's policies and address how the company is deleting constitutionally protected speech/images from the app and further denting society's long withheld taboo and preconceptions on the female body.
Feel free to read my essay below and leave comments (I'm by no means an expert on any of these topics, so don't be too harsh).
Misogyny in Modernity: Female
Body Censorship on Instagram
Instagram—a mobile phone app that
has reached over 300 million users (Constine)—has been the social media locus
for artists and photographers ever since its launch in 2010, as it has fostered
different kinds of expression and has allowed for people to interact and start
conversations. In the new age of digital
art, there is an ongoing shift from private to public, where content creators
can extend their work to reach many more people than was ever possible before. By
opening the sphere, new ideas and ways of thinking have sprouted in these
social media websites, which have allowed for new topics to be discussed within
a mainstream audience. Several recent incidents involving Instagram’s “terms of
service” however, have caused controversy on the media platform and has forced
some of these talented artists to question whether Instagram is the
diversifying, free speech arena that it was esteemed to be, or if it is a misogynistic,
censorship-driven network marked by strict regulations and unreasonable banning
of images.
Using the app and its social
capabilities, feminist artists like Rupi Kaur, Petra Collins, Marilyn Minter
and countless others, have challenged conventions and rejected the media’s
portrayals of idealized femininity by exploring the female body and portraying
it in its natural state. However, Instagram has declared their art as obscene,
inappropriate and, as Collins phrased it: not meeting “society’s standard of
femininity” (Collins) and has banned their pictures on multiple occasions. Rupi
Kaur, a photographer, artist and poet, uploaded a picture of herself on
Instagram in March 2015. Pictured was Kaur dressed in sweat pants and a t-shirt
curled up in her bed, with a blood stain seeping through her pants and onto the
mattress. The picture did nothing else aside from minimally depict a normal
accident that occurs to women during the natural cycle of menstruation.
Instagram banned the image twice, which spurred controversy around the web. Kaur’s
response went viral as she pointed out the inconsistencies of Instagram’s
policies, writing “I will not apologize for not feeding the ego and pride of a
misogynist society that will have my body in underwear but not be okay with a
small leak” (Kaur).
Comments and responses to this
case have polarized into two different ways of thinking, some comments praise
Kaur’s actions, and other classify it as “gross” or “disturbing.” Collins had a
similar response to her picture uploaded to Instagram, a photo of her pubic
hair emerging from the waistband of her bikini bottoms. Instagram also banned
the image, and Collins published a compelling account on how censorship is
desensitizing society and creating an impossible standard for women who want to
showcase themselves on the public sphere. Collin’s wrote “The deletion of my account felt like a
physical act, like the public coming at me with a razor, sticking their finger
down my throat, forcing me to cover up, forcing me to succumb to societies
image of beauty. That these very real pressures we face everyday can turn into
literal censorship” (Collins). Collins comments show that virtual threats and
abuses can feel real and tangible to women who are receiving them, it can cause
them to feel forced to act a certain way and be seen as miniscule and
unimportant. Situations like these lead
us to question, who is right? Does Instagram have the right to ban certain
content and allow only what it deems acceptable? Or are these artists protected
by the first amendment? The answer to both questions is yes, the real debate is
figuring out where to compromise.
In the broadening world of the
Internet, where the restrictions are almost non-existent and the access is
unlimited, who is responsible for writing the rules? Online censorship is a new
field of study in law, and policy makers are still debating what the correct
course of action is. Ultimately, private companies that run these websites
dictate what gets communicated in the cyber world and as much as they proclaim
free speech, they are prone to censor a vast range of constitutionally
protected speech. Websites like Facebook and Instagram have the first amendment
right to censor whatever they like to tailor their content to fit their image because
they are not considered common carriers and thus cannot be prohibited, legally,
to employ a content-based terms of service (Heins). Section 230 of the
Communications Decency Act or CDA of 1996, protects all internet users who
spread information not of their own from liability for defamation, invasion of
privacy, and practically everything else except infringement on intellectual
property (Section 230). This means that Instagram does not have to censor anything;
in fact, section 230 discourages private industry censorship (Heins)
in order for free speech to prevail on the Internet. However, it does not
prohibit it, and it is in this clause that companies have created their vague
and sometimes discriminative, “terms of service.”
For example, taking a closer look
at Instagram’s “Community Guidelines” there is a distinct vagueness and
subjectivity that characterizes the short posting. The “short version” simply
states: “1. Post your own photos and videos. 2. Keep your clothes on. 3. Be
respectful. 4. Don’t spam. 5. HAVE FUN!” (Instagram)[1].
