What if there was a social media platform with an extremely high tolerance for sexual self-expression, and an extremely low tolerance for mean comments, body-shaming, sexism, or harassment? That’s the vision of Lips, a new social media platform that’s like what Instagram would be if it allowed sexually explicit images, while at the same time kicking off hateful or trolling commenters, making it a safe space for women, BIPOC, LGBTQ+, sex workers, and other marginalized groups to express themselves sexually.
For too long, Big Social Media has taken the opposite approach, kicking off sex workers and censoring and banning any person who dares to bare a (heavens!) “female-presenting nipple,” while at the same time allowing hate, trolling, disinformation, harassment, misogyny, and white supremacy to flourish.
Starting up on a shoestring, with $10,000 crowdfunded on IFundWomen, Lips is the brainchild of Annie Brown, a tech-marketing consultant who has worked with gender-equality organizations including the Grameen Bank, the Humsafar Trust, and Planned Parenthood.
I interviewed Brown and the entire founding team of Lips. (Disclosure: I collaborated with Val Elefante, Lips’s community manager, on a non-commercial art film project in 2018.) Brown (who uses they/them pronouns) told me about their motivation for starting Lips. “When I was growing up, Cosmopolitan was Instagram. I would read Cosmopolitan, and it definitely didn’t help with my self-esteem and body-image issues,” they explain. “Then I got to college, and I took my first women’s studies class and learned about the male gaze, and about how women are portrayed in media. I decided I would make a zine called Lips out of a collection of women-identified students’ art stories about sex and sexuality. It’s gotten better over the years, but back in my day, Cosmo was all about how to please your boyfriend and how to please your husband. Instead, Lips was focused on, ‘What makes you happy? What fulfills you?’”
In 2018, right around the time they started building the digital version of Lips, Tumblr announced a ban on porn. “It was this huge erasure of erotic artists and LGBTQ+ communities. And that’s when I saw that, just as Lips is filling a need in our own communities offline, we can branch out and be this space for marginalized communities who are being de-platformed over sexual censorship,” said Brown.
Lips was launched on Dec. 31, and now has close to 1,000 users. It’s coming out during a time of extreme censorship of sexually explicit content online. In the wake of 2018’s FOSTA-SESTA, 2020 brought on even greater waves of censorship, from multiple angles. Pressed by a “shady sex-work abolitionist group,” Visa and Mastercard cut off their payment processing for Pornhub, leaving thousands of sex workers who sell their content online out of work during a pandemic. This shutoff showed how payment processors can act as powerful censors of legal adult content. Then there’s the bipartisan Stop Internet Sexual Exploitation Act, which would require every indie porn performer selling clips on their own website to run their own staffed 24/7 abuse hotline—a compliance hurdle so absurdly high it “could be the end of internet porn” in America.
Against this backdrop, platforms have tended to take one of two stances to sexually explicit imagery online: Big Brother bans (à la Facebook, Instagram, and Tumblr), or laissez-faire (à la Pornhub). In practice, the former approach leads to platforms kicking off sex workers and sex educators merely for existing, even if their content does not violate terms of service. And in practice, the latter approach—while promoting the unfettered right to post legal adult content—leads to a free-for-all (and typically cishet white male-dominated) environment that can feel like a disrespectful and unsafe space for women, LGBTQ+ and BIPOC people, and members of other marginalized identities.
How can an online platform allow for a robust expression of user-generated sexual content centering these communities, yet at the same time keep it a safe and welcoming space for these communities? The answer: curation.
A piece of SFW erotic art posted on Lips
Bad Vibe ArtBrown explained: “We’re not an all-purpose porn site. We just don’t have the legal bandwidth or the money to handle the kind of compliance required to ensure ethical, consensual content, and it’s not our overall mission to host any and all porn. Sex workers are allowed and welcome to promote their porn content on Lips and link to their hosting sites in their Lips bio (which Instagram does not currently allow). We don’t have any moral judgments against porn—quite the opposite, as we have an adult filmmaker on our founding team, and actively advocate for sex-worker rights—but our focus is on feminist-oriented erotic art and creative self-expression. Of course, there is plenty of porn that is artistic—and we will allow feminist porn photos (we don’t host video yet) if there is some artistic intent.”
So, how do they decide what passes muster? “Well, that’s very subjective, right? We’re taking a nuanced approach as opposed to the lazy approach of big tech, which kicks off anything with any nudity whatsoever,” said Brown. “In contrast, we have a diverse panel of feminist experts, technology experts, philosophical experts, erotic art experts, sex workers, LGBTQ+ community members, and BIPOC users who are making judgment calls about what we want in our community. Instead of a bunch of white cis straight guys who are trying to categorize us and our content, who have no knowledge or background of erotic art, we’re taking our users’ input in combination with our experts.”
