What Shadow-Bans Teach us about historical “failures”

What’s the point of gaining a seat if it’s a shitty fucking table…

Filmed and edited by professional videographer Walel Labrinssi (@greythief on insta)

If you’re reading this, you were likely prompted by my Instagram post directing you here.

I’m posting the above reel here to avoid being shadow-banned on Instagram, something I'll be doing more in the future instead of feeding the algorithm and lining the pockets of billionaires who are hell-bent on ushering in a dystopian world order. While social networking platforms require certain regulations, studies have shown that there is a significant algorithmic bias against women’s bodies, women of colour especially, as well as members of the LGBTQ community (Are 2021, Mauro/Schellman 2023). Algorithmic bias significantly influences public opinion by determining what and whom the masses are exposed to. Furthermore, studies show that social media algorithms amplify misogynistic content to younger audiences (Ringrose 2021, 2024).  Implicit in this amplification of misogynistic content is the dehumanization or objectification of women, leading to the conclusion that acts of agency and bodily sovereignty are deemed inappropriate while content presenting women as inferior or passive objects to be acted upon gains more reach, thus normalizing the assumption that women’s objectification and sexualization are perfectly suitable as long as they are not consenting to it.

You tired yet?

Shadow bans are not new; they reflect broader social and cultural norms that govern bodies into passively submitting to the dominant order. These norms are so baked into our social fabric that we can’t even “clock them”, so to speak. When they suppress personal expression, acts of bodily sovereignty, shadow bans act as a digital extension of moral scrutiny, a form of policing that functions to reinforce dominant norms and discipline bodies into obedience, or even erasure .

If you’ve been following me on Instagram for a while, then this is not news. I’ve been talking about disciplinary norms imposed upon bodies through my pole dance practice for a long time now. About a decade, actually, which coincided with the rise of far-right politics and increasingly vocal masculinist sentiment in the public sphere. Now it’s quite literally mainstream. Between crackdowns on reproductive rights and freedoms, GROK undressing women online against their will at the behest of men, pseudo-intellectual podcasts decrying a “male loneliness” epidemic” which amounts to members of the male population lamenting capitalism and patriarchy’s failed promise of unfettered access to wealth, social dominance and  women’s bodies but redirecting the responsibility on women who won’t fuck them. I’m tired. At their core, all of the above are reactions to women’s (narrowly defined) non-compliance with their assigned role in society: reproductive labour, which is basically the unpaid work  (cleaning, cooking, fucking and child rearing) performed as part of the heterosexual couple form and in support of the male waged worker upon whom one would be dependent. Reversing this woeful condition would necessarily require imposing legislative and economic constraints on women’s ability to provide for themselves or play a role in public life (see Project 2025) while also disseminating social and cultural messaging that convinces women to participate, even welcome, their own subjugation. The rise and amplification of Tradwife, Stay-At-Home GF, Soft-Life, Pilates Princess/Skinny Tok content is no surprise at this juncture. It glamorises and aestheticises a traditional, able-bodied femininity that is fundamentally fuckable, unburdened by the anxieties caused by life under capitalism, and fully racially coded by aspiring to/performing the privileges of whiteness. While  this reactionary return to traditional values among young men and women is understandable — the struggle is getting more and more real and I don’t need to link stats for that — they fundamentally lose sight of the enemy, pointing the finger at the “tyranny” imposed by feminism and other social justice movements when the source of their discontent are the untenable conditions imposed by neoliberal capitalism.

So, what is to be done? How did we get here when the past 50 years have seen so much “progress”? We have to fully reconcile ourselves with the fact that no social justice movement related to gender (or race, for that matter) has been able to dismantle a social and cultural order based on the hierarchical ordering of bodies according to their external markers of difference (race, sex, ability) and grounded in the extraction of value, whether from bodies or nature. Sex (determined at birth) continues to be tethered to a set of expectations regarding the role one ought to play, the work one ought to perform within a male-dominated society structured around capital accumulation/value extraction where the het-normative traditional family acts as the ground zero of the ideological state apparatus (cue the state’s restriction on reproductive rights, LGBTQ rights etc). Even some feminists have lost sight of the enemy in their war over bathrooms, inadvertently reinforcing these structural conditions. While white western feminism granted women access to traditionally male spaces and the wage, it did little to dismantle the underlying misogyny and effeminophobia undergirding our social, cultural and political sphere. Nor did it challenge the economic system that enslaves us all.

Anyway… It has been a very rough start to the year. I have been unable to engage with the state of the world and the ramping up of imperialist/masculinist agendas. Honestly, I’m scared. And I’m tired. It’s been ten years of me trying to raise awareness through my little corner of Instagram, and now that the threat is more palpable, my feed and DMs are flooded with content about it…and all I can think is “yes…I know… I’ve been saying this.” I’m not saying this to suggest that I was ahead of the curve. I was simply writing a dissertation in 2016 that foreshadowed our current moment, so I saw it coming. In any case, my strategy going forward is joy; nurturing it, cultivating it, spreading it, sharing it. Fascism hates joy. It hates humour. It hates pleasure. And as Klaus Theweileit argues in “Male Fantasies”, it hates sex, especially with women (go figure).

Thanks for reading.

SS