A Face Too Sexy For Social Media
Being a 90s kid I don’t remember a time when female sexual empowerment wasn’t a hot topic. When Madonna kissed both Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera in their 2003 VMA performance people were shocked to see such behavior on TV. Fast forward to today where WAP has over 400 million views on YouTube with no age restriction on the video, photos and videos of scantily clad women flood all social media platforms, and popular streaming service Netflix hosts Cuties, a film featuring what some critics describe as ‘soft core porn’ involving girls at the young age of eleven.
As a female artist who explores my own relationship to feminine sexual energy in my works, I began posting my art to my social media accounts with no concern that any of them would be viewed as obscene or breaking community guidelines. None of the women in my pieces are engaged in sexual acts and they were created with the intent of exploring the female experience rather than as visual aids for sexual gratification. In fact, I have been met with criticism from viewers that my work is not sexually explicit enough for their liking.
My current NFT art series titled ‘Crypto Sluts’ plays with tongue-in-cheek sexual innuendo but is some of my most demure work. Each piece in the series features a portrait of a beautiful woman, face flushed and eyes rolled back in ecstasy, with a round item on her tongue sporting her favorite Cryptocurrency’s logo. ‘Crypto Slut’ is a self descriptive term I use for myself as I am not a maximalist for any crypto project but rather I prefer to experiment with them all. The collection itself is a representation of the passion I have witnessed the crypto community showing for their favorite projects, so Crypto Sluts felt like a perfect title. Innuendo aside, each piece shows absolutely no sexual activity nor adult theme. It’s drawn leaving interpretation completely up to the viewer, including what that round item on her tongue might be.
When the art reveal video for my Bitcoin Slut caught some traction on YouTube it was met with a near 50/50 like to dislike ratio and the comments were ‘WTF?’, ‘Why…’, and ‘I am utterly disgusted’. Unexpected but not terrible. Twitter flagged multiple posts of mine for using the word ‘Slut’ but I was able to resolve that. The most shocking was what happened on TikTok. Open the TikTok app and you’ll find videos of girls under the age of 18 twerking in crop tops and booty shorts, strippers in the club dancing on stage, and women discussing working as Sugar Babies with hundreds of thousands of views. Oddly the artwork from my Crypto Sluts collection was flagged as ‘Adult Sexual Content’ so many times on TikTok that I was eventually restricted from posting. Each time my work was flagged I appealed and each time the team said that after review my posts were found to have in fact broken the platform rules of no adult sexual content and were permanently removed. Compare this to Minds, a platform that requires users to flag NSFW content or face a channel strike. Not only am I not required to flag my Crypto Sluts as NSFW, but they are eligible for promotion across the site (Minds does not allow promotion of NSFW material and all promotions are reviewed by the platform).
I’ve experienced inconsistent censorship of my art before, but this is nearly the most perplexing circumstance ( second only to the time I uploaded my art videos to Porn Hub expecting to have outsmarted the censorship issue only to have a number of them flagged on there for breaking community guidlines). This and previous instances of channel strikes have created blurred lines of what is too sexy for social media and leaves me confused. Whereas I started publishing my work believing it would be met with general platform acceptance when compared to the content already being hosted, I now lack confidence in my ability to continue to share my art on social media with out fear of losing my entire account.
What is too sexy for social media?
*View the Crypto Sluts NFT Art Collection on OpenSea