When searching for racy content on Lips, you won’t find the typical mainstream porn categories—“teen,” “MILF,” etc. Instead, you’ll find tags including #bodypositive, #activism, #supportblackartists, #mentalhealth, and #witch. Beyond curating and categorizing the content itself, Lips employs an additional layer to make sure the content is respectful and affirming: curating the users who join the site. You need more than just an email address to join up—you also need to write a paragraph about “Why do you want to post on Lips?” and provide three samples of posts you might make.
Val Elefante, the site’s community manager, and one of the team members responsible for reading and approving these “applications,” maintained: “We want people to come to Lips with the intention of contributing to the community. We’ve laid out very clearly what we’re all about. We’re a community that centers women, non-binary, and LGBTQ+ identifying people. Anyone can join us if you’re willing and able to center those identities in the experience of the community. That idea is running through our blood every single day.”
It may seem paradoxical that a site devoted to free expression is pickier than most social media sites about who joins, and about what they post. This is by design. There’s a name for this dynamic—the “paradox of tolerance”—and Lips references it in their community guidelines. One interpretation of the paradox, as it applies to Lips, is that there’s no such thing as a neutral platform; some voices are always going to tend to drown out others, so you have to choose whose voices you’re centering. As Julija Rukanskaitė, Lips’s UX designer, puts it: “If you’re saying, ‘everybody is welcome on this platform,’ then you’re not saying whose position you are speaking from. This is basic intersectional feminist theory: you’re always speaking from somewhere. That person who decided that it was OK to have sexist comments on the ‘neutral’ platform, they weren’t coming from the experience of being harassed online. It’s never neutral.”
Barbara Bickham, managing director of the Women’s Innovation Fund Accelerator and the acting CTO of Lips, said, “Mass social media is clearly completely broken. So maybe having our own unique communities is not necessarily a bad thing. Where we can go and have safe conversations, and safe spaces, and safe things to share. And then, if you want to go back out onto the dangerous, regular social media, go for it. Otherwise, you can come into these communities. I think we’re going to start seeing that more and more. Because I think people have recognized this mass social media experiment, not only from a safety perspective, but from a mental health perspective, is not working. So, how do you reinvent and reimagine that?”
A key to reinventing the social media experience is the composition of the founding team. The all-women and non-binary team, which includes a Black and a Latina woman and several members who identify as LGBTQ+, emphasized how different and important it is to have a diverse squad building a social media community from the ground-up. “If you look at who you’re having this conversation with, we look very different than most founding teams of technology startups,” said Bickham.
Then there’s the issue of mental health. The intentionally addictive social media algorithms exposed in The Social Dilemma are the negative example against which Lips is attempting to build an affirming, confidence-enhancing community for its members.
“I imagine Lips being a place where people can go when they’re feeling down to give themselves a boost, not the opposite,” said Elefante. “I leave Instagram, and I feel shittier than when I started. So, it’s the opposite of that. It’s a place where, when you’re an hour into browsing, you’re not like, ‘Oh, this thing is sucking me in.’ Instead, you’re like, ‘I’m learning a lot. I’m opening my mind.’”
Despite the idealism of Lips, due to its erotic content there’s no way the iPhone or Android app stores will touch it. And Visa and Mastercard have already signaled they may start pulling the plug on explicit content. To combat this, Lips was built as a progressive web app, which means the app is designed to be accessed through a browser, not on app stores. And they are aiming to make it cryptocurrency-enabled.
Payment-processing through uncensorable cryptocurrency will be an important part of the site’s operations, as they are aiming to roll out a social commerce element soon, whereby erotic artists, sex educators, and sexual wellness companies can advertise and sell their creations and products directly to fans and customers. While you can see Facebook ads of photo-realistic characters blowing each other to bloody bits in violent video games targeted to men, and while Facebook lauds the ads it hosts for erectile-dysfunction pills for men as a case study in advertising success, anything having to do with women’s sexual pleasure or education are strictly forbidden on Facebook, Instagram, and most social media advertising.
“Our vision encompasses both small creators, who aren’t allowed to sell or advertise or even be on Instagram, all the way up to these multimillion-dollar venture-backed brands,” explained Brown. “Dame Products is a great example of a women’s wellness company with a million dollar per-year social media budget, but they were literally not allowed to sell their products in Instagram Shopping and kicked off of Instagram advertising. So, along with an Etsy-type store for erotic art and products, we’ll also have an advertising platform for those folks who are literally banned from advertising on social media for no good reason.”
The tragic irony of social media platforms banning anything and everything having to do with sex—supposedly to protect people from the dangers of sex—is that a lot of the things they are banning (art, education, health information, wellness products) decrease the dangers of sex. “The bigger picture for Lips is that, once you start allowing for erotic art and sex education and these nuances, it actually reduces these harmful things that these bills and censorship are fighting against, such as sex trafficking, rape culture, and sexual abuse,” said Brown. “It’s a well-proven and established phenomenon, that societies that are more open to honest discussions of sexuality have less of these violent issues surrounding sex and sexuality.”
