For a platform so well-suited to photography, modeling, and fine art, Instagram has a weirdly restrictive policy toward nudity: It does not allow any images to show female nipples. Instagram models can, of course, get away with showing a lot, so much so that Playboy cited the platform when it ditched nude photography early last year. But nipples—specifically female ones—remain banned on Instagram. Posts containing them are subject to be removed by the company. Male nips? Totally okay.
To point out this disparity in policy, the account genderless_nipples posts exclusively nipples. (It is possibly NSFW, although it will certainly provoke an interesting conversation with your boss.) The images—zeroed in, like a series of bullseyes sans context or, you know, connective body—could belong to anyone, either female-identifying people flouting a loophole in Instagram’s nipple policy or male-identifying people proudly baring an insignificant portion of their bodies. The account, of course, doesn’t tip its hand either way as to whom the nips belong to. At some 35,000 followers, it illustrates that there is certainly an appetite on Instagram for nipple-related content, or at least an appetite for the platform to remove its restrictive, gendered policy.
On the other hand? Seeing this many close-ups of nipples at once is kind of weird, like looking at the surface of a strange new planet.