Dear Instagram,
By: Wendy N. Kessman
Tags: Sex Work, Censorship, Sesta, Fosta, Instagram

Youthful curiosities, oppressive policy, and what we risk when adult content is erased from the internet:

By the time I was 13, I had crafted the art of the perfect AIM away message. Something along the lines of “in the shower ;)” followed by moody lyrics that evoked a sense of mystery. I had to leave an offering for the wandering imaginations, a literal wink to the audience of strangers I had accumulated.

At the time, my best friend and I had been exploring the World Wide Web. We would come home from school and jump on AOL Instant Messenger. We’d chat with friends we knew and some we didn’t. I don’t remember how we would connect with strangers, or how they would find us. The conversations huddled over our screen together, where we took turns typing and debating how to respond, were always a little tamer than the ones I had in private. Suggestive, sexy even, but PG-13.

Alone, things got explicit. I knew very little about sex at that age, though I’m sure in some way or another my parents tried to talk to me about it, coming from them was mortifying. I’d rather learn about the intricacies of oral from SurfLvr7994. This carried on for a while. I think now of this turn of the century cybersex I had with (probably) grown men. I straddled the line of pretending like I knew what I was talking about while absorbing the knowledge of this foreign, sexual, state. It was a secret, especially as I continued to have more questions than answers. I did not hold back in angst, expressing some variation of I hate myself, my parents, my life. Small signs of vulnerabilities like chum in the water.

Eventually, I left a chatbox up and got caught. Hearing aloud what I had typed made me want to throw up. I shut down into rationalizations, I hate myself, I hate my life. I sprinted out of the door (the drama) and ran down the hill to my best friend’s house. My mom gave her mom a call to warn of the impending trouble. When we walked outside the weight of humiliation kept me quiet. I don’t remember us saying much.

I don’t carry that shame anymore. It didn’t serve me then; it won’t serve me now. I, like many queer people, have been learning about (and later on, finding) sex on the internet for nearly 20 years. I share this story, not as some red-light warning of the dangers lurking in the far corners of the interwebs. In fact, the opposite. The thing is, looking back, I’m not sure I actually hated myself. I think I was just curious and caught. I think I had more questions than answers, and I went looking for them from strangers online.

Now imagine if, at 13, instead of finding a faceless screen name, I discovered a platform that taught me about consent, provided sex education that wasn’t heteronormative, showed bodily autonomy, agency, pleasure, sexual and gender expression, even internet safety. What if sex-positivity framed my curiosity rather than shame? Imagine if I was confronted with images of all different kinds of people who were unapologetically comfortable in their bodies and expressed that. It is an education I could have grown into.

Instagram’s new Terms of Service went into effect on December 20th, threatening the existence of accounts that not only provide a valuable service but a space for information and expression. The policy is a spawn of the Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act (FOSTA) and the Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act (SESTA), the federal law passed in 2018. The legislation holds companies liable for “knowingly assisting, supporting, or facilitating a violation” of sex trafficking. Social media platforms have thus resulted in self-censoring. While the policy is framed as a win for victims’ advocates, it is a case study in unintended consequences. The inability to legally differentiate between sex trafficking, sex work between consenting adults, and even sexuality education is a dangerous conflation that serves no one, least of all trafficking victims that deserve support through often nuanced trauma. Websites that once served as online communities providing tools for harm reduction have been shut down. Many of these pages at risk are run by queer people of color and sex workers, those who are routinely pushed to the physical and digital margins towards greater violence and criminalization.

It should go without saying that not all content is made for the young ones, but I still ache for the teen who won’t get a valuable lesson in boundary-setting because it came from a sex worker who was de-platformed. There is a stigma around sexuality, sexual expression, and sex work. Part of what kept those chatboxes a secret was that stigma. It’s the same force that kept me from outright asking questions to begin with, and it will never keep us safe. The Instagram Terms of Service is a policy that reinforces shame where there shouldn’t be and aims to erase those who confront it. If you appreciate or engage with, adult content, then support it and the creators with your advocacy and your wallet. It may not be around for long. We still have so much to learn, and it is important who our younger selves learn it from.