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Health

This Instagram Was Deleted Because It Showed A Woman’s Menstrual Blood

“Their patriarchy is leaking. Their misogyny is leaking. We will not be censored.”
posted on March 27, 2015, at 6:16 p.m.
Sally Tamarkin
Sally Tamarkin
BuzzFeed Staff
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1. Earlier this week, Toronto college student Rupi Kaur posted this photo to her Instagram account.

2. The next day, Instagram removed the photo, claiming it violated the company’s Community Guidelines.

3. It’s from a photo series Kaur created with her sister as a final project for a college course. The project is meant to “demystify the period and make something that is innate ‘normal.’”

period. 

(a photo series shot by sisters rupi and prabh kaur.  art direction by rupi kaur.)
i bleed each month to help make humankind a possibility. my womb is home to the divine. a source of life for our species. whether i choose to create or not. but very few times it is seen that way. in older civilizations this blood was considered holy. in some it still is. but a majority of people. societies. and communities shun this natural process. some are more comfortable with the pornification of women. the sexualization of women. the violence and degradation of women than this. they cannot be bothered to express their disgust about all that. but will be angered and bothered by this. we menstruate and they see it as dirty. attention seeking. sick. a burden. as if this process is less natural than breathing. as if it is not a bridge between this universe and the last. as if this process is not love. labour. life. selfless and strikingly beautiful. 

4. After the photo was removed, Kaur reposted it, pointing out that it does not violate Instagram’s stated guidelines.


The guidelines state that users are prohibited from sharing content that: belongs to someone else, shows nudity, mature, or illegal content, or promotes or glorifies self-harm, none of which Kaur believes her photo did.

5. When Instagram deleted it a second time, Kaur posted it on Facebook, with an open letter to Instagram protesting the removal.

News Feed

Rupi Kaur
Artist · 30,362 Likes
· March 25 at 8:39am · Edited ·
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thank you Instagram for providing me with the exact response my work was created to critique. you deleted my photo twice stating that it goes against community guidelines. i will not apologize for not feeding the ego and pride of misogynist society that will have my body in an underwear but not be okay with a small leak. when your pages are filled with countless photos/accounts where women (so many who are underage) are objectified. pornified. and treated less than human. tha...nk you. ⠀⠀
as a part of my final project for my visual rhetoric course i created this image along with a full set which you can view at www.rupikaur.com to demystify the period and make something that is innate "normal" again cause rape categories in porn are okay. objectification and sexualization is okay. people getting off on naked underage women. bondage. torture. humiliation. abuse is okay but this makes them uncomfortable. that's what this work is supposed to do. make you as uncomfortable as you should feel when you watch others get abused and objectified. ⠀⠀⠀⠀ ⠀
⠀⠀⠀⠀ ⠀⠀⠀⠀ ⠀
This just goes to show who is sitting behind the desk. And whose controlling the show. Whose controlling the media and who is censoring us.
Some women aren’t allowed in their religious place of worship. Out of their homes. To do certain things. And are told they are sick. As if the period is a common cold. Yes. This is here in North America. I have been hospitalized many times because of issues associated with my period. I have been suffering from a sickness related to my period. And ever since I have been working so hard to love it. Embrace it. Celebrate it. Even thought it’s given me so much pain in the past few years. and they want to tell me I should be quiet about this. That all of this we experience collectively does not need to be seen. Just felt secretly behind closed doors. That’s why this is important. Because when I first got my period my mother was sad and worried. And they want to censor all that pain. Experience. Learning. No.
Their patriarchy is leaking.
Their misogyny is leaking.
We will not be censored.
⠀⠀⠀ ⠀⠀⠀⠀ ⠀
i bleed each month to help make humankind a possibility. my womb is home to the divine. a source of life for our species. whether i choose to create or not. but very few times it is seen that way. in older civilizations this blood was considered holy. in some it still is. but a majority of people. societies. and communities shun this natural process. some are more comfortable with the pornification of women. the sexualization of women. the violence and degradation of women than this. they cannot be bothered to express their disgust about all that. but will be angered and bothered by this. we menstruate and they see it as dirty. attention seeking. sick. a burden. as if this process is less natural than breathing. as if it is not a bridge between this universe and the last. as if this process is not love. labour. life. selfless and strikingly beautiful.
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6. “I will not apologize for not feeding the ego and pride of misogynist society that will have my body in an underwear but not be okay with a small leak,” she wrote on her Facebook page.

7. And then by Thursday morning, the post had reappeared on Kaur’s Instagram page with an apology.

The photo-sharing app saod the image’s removal was a mistake. A spokesperson from Instagram told BuzzFeed Life via email: “When our team processes reports from other members of the Instagram community, we occasionally make a mistake. In this case, we wrongly removed content and worked to rectify the error as soon as we were notified. We apologize for any inconvenience.”

8. Kaur celebrated the return of her photos with a post on — yes — Instagram.

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