as small as a world and as large as alone, findanewequation: So for the last four months or...

4:10am July 14, 2014

So for the last four months or so, I have taken part in the body positivity movement on Instagram, including posting photos of myself in my bikini and underwear/bra. Keep in mind that none of my photos have ever been sexually explicit or suggestive and that I have always been fully covered. As far as nudity goes, I show no more skin than a thin woman in a bikini. Below is a photo I uploaded last night, with the caption “I love my belly. ♥”

At approximately 2:05 am, I received an email from Instagram stating that a photo had been removed from my account for “violating the community guidelines.” I went to my page to find the above photo missing from my account. Angry and determined to make a point, I went to the tags on Instagram to find photos of women dressed in as much clothes as I was. I found entire pages dedicated to sharing women in sexually explicit and suggestive poses in half the clothes I am wearing in the above photo. I also found men, completely naked with the photo cropped to just miss their dick being in the photo. I reported these photos for nearly half an hour.

At exactly 3:58 am, I was logged off of my Instagram account while using it and then told that my account had been disabled for violating the community guidelines. My entire account containing over 560 followers and over 500 personal photos and memories of my self love journey were removed without warning.

I went to sleep crying, disgusted and angry that Instagram would do this. When I woke up, I found that every pornographic image I had reported was not only still there, but so was the pages offering to send people nudes in direct messages. That is the moment that I became enraged and determined to fight this.

This is not the first time that Instagram has practiced size discrimination. Meghan Tonjes went through a very similar situation and her story went viral. I am asking you to make this go viral as well, because THIS is not okay. By removing my photos and the photos of women of size and not the others, Instagram is effectively telling women that our fat bodies are more offensive to the eyes of children and their viewers than thin women half naked and blatant pornography. They are silencing us and telling us that our bodies are to be censored while the rest of the world can practice “cocks in socks” and post Victoria’s Secret Models.

I will not be silenced. After years of struggling with my body through depression, anxiety and self harm, I WILL NOT let a website tell me that my body is censor worthy simply because it is a fat body with cellulite and rolls. END SIZE DISCRIMINATION ON INSTAGRAM.