The first time I was introduced to Dr. Cuterus was in between Instagram reels and frankly, I got offended. I was busy enjoying a shuffling dance tutorial and later a generic ice-capped mountain with yet another earworm for the background. Who wants to know about different kinds of breasts that exist and how all of them are natural or normal? Swipe up.
But once the initial shock wore off, the inner feminist voice derided me for being a hypocrite and demanded to go back and watch the whole reel. Swipe down. For forty highly uncomfortable seconds, I watched Dr. Tanaya’s lovely curls and dimpled smile explain to me about different types of breasts.
Not just that, I immediately pressed the follow button on Dr.Cuterus Instagram account, rushed through her stories, and hit home with a grounded feeling. It was the kind of feeling I have after watching a good TED Talk or finishing a WikiHow page or sitting through an inspired teacher’s class.
Dr. Tanaya Narendra is an Oxford-educated assisted reproductions expert on her way to pursuing an MS from London. After the coronavirus pandemic halted her MS plans, she utilized her gap year by throwing herself into running the Dr. Cuterus Instagram handle while working at her parents’ clinic in Prayagraj, U.P.
In conversation with LifeBeyondNumbers, Dr. Cuterus shared her experience of running this sex-awareness Instagram handle and people’s reactions to the same.
How did Indians respond to Dr. Cuterus?
A quick Google search and her Instagram bio told me that Dr. Tanaya was a professional Oxford-educated doctor and Dr. Cuterus was an award-winning social media educator. Before I chanced upon Dr. Cuterus’ page, the closest things to social media education for me were psychotherapist accounts and first-person experiences of people suffering from chronic mental conditions. Most importantly, none of them were by Indians. (For those not in the know, in India, mental health tops sexual health in the list of taboo topics.)
So when I sat down with Dr. Tanaya to talk about her work and the story of Dr. Cuterus, my very first question was about the Indian response to a woman talking about sexual health, that too publicly. And her response was surprisingly hilarious.
“A man once sent me his complete blood profile and was willing to get as many tests as I needed to ensure he was healthy enough to marry me,” she said before breaking into a hearty laugh. Dr. Tanaya has received many marriage proposals since her page took off in May 2019. But the one with the blood reports was by far the most memorable one.
“About 40 percent of my DMs (direct messages on Instagram) are questions about personal medical advice which I ignore since I do not give out medical advice there. About 20 percent are positive and appreciative messages. Another 20 percent are asking questions that I have already answered on my page. I don’t know why people don’t take time to go through the content before sliding into my DMs asking about PCOS,” said Dr. Cuterus.
What about the rest 20 percent I ask, “That is the negative stuff, like unsolicited dick pics.”
When Instagram accused Dr. Cuterus of pornography
How does she handle the last 20 percent?
It was International Men’s Day, 2020, when Dr. Cuterus uploaded a reel on men’s sexual health. Up until then, it was all about the female body and female sexual health. “It was after this particular reel that the abuse began. My DMs were flooded with penises and I immediately reported as many as I could to Instagram. But got no response. So I started sharing screenshots of the DMs on my status, asking my followers to report them as well.” Then, Instagram took notice.
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But instead of responding to her reports against the abusers, Instagram was acting on reports initiated against her.
Within a few hours, Dr. Cuterus was action-blocked from going live. “I could not have imagined it was because I was speaking up against abuse. I thought it was due to a joke I made about upper-caste liberals. But no, Instagram soon informed me that my account was in violation of its community guidelines.”
How? According to Instagram, since the penises were shared in private chat, Tanaya had no right to share them publicly on her status.
“I had blurred the penises but kept their names visible,” Tanaya told the lady from Instagram, but to no avail. “It was all the more frustrating because I was talking to a lady about all this!” she told me. The strikes were removed once Tanaya went public with Instagram’s censorship against her, but not without warning against creating “pornographic content”.
“The only good thing to come out of it all was the number of dick pics reduced drastically. From a daily affair, it came down to four or five in a week,” she told me.
Instagram needs to up its grievance redressal game
At this point, I had nothing but sheer admiration for her will and creativity in handling the abuse.
“So the thing is, I was lucky to have received all that abuse after I had garnered enough followers and could do something about it. I wonder how smaller accounts deal with abuse because Instagram only took notice of my woe because of the number of people who stood up for me,” she replied matter of factly.
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Did she ask for help? “Yes, so I was also lucky to be able to contact people who could guide me in the matter. I spoke to many others who were also abused online and got a cold shoulder from Instagram just like me,” she replied. “I spoke to a woman whose ex-boyfriend had created her fake profile and uploaded all the nudes she sent him while they were together. When she reported the account, the guy responded by reporting her original account as the fake one,” she added.
Also, read this story:
How This 18-YO’s Initiative Is Empowering Children & Adults With Sexual Health Awareness
“Then my own cousin and fellow Instagram influencer Kaustubh was reported by people online for appropriating African culture. He has deadlocks and had uploaded a picture next to a Black artist’s poster on his profile. Instagram action blocked him without any consideration of how deadlocks were a part of the Indian Aghori culture as well,” she said, rather frustrated.
The lack of nuance in Instagram’s approach to the problems of influencers sounded disappointing at best and disastrous at worst. With the COVID-led lockdown, almost every social media site has witnessed a boom in both user-engagement and influencer-content. Instagram’s poor handling of online abuse could just be proof of its inability to evolve with changing times. I ask what Tanaya thinks about this.
“Well, my own account grew exponentially during the lockdown. Not only did the pandemic make Indians care for their health a bit more but also increased the amount of time spent online. So many of the most popular social media handles are lockdown babies. But Instagram’s response has been nothing short of a sh*t show,” she resigned.
What was Sex-ed like for the Sexual Health Expert?
Towards the end of our video call, I still had one more question to ask of the sexual health expert. What was her own experience with sex education like?
What about her own experience with intimacy and sex? “I think by the time I was ready to get intimate with someone, I knew a lot about the biological aspects of sex. But nobody had ever talked to me about nuances of intimacy. I too had to learn a lot along the way,” she said matter-of-factly. Indian orthodoxy is indeed diverse and we are all united in its diversity.
I told her about my friends who have shared Dr. Cuterus’s account with their teenage cousins hitting puberty. “Your work has made the monumental task of sex education that much easier for them,” I say. And also thanked her for rescuing my doomsday Instagram scrolling with her posts and reels on safe sex or breast cancer. After all, whatever was ever achieved by staying in one’s comfort zones?