The second point is the one that has kept feminist artists and bloggers
dissatisfied, simply because it is phrased with a sense of superiority and
disgust. No one phrased it better than Magdalena Olszanowski in her essay
“Feminist Self-Imaging and Instagram” where she wrote, “Embedded with moral
superiority, the phrase is used as a dismissal of nudity with the assumption
that either you are a person who should keep clothes on or that showing your
body is intolerable and inappropriate in whatever context the phrase is
uttered” (Olszanowski). We should consider what the consequences of banning
images of the female body are, and how these private corporations are defining
for us what the difference between appropriate and inappropriate should be.
Not only is the banning of images
like Collin’s and Kaur’s a case of free-speech infringement, it is also a huge
step back on the social conversation around female sexuality. Throughout
history the female body has been stigmatized and objectified, and feminists
artists like Collins and Kaur have been trying to reinvent the way we think and
talk about women’s anatomy. The expectations of Instagram’s policy are highly
subjective. First of all what is considered as mature content? Instagram’s
rating on the App Store is 13+ (Instagram), and they require for everything
that is posted to be appropriate to people as young as thirteen. Is menstruation
something we don’t talk about to teenage girls? What about natural changes to
young women’s bodies like pubic hair, are 13 year old girls not entitled to
know about them? Instagram is inadvertently shaming natural cycles of women’s
bodies. If a young girl knows she isn’t allowed to post about menstruation,
what will make her think it is appropriate to talk about it in real life?
Collin’s previously mentioned point of online censorship becoming censorship in
our everyday lives is a clear threat here. The power that Instagram has to
suppress nude images, or images that depict the realities of the female body
can have a detrimental effect on conversations about visual art, sex education
and sexual politics—it can stimulate the centuries old taboo, or go as far as
halt the discussion of these topics online completely.
The message these images are
striving to convey and the response they try to achieve is simply the recognition of female anatomy as
something natural and positive, they want people to learn from these images and
relate to them, not cringe at the sight of them. It is an effort to
counterbalance the dominant pictures of idealized—and sometimes impossible—
versions of naked women on the media with real and genuine depictions. Rhiannon
Schneiderman, a feminist artist who considers herself an advocate of “period-themed
images” defended the case by saying “These women, like Rupi Kaur, are
recognizing that cycle [menstruation] and how important it is and how powerful
they are for experiencing it” (Schneiderman qt in Frank). Instagram’s intent
for keeping the app “clean” is at the expense of advancement in the way the
mainstream media thinks about and depicts women. Although Instagram allowing
pictures like Collin’s and Kaur’s wouldn’t fix every feminist problem in the
world, it is definitely a step in the right direction.
Thinking about censorship, and
people or companies who create and enforce it, brings us to question what the
motives are for the censorship, who exactly they are trying to protect and what
contexts they are designing these polices around. There are no explicit answers to questions
like these, however it is beneficial to turn to the ideologies that are deeply
engrained in our society and see if laws of censorship are mirroring them.
Collin’s, in her essay response to Instagram’s banning of her image, analyzes
the types of messages about women that are being shot at us from all different
types of platforms. Some of the examples she makes are pop and rap songs on the
radio that sexualize women and treat them as prices or things that can be taken
without consent; she refers to female rape victims who often are harassed and
bullied into thinking their rape was their fault or could have been prevented;
she talks about how even powerful political women are scrutinized by their
physical appearance and reduced to objects who are solely made to be looked at
(Collins); these are all occurrences that are regrettably not uncommon in our
society. Although Collin’s statements are true, they are by no means reflective
of every single individual in a society, and they do not denote that females
are the only ones who are victimized. It is necessary to make clear that it is
acknowledged that not everyone in a society degrades women, and that males are
also widely discriminated—however, for the purpose of the message that is being
conveyed, these statements only refer to women. Like Collin’s suggests,
censorship is mirroring the long withheld rhetoric that societies have been
regurgitating: females are inferior, they have designated intents and purposes,
their bodies have to be shaped in a way that is appealing because they are first
and foremost sexual beings, and so on. However, not only is Instagram mirroring
this sentiment, it is encouraging it and extending it even further by
implementing their policy and banning the harmless art that is trying to oppose
prejudice.
Despite the draconian policies of
Instagram, women artists continue to post and hold accounts on it. Why invest
their time and give away their art on a platform that isn’t welcoming of them?
