We need to talk about social media.
It doesn’t feel good out there and if we are honest, it hasn’t for a while. Undressing Disability is a sex-positive, informative, educational resource. We are a campaign run by, designed by, written by disabled and neurodivergent people, for the very community we are a part of.
It started as a way to showcase how sexy our community is and that disabled people still want and enjoy sex. . It now includes a podcast, educational resources, a free support service called the Love Lounge, events and training. As part of this, we often share photos of sexy disabled people being their gorgeous selves.
Hell, we’ve even organised the photoshoots!
Noticing the difference
However, it’s getting harder and harder to reach our audience. Earlier this year, we decided to come off Twitter/X after it became apparent our community was leaving – with good reason. While it was hard to say goodbye to the hard work we had put into it, it was the right decision.
Instagram has been the main social media page for us for some time. We have made so many beautiful friendships and collaborations through it. However, Instagram does not enjoy our content nor does it like many of the other sexual health educators, influencers, and workers who are all part of it. We do not use TikTok but do note that we’ve heard similar complaints about the content there.
Visit our Undressing Disability Instagram page.
We’ve watched as our posts on consent or safer sex are barely viewed compared to ones that aren’t about anything sexual. We’ve tried hiding our words by writing seggs instead of sex. We’ve added the symbols or numbers in desperation, like k!nk instead of kink or even bre@sts instead of breasts. It’s time-consuming, problematic and infuriating. Not to mention, ableist when you consider how many people using screen readers might struggle, or people with dyslexia. It also looks ridiculous.
It’s important to know the right words for our bodies, our sexual health and our sexuality. By removing such words, we are contributing to health illiteracy. Avoiding these words feeds into the idea that such language is dirty or bad.
It’s what we have to do to avoid our account not being seen at all, banned, blocked or removed completely. There are so many ways in which this censorship affects disabled/neurodivergent people. We aim to make our social media content as accessible as possible by using things like alt text, checking the colour contrast and video captions. It’s frustrating to have to write @n@l because we can’t use the real word, making the text less accessible. Even putting these words into the actual graphic appears to no longer work. We do offer an alternative, that if people are struggling to read these words, they can get in touch with us and we will type it in a message – but this is a lengthy alternative that frankly, no one should have to do.
This censorship feels as if it ranges from the real (the wording, the blocking and banning) to the ridiculous (apparently we can no longer use the aubergine emoji as it’s flagged as sexy content) to the harmful (the loose wording around sexual roles could place LGBT+ people at a greater risk of censorship).
How does this harm us?
Hands up if you feel your sex education at school was less than informative? Does the sex information in magazines feature disabled models or voices? How many books are written about sex positions or advice for disabled people vs non-disabled people?
Younger generations are turning to social media to get the education they feel they didn’t get at school. This includes disabled people who are often left out of the conversation entirely. If the chance to access safe, accurate information is removed then where does that leave us?
Not to mention, creating content is time-consuming, expensive and exhausting. A lot of disabled people do not have the energy or resources to keep replacing content that is taken down nor should they have to.
We travel around the UK with the Love Lounge offering free advice to disabled people. We know that disabled people have a lot of questions about sex, relationships and love. We also know that they often feel lonely and depressed without a community. This is the positive side of social media, it can help people to access information and connect with people.
Visit our Love Lounge page to find out how to get free, confidential support
So what is the answer?
The immediate response is usually to leave social media. This isn’t possible as to do so leaves charities like ours out of the conversation completely. It means we would struggle to speak to our audience at all.
The ‘answer’ or the solution is for the social media companies to resolve. This means investing in humans instead of bots when it comes to content moderation and clearer guidelines around their wording. For those of us in the sexual information or education field, is it that they have a special verification mark so that readers know the content is fact-checked and researched?
It might even be that we leave the platform to its own devices and join one made by the community, for the community.
We might even get to use the aubergine emoji again.
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