A Pleasant Ride: Vintage Aesthetics as a Strategy to Deliver Sex Education and Harm Reduction on Instagram

This article discusses the possibilities and limitations of delivering transformative sex education and harm reduction on highly regulated platforms such as Instagram and what are helpful strategies in this process. I use the Brazilian project Sento Mesmo (SENTA) as a case study. SENTA is a multiplatform project that uses vintage aesthetics and deploys explicit language to address its topics. It is an activist project as it challenges current paradigms, particularly the way sex-ed and drugs are hegemonically addressed, and targets groups excluded from public policies. SENTA is explicitly inspired by Freirean pedagogies, and I argue it can be framed as pleasure activism (brown, 2019) as it understands sexuality as more than just a site of oppression and as an indissociable part of our lives.
Through a mixed-methods approach that included content analysis and a semi-structured interview with the creator, I analysed SENTA’s content to understand the creative strategies chosen to evade Instagram’s ban or censorship. There are intentional and numerous contrasts: between text (explicit) and images (vintage, evoking the “good old times”), present and past, invisibility and visibility. In sum, visual, textual and engagement concessions have to be made to be able to circulate in such a highly regulated environment, but such concessions can still be filled with meaning. In SENTA’s case, the contrasts create a dialogue whilst trying to balance attractiveness for the readers and being harmless to the algorithms. This constant dialogue between past and present also reaffirms SENTA’s political alignment, including its alignment with historical LGBT actors in the country. I conclude that despite SENTA’s content being very context-specific, its strategies can be applied elsewhere, and become more important as public policies and traditional sex-ed approaches continue to overlook people who do not comply with every single norm.