Olszanowski suggested that “Maybe part of the appeal of Instagram and all its
concomitant censorship policies is that these women are co-constructing their
own space where there isn’t space for them” (Olszanowski). Another suggestion made
by Audrey Wollen was to think of Instagram’s censorship as a positive thing. She
wrote “Instagram is an inherently normalizing, policing force and our exclusion
from that is a sign that the female body still has the ability to horrify, to
disrupt... That is something to revel in, rather than resist” (Wollen qt in
Frank). First and foremost what the work of these artists is trying to achieve
is to articulate the conversation of female sexuality publicly, in a mainstream
sphere that can reach a lot of people especially the impressionable youth of
the future generations. Instagram is the perfect place for that, it is highly
personal and interactive as well being among the most popular apps that form a
huge part of contemporary culture. Instagram might as well be a “common carrier”
(a term used by the CDA to define big influential platforms like newspaper or
television), because it reaches hundreds of millions of people and most
definitely influences a lot of modern thought. Feminist artists will not give
up the opportunity to revolutionize a modern sphere where the exact audience
they appeal to is interacting on a daily basis. Some people may think that
Instagram should do whatever they want with their content because they are a
private company, however the reality is that they host millions of users, which
gives them a moral and ethical responsibility to be as transparent as they can
as well as be equal and fair to the content that is allowed to be posted.
Finally, as much as Instagram’s
policies are incoherent and are deferring the process of de-stigmatizing the
female body, this problem is primarily and originally a societal one. Although
there is some progress that has been made in the recent decades, our society
still has to catch up and get over thousands of years of female repression.
While this will take a long time to resolve, there are things that can be done
to speed up the process, especially in social media. A proposition that can be
made to compromise the feminist artist’s right to free-speech and Instagram’s “Community
Guidelines,” is to have filters available on request instead of imposed. These
could be done in different ways: by specifying age on the user’s profile and
allowing content on their feed that is “appropriate,” or by allowing a user to
only see the image after having given him or her a disclaimer about the type of
material that it could contain. Any of these suggestions could work better than
simply deleting artists’ works or accounts from the platform and completely
disregarding this important wave of thought that needs to permeate our young members
of society’s lives and minds in order for some significant change to happen.
Meanwhile, feminist artists will continue to captivate critics and supporters alike
with powerful artistic manifestations, revolutionizing society’s institutionalized
misogyny and achieving ultimate justice for women everywhere.
Works Cited
Collins, Petra.
"Censorship and the Female Body." Petra Collins. STUDIO
Gallery, 2013. Web.
28 Apr. 2015.
Constine, Josh.
"Instagram Hits 300 Million Monthly Users To Surpass Twitter, Keeps It
Real
With Verified Badges." TechCrunch. AOL Inc.,
10 Dec. 2014. Web. 28 Apr. 2015.
Frank, Priscilla.
"15 Feminist Artists Respond To The Censorship Of Women's Bodies
Online." The Huffington Post.
TheHuffingtonPost.com, 13 Apr. 2015. Web. 28 Apr.
2015.
Heins, Marjorie.
"The Brave New World of Social Media Censorship." Harvard Law
Review
Forum. Hardvard Law Review,
20 June 2014. Web. 28 Apr. 2015.
"Instagram Help
Center." Community Guidelines. Instagram, n.d. Web. 28 Apr.
2015.
Kaur, Rupi. "Rupi
Kaur on Instagram:." Instagram. Instagram, 28 Mar. 2015. Web.
28 Apr.
2015.
Olszanowski, Magdalena.
"Feminist Self-Imaging and Instagram: Tactics of Circumventing
Sensorship." Visual Communications Quarterly.
Routledge, 22 July 2014. Web.
"Section 230 of the
Communications Decency Act." Electronic Frontier Foundation.
Electronic
Frontier Foundation, n.d. Web. 28 Apr. 2015.
[1]
Instagram has recently changed the literature of the company’s Community
guidelines. The second point has been modified and now reads “don’t post nudity.”
2 comments
Very nice! Personally, Kaur's work is still kinda gross, but that doesn't mean that it's not art or that we shouldn't be seeing it/talking about it. Plenty of art is gross, weird, and not nearly as impactful but is still celebrated. Example: that ancient yogurt lid stuck to the wall at MOMA. Shame on Instagram!
ReplyDeleteWhile "gross" isn't the word I would use to describe it, it is provocative-- it's meant to spur controversy and start conversations. I like that you can appreciate art even if you don't like it, and that you understand that it is important for it to be talked about! Thank you for reading :)
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