I love Instagram. In social media terms, it’s my happy place, full of pretty flowers and witty cartoons and empowering photographs and delicious food. I have curated my timeline so carefully that nearly every post I see, from the people and hashtags I follow, is glorious.
Feminist memes, photographs of fat women being fabulous, stunning landscapes and nostalgia for places I have lived are all conjured up when I scroll through my Instagram feed and they all take me to good places in my head. It’s why it takes me a moment to understand why I’ve seen so many young women say that Instagram posts are part of their oppression, when it comes to the terrible beauty standards people are held to. I realise that, if I was predominantly following 19-year-old super-thin models with perfect skin and bones jutting out of their body, I too might see the site as a place of pressure and negativity.
It’s all about who I follow. And what I follow.
Adult acne
As somebody with adult acne, due to polycystic ovarian syndrome (PCOS), I often feel very self-conscious about my skin. I use medication now that helps a lot but I’ve usually still got a few spots on my face and, as someone who is 41 years old, I feel strongly that I should have outgrown this by now. By over 20 years ago, actually.
The severity to which it affects my life depends on a lot of things, but usually comes down to how confident I’m feeling or how I feel about myself on any given day. I rarely wear make-up, though I feel reassured that it is an option for me, and I just avoid photographs, which seem to highlight the splotchy redness in a horrendously unflattering way.
One day, I saw a link to an article about women reclaiming their skin and I clicked with an unusual eagerness. I learned that, using the hashtag #SkinPositivity, they and others are sharing photographs of themselves with bare, spotty skin on Instagram. They talked about how empowering it felt and how much better life was when having spots was normalised. Like the normal, skin variation that it is.
I flung open Insta and typed in the hashtag. There, in all their glory, were men and women sharing photographs of their spots. Some did befores and afters with their make-up for the day, others were comparing their skin today to their skin when they started medical treatment for their acne. Others just shared a selfie in which spots were visible.
I scrolled and scrolled and subscribed to the hashtag and a few others that were associated with it. And, over the months that have followed, I have drunk up the daily images of others with the same problem as me. Some have it worse, others have it more mildly. Some are conventionally beautiful in every other way. None of that matters. I’m seeing my skin problems on other people, too, and it makes me feel like less of a freak.
This was exactly how I came to terms with living in a fat body years ago. Long before Instagram was a twinkle in its parent’s eye, I followed fatshion blogs and scrolled daily past photos of women who looked like me but who were not ashamed. Were not hiding away. They were, instead, wearing the bright colours and horizontal stripes we were ‘supposed’ to avoid and photographing themselves doing it.
Seeing others who resemble us, in whatever way society normally deems unacceptable, is empowering and potentially life changing. This is what Instagram does for me.
The dark side of Instagram
On the other side of the coin, young people subscribe to accounts with impossible images of beauty and devastating depictions of distress, whether in the form of eating disorders, self-harm or suicidal ideation. There are memes and portraits and everything else you can imagine promoting those mediums of distress as beautiful, meaningful lifestyles and, if you are already affected by mental illness, being drawn to these pictures can suck you into levels of upset that are new and overwhelming.
BBC News this week has been covering this side of Instagram, following the death by suicide of a 14-year-old girl whose parents blame Instagram, at least in part, for causing her to take her life.
If the simple hashtag #selfharm can lead young girls to images that exacerbate their own distress and encourage them to harm themselves further, there are questions that sites like Instagram have to answer. A Facebook boss told BBC News that they will remove reported images that glorify self-harm but leave those that appear to be asking for help, so triggering images can stay on the site legitimately and lead people down the rabbit hole of worse and worse upset.
If you’re not well enough to resist the pressure to follow pro-ana accounts and obsess over gruesome images of cuts and burns, then whereas for me Instagram is a positive site for my mental health and wellbeing, it will instead become a place of danger and dread.
Photo: Masaaki Komori
