I want to tell you a story about my body, about my skin and fat and bones and muscles. No, actually, I want to tell you a story about the spaces where I finally learned to love my body. It’s a long, bumpy, winding road. So grab a snack or a cup of coffee and get comfortable.

I’ve been a pretty active person all my life. My relatives often poked at me, calling me skinny. I don’t think I ever sat still long enough to gain weight as a child. I struggled with my appetite as a teenager. I’d done karate and then Bellydance classes and then tried ballet. I walked everywhere with my friends before I got a car.

I never gained the “Freshman 15.” Probably because during my first year of college, I had an apartment off campus. It was about a mile away from the University of Arizona and it had a kitchen so I could cook for myself. I bought a cheap bike and road that back and forth and used it to get around campus. I was healthy.

My parents never admonished me for wearing a miniskirt or a low-cut top. I went to a competitive public high school where everyone was so focused on academics, teachers neither paid attention to nor cared about whether we wore a spaghetti-strap top or a pair of Daisy Dukes. Nor should they have. We lived in Arizona. It’s hot. And except for the occasional irritation with my stubborn lower stomach pooch (even after a horrible bout of pneumonia in 8th grade where I ended up terribly underweight, it was still there), I was pretty happy with my body. I wore bikinis. I went out in short shorts and wore crop tops.

And then, I went on a semester abroad. The combination of nights out, cheap food, and the weather (English), meant that I spent most evenings sitting around the kitchen table with friends drinking beer and eating takeout instead of dancing and going for long walks. I ballooned to my highest weight ever in the five and a half months I was there. Fifteen pounds probably doesn’t seem like much, unless you happen to be short like me (five foot two, to be precise). The number on the scale didn’t bother me so much, but I was a broke college kid and none of my clothes fit. I felt like I’d been stuffed into them. I hated having pictures taken of me.

There’s a reason we avoid the mirror when we’ve gained a few pounds. It’s hard to confront what you look like sometimes. It makes you feel bad. And if it doesn’t, there’s some societal value judgment on you for not feeling bad that you don’t look like a Victoria’s Secret model. I was no exception. For a year and a half, I tried to pretend that my weight gain wasn’t an issue. And then I got my first job out of college, and I could barely climb the stairs to the conference room for meetings.

In 2014, I was still overweight and terribly out of shape. I hated the way I looked; I hated the way I felt, more. And then I found a Groupon for a pole dancing studio. I didn’t sign up because I thought it would help me lose weight. It just looked fun. It was the hardest thing I’d ever done. I sucked at it and I felt broken after the first class. By the end of the week, I’d signed up for a membership. I also had to wear shorts and a tank top for the class. The irony of the fact that I was spending most of my free time in a room with two walls of mirrors, basically wearing a swimsuit didn’t escape me. It was uncomfortable. I wanted to take pictures and videos of the cool things I was doing, but I didn’t like the way I looked. At this point in my life, I could probably best describe my shape as “cylindrical” since I tend to gain all of my weight in my stomach.

While I was struggling with my body, I often wasn’t the heaviest or most out-of-shape person in my classes. But like many beginners, I struggled to hold my bodyweight up to achieve the beautiful spins and poses my instructors showed us. I was clumsy and I struggled to commit choreography to memory. But I worked hard. I went to class at least twice a week, usually three.

After a few painful months, I started to put on muscle. I lost a little weight because pole dancing motivated me to eat healthily. At the end of one spectacularly dismal lesson about two months in, I finally, finally managed to climb to the top of the pole, pushing through the discomfort to put a hand to the ceiling. A few months after that, I was strong enough to pull my entire bodyweight over my head and to hang from the pole using only my legs. In less than a year, I progressed to hands-only moves. I was promoted to an advanced student and signed up for a competition. It completely changed my relationship with my body. It all felt like the ultimate non-scale victory.

But the thing I have always loved the most about pole is how much we celebrate each other, in class and online. And around the time I started pole classes, Instagram was the perfect online place to do that, particularly for those still worried or frustrated at the judgement they might experience by posting on Facebook, where coworkers, friends, and family followed their every post. The nature of Instagram meant that it was an ideal platform for the pole community. It’s visual, quick to use, and hashtags meant that we could quickly search for the names of moves and find each other using hashtags like #poledancing We followed each other on Instagram and posted our photos and victories and bloopers on there. Occasionally a pole celebrity would comment on my post, sending me into heart palpitations.

Aforementioned ceiling and celebrity

Maybe you’ve heard this all before. People love to talk about pole and how much confidence it gives you and how much strength you gain and how you learn to love your body for what it’s capable of rather than how it looks and the incredible friendships you form. Those things are all true. Here’s the thing we don’t always say in those #MotivationMonday Insta posts though: becoming a pole dancer has forced me to look at my body and other people’s bodies in little clothing and to do that without assigning capability or value judgments to them. That’s what this is about. This is about community. This is about having a place to celebrate your own body and the bodies of other women.

Instagram has been integral to the global growth of the pole community and since I started working as a freelance pole instructor in February, it’s extremely helpful for me to post updates for my current clients and for new clients to find me and see what I teach. Until now.

Instagram’s clumsy approach to complying with FOSTA-SESTA — a law intended to target sex traffickers, supposedly—by cracking down on “inappropriate” and “sexually suggestive” content has now led to my (and thousands of other) pole-related posts being “shadowbanned” multiple times.

