“I was well aware of the gender bias in the algorithm before, but this took it to another level,” Eliza Hatch, creator of @cheerupluv tells Stylist.

Hatch says that it’s “astonishing” that pictures of a completely visible penis are allowed to stay on-site when her posts sharing a survivor’s testimony of sexual harassment or DMs including verbal abuse or unsolicited images that she’s received get “removed by Instagram immediately”.

“Photos of breastfeeding mothers with even the slightest sliver of areola showing are removed instantaneously. Images of Black curvy bodies are constantly shadow-banned or taken down. Testimonies of sexual harassment and abuse are suppressed and censored, and sex-positive pages are warned that their accounts are going to be deleted all the time. But the full-frontal penis of a verified straight white man with over 1 million followers? Yep, totally fine. No community guidelines breached there. And do you know why? Because they were written by the very same men.”

Indeed, Lee is not the first male celebrity to share nude photographs to the app; nor will he be the last, but the blatant double standards when it comes to women’s and trans bodies is something that desperately needs to be addressed.

As Martin herself highlighted, the problem is not that Tommy Lee wants to post a nude photo, but instead “the blatant gender double standard that sees [how] the algorithm and people working in reports view feminine bodies, especially Black, plus-sized and disabled people’s bodies and skin as inappropriate whether they are portrayed sexually or not, but has no issue with this.”

Instagram – and its parent company Meta – owe it to its 1 billion monthly users to continue deplatforming hateful, dangerous and inappropriate images shared on the app. But the question remains – why are women’s bodies so quick to be censored?

Stylist has approached Instagram for comment.

What the Tommy Lee Instagram censorship debate teaches us about the double standard around women’s bodies