Phillip Hofberg Bruskin. Courtesy of @ratedmodernart.
In our Unfollow column, we take a look at the rise of social media tropes and put a finger on why some of them haunt us, even after we close the app. Call us negative, but we’re positive that sometimes, the only thing you can do to keep sane in our age of overstimulation is mute, hide, and unfollow.
It was artist Stephanie Sarley, who swept headlines in 2016 with her ‘fruit fingerbanging’ Instagram—a lo-fi update on an age-old art history trope—who ignited the trend. Since then, fruit straddled between open legs casually prop the pages of sex toy brands, sex positive influencers and pleasure activists. Think honey gushing from a halved melon. Manicured hands fondling a fig or plum. Milk skirting an inner thigh. It’s a sticky visual language idealising pure, delicate, sweet assumptions of womxn’s pleasure, all the more ill-placed when these platforms claim to dismantle those beliefs with their brands and products. As opposed to liberating my feed, they sanitise it with pastel-toned ‘suggestive’ aesthetics. This brand of sexiness has little to no possibilities…and is, to my taste, too pink. My gripe with these images though, isn’t so much the obsession with sweaty limbs, penetration and wet entries, but what they indicate about the narrowing potential for sexiness on social media—one that is less packaged and pretty, and less flat.
Earlier this month, I visited Plasticised Sensation at the ICA, a slick installation piece by artist Davinia-Ann Robinson. In the upper gallery, gold hardware suspended a series of square plaster blocks, that in turn held black plaits slicked with varnish dripping and glazing the floor. The room had a tempting stench, everything looked perfect, touchable and repelling in equal measure. In an on-site talk Davinia spoke of Audre Lorde’s essay “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power”, from which the art took inspiration, and references a key home truth: “[The erotic] …has been made into the confused, the trivial, the psychotic, the plasticised sensation.” Davinia’s eye on this reduction felt perfectly timed. This constant plasticisation and packaging of pleasure, particularly online, is ultimately a process of numbing. As soon as that happens, it feels like the erotic stops being erotic at all.
But even if images of overripe fruit and moist pale legs were culled, and pleasures were re-visualised beyond genitals, can a space like Instagram present a new sexiness when it’s so smooth, so frictionless? Are there even visual codes that can subvert the algorithms and complicate the grid? It’s pretty much a double bind. Insta’s opaque censoring framework, particularly applied to femme-presenting bodies, means there’s little opportunity to add any real fleshiness to the mix. Content breaches, of which Instagram hardly ever unpacks, keeps even necessary and impactful sex education pages on permanent edge (hold tight Sex School, Come Curious, and others).
Sometimes I think of Tumblr, of which my (shared, and longstanding) mourning is still unresolved. There’s yet to be an online platform that facilitates a titillating and boundless cruising of images. The best era of any platform is when there are still holes to fall into, and back routes to tread. Did Instagram ever have that window? Moving around on its terrain feels less free. The Explore page is rigid, and the trails between images so direct, that the sexiness in looking and arriving is quashed.
Amongst all this, I still try to hold onto hope that my ambition for a less passive and more moving experience is possible on Instagram. It will probably start with me being a better, more conscious and more imaginative user. It will likely take lead from offline convos, debates, disagreements, and collaborative co-conspiracy. It most certainly won’t start with a leaky, juicy peach. that is for sure.
Anything you’re cutting out of your social media diet? Send your pitch to kathryn@sleekmag.com.