A shadowban can result from a post being flagged as inappropriate for a number of reasons (“nudity”, using the wrong hashtags, using too many hashtags, using the same hashtags as the day before, editing your hashtags, etc.) and can only be seen by people who currently follow you. I want to be clear that I’m not violating the platform’s policy on nudity. I don’t show my genitals or nipples. Usually, I wear a sports bra and shorts and high heels.

I get a lot of comments from pole-muggles and even some polers about the tiny outfits I wear. Some of you reading this may or may not know that pole fitness requires skin grip. With the exception of leather, vinyl, or latex clothing, it’s extremely difficult if not impossible to accomplish 80% of existing pole moves without using your skin to grip the pole. I’ve been laughed at for pole dancing. I’ve heard my fair share of snide remarks or seen the raised eyebrows. I’ve explained more than a few times that “No, I’m not taking my clothes off, but there’s absolutely nothing wrong with stripping and the entire pole industry is based on exotic dance whether you like it or not.”

But I’ve never actually felt bad about showing my body — one I’ve treated unkindly in the past and then got to know and come to terms with and worked hard for — until the last few weeks. Mostly I feel angry. I also feel ashamed for wanting to wear grippy leggings in every video to avoid being shadowbanned. I feel guilty for angrily posting an intentionally provocative picture, knowing it will be censored and my account could be deleted when I rely on Instagram for my business. I feel dejected thinking about all the hard work I’ve put into a trick or a video knowing that it’ll disappear into the void.

I’m struggling with it and I’m considering leaving the platform because it’s not profitable or good for me to be spending as much time as I do editing and uploading videos to an app that will immediately censor my posts because I wore a sports bra and shorts, the athletic wear required to perform my sport and which often covers me more than the bikinis worn by beach volleyball players in the Olympics.

Literally the only trick I could manage with stockings on

Personally, I fail to see how preventing people from using hashtags associated with an internationally recognized sport or posting a picture of themselves in a standard-issue bikini is going to help catch sex traffickers. I fail to see how censoring actual sex workers on is going to put traffickers and people looking to exploit others in jail. And when people have pointed it out that “it’s the algorithm’s fault” my response is “The algorithm is flawed.” Human bias in AI is a well-documented phenomenon and the algorithm that was created to comply with a law that is supposed to help women is as flawed as the law itself. And what’s the flaw? Misogyny.

Women’s bodies have been long under attack — they’re scrutinized and criticized in every way, deemed “too sexy” or “not sexy enough”. It’s one of the reasons women take up pole dance — to feel sexy and empowered. Sometimes, it’s also a big middle finger to the world. We get tired of being told what we can and can’t do with their bodies. It’s exhausting and unfair to have to try to comply with constantly-evolving rules to how much skin is acceptable to show in order to be considered the right kind of woman. Even more rage-inducingly, these rules apparently don’t apply to men, while we’re constantly told that our bodies are inherently inappropriate and provocative. And if you don’t agree with me, let’s all take a moment to remember that “female presenting nipples” are a thing.

By specifically targeting women, the algorithm and, by extension, Instagram is literally telling me that my skin is inappropriate, that wearing a bikini — that thing that literally every woman’s magazine in the grocery store tells us we should aspire to be wearing — is offensive. I understand that it’s sexually suggestive. I get that people feel upset that breasts are sexualised but men’s nipples are not. And that’s a fair point. But it’s also entirely beside the point.

It’s not the sexualization of women’s bodies I even object to. Stay with me, here. Breasts are secondary sex characteristics. Yes, they’re just glands used to feed babies. But in western society, they are sexualized. And you know what? That’s not the issue — we have sexual parts and preferences for a reason. In fact, I get a lot of business from women who want to learn “exotic” style pole and “learn to be sexy.” It’s my speciality and I love teaching it. We are (by and large) sexual beings and there’s nothing wrong with that. The same society sexualises parts of men’s bodies too. To me, this isn’t the issue.

Men aren’t punished for showing their bodies. That is the issue. The same society that celebrates semi-nude male celebrities and bodybuilders who work to become muscular and then show off their progress toward aesthetic goals reprimands women who do the same. We’re called vain or accused of using our sexuality to gain an advantage.

Don’t worry, it’s not just women in swimsuits being targeted. The most outrageous (and probably upsetting) example I saw was a figure drawing of a nude woman. It’s also breastfeeding mothers, LGBT folks, sex educators, and activists to round the whole thing off. Funny, it sounds an awful lot like a list of marginalised people, doesn’t it?

I’m still deciding whether or not I want to be a part of a platform engaging in this blundering kind of censorship and obvious discrimination. On one hand, it feels like a waste of my time. On the other, I and other polers find solidarity in engaging with each other using the hashtag #shadowpolers and circulating a change.org petition to draw attention to the issue. Most of all, I want Instagram to fix this. Because there’s nothing fucking wrong with or about my body and if I want to put it on the internet, that’s my right. And yours, too.

#sundaybumday forever

Click here to sign a change.org petition if you’re opposed to the censorship of art. Head to Instagram and show #shadowpolers some love. You can find me @jennyhpolefit on IG, for now, anyway.