Towards a bra-free Instagram experience
> Do men on Instagram contend with this many half-naked dudes and their butts all the time? I really want to know.I really feel for this comment, as women are hyper-sexualized and we have a broken culture of stuff that optimizes for the male gaze, and so this is a common complaint.But this isn't about sexuality, this is about insecurity. These specific ads are only showing skin so they can hit a weak spot in the viewer and break them down to buy stuff.The same patriarchal cultural BS about what it means to be a real woman also exists as a pressure against men, it just leads to a different set of insecurities.Example: I feel insecure about losing my hair. I still have hair... and it shouldn't really matter?... but it is thinning :/; and, when I think about it, it makes me sad.(edit:) To be clear, I mean the kind of "sad" where every time I see myself in a mirror and every time I wash my hair and even if my hair falls a weird way, it hits me. It is an ever-pervasive "insecurity" in my life that I fight with every day, and where I am dreading what it will be like in another two or three years :/.I manage to forget about it a lot, or even get to a place where I look at myself in a mirror and am like "this is fine... I don't mind how I look today, so I am happy"But like, one day, I decided to research products and procedures designed to prevent or hide hair loss. I spent hours on it. I didn't end up deciding to do anything.But the Internet remembers. The Internet now knows that I have an insecurity, and people with an insecurity are profitable. People like me are why ads make money :/.So now, every few damned days, while going through my Instagram "stories", I am given a sponsored interstitial ad for hair loss prevention products and services.Fuck you, Instagram.