The Secret Social Network Waging War on Instagram’s Nudity Ban
On this site, the nipple will always be free.
We flock to Instagram to share racy, albeit PG-13 photos for a reason: those filters make us look infinitely better than the sad, florescent lighting under which they were originally taken. Add to that the instant, quantifiable approval of our peers by way of likes and comments, and it’s a recipe for long-lasting social media addiction.
There are just two, tiny problems: Because of strict guidelines from the Apple App Store, Instagram refuses to allow fully exposed breasts, along with any other nudity, which has sparked the widely popular #FreeTheNipple movement to change the puritanical guidelines of our favorite social networks. The nipple was born, and everywhere it is in chains.
But now, there’s a young upstart on the scene that wants to revitalize the sexy snap. Uplust, founded by French web developer Quentin Lechemia, takes all the best parts of Instagram and combines it with all the nudity the Facebook-owned app cruelly withholds from us. It’s a nude selfie site that looks eerily like Instagram, affording users the ability to share explicit pics and enjoy their God-given right to every filter under the sun. But unlike conventional porn sites, no one is paid to post. It’s just everyday users who want to get a little saucier than most apps will allow.
We caught up with Lechemia for the dirty details. “I really like Instagram as a basic user. The interface is ergonomic and the concept is pretty simple: visual content is king,” he told Maxim.
But aside from photos you can like and share, and Vine-like video capability, Uplust boasts one more key feature missing on Instagram: games. Sexy time-wasters like “Game of Boobs,” which challenges you to match the chest-region of the topless HBO actresses to their character names, helps Lechemia reach the goal he always strived for: to de-stigmatize the naked form in a positive, open way. Next, he’s promising “Booty Crush,” a parody of the ubiquitous Candy Crush. Except, you know, with butts.
But it wasn’t always smooth sailing through an endless ocean of unmentionables. Back in 2014, the site was using the name Pornstagram, but were quickly contacted by Instagram’s lawyers. They wouldn’t sue, they said, so long as the company changed their name ASAP. And so, Uplust, a name chosen by some 7,000 users, was born.
To Lechemia, Uplust is more than just another site for porn. “We live in a hyper-sexualized society in which any commercial for shampoo or coffee will use sex as a selling point,” he says. “And porn as it is produced nowadays has no ambition to reproduce real-life situations anymore. I think that’s why Uplust is so popular: people seem to prefer real-life pictures and exchanges instead.”
Combating the flaws in porn culture and delivering uncensored nipples? We’ll take it. When asked if he had one message he could deliver to naked-shaming folks of Insta, Lechemia laughed: “400 million users and not one nipple? This is not real life guys!”
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