How Instagramers become prostitutes. “Nudity is rewarded. This is the first dose of the drug.”
– There is only one step from “modeling” on Instagram to stripping on OnlyFans and then to prostitution – says Kaya Szulczewska, Instagramer, creator of Ciałopositive.
Krystyna Romanowska: Sexologist Agata Stola, in a conversation with me a few months ago, said that she was concerned about the fate of young girls who take photos on Instagram in underwear or show their bodies more boldly. That they enter the sex industry relatively often. Do you – as the creator of one of the first body positivity profiles in Poland – have a similar impression?
Kaya Szulczewska: I know the fate of girls who, five years ago, started innocently by taking photos on Instagram and then – through OnlyFans – became classic prostitutes. Someone may say – what kind of perspective is this: only 5 years! In the rapidly developing social media, five years is almost an epoch – during this time you can observe huge changes in both trends and user attitudes.
At that time, my profile Ciałopositive was one of the first blogs in the broadly understood culture of body affirmation. Its aim was to familiarize people with images of various sides of the body and its affirmation. So it was natural that young women appeared there. Following this path is very interesting, because it turns out that the path from Instagram to the sex industry is very simple.
How would you describe this group of girls?
A few years ago, it was fashionable on Instagram to include eating disorders in your bio. So the girls presented: “eating disorder recovery”. A little later, it became fashionable to add “bordeline” and other mental disorders to the bio, and it still is. Although since 2020, there are still intense issues of orientation, identity and political orientation among the young generation.
Five years ago, a group of my followers wanted to be body-positive models showing themselves half-naked on Instagram. My profile encouraged such activities – but these girls were very young. I often posted their photos anonymously or without faces to protect the users, and they did it under their names on their profiles. When posting a photo of themselves in underwear, they did not think about the consequences of these steps: a potential future employer who would one day see the photo or what their friends might think about them.
