My Last Abusive Relationship

And life beyond the algorithm

In my last abusive relationship, the flush of the beginning was magical like I’d never known. Our communications were filled with hearts, and every time I picked up my phone I got that dopamine hit that made everything feel fated, meant to be.

I started to get comfortable. I started to focus only on this relationship. It gave so much back to me, I thought, why not pour all of myself into it? I took leaps of faith. I dug in. I committed.

And then, like a slow gas leak, so slow you hardly sense it, things began turning toxic. I was told my desires were sick and wrong. I was told that my passions were unattainable. I was told I was too much, and at the same time I would never succeed on my own.

But I adapted again. I learned to carefully moderate my speech. I censored. I kept my eyes downcast.

The way I saw myself slowly shifted. Where once I’d been independent, now I was dependent. Where once I was brave, I was now afraid. Where once I was radical, jubilant, quick to laugh, I was self-questioning, anxious, and ashamed.

You’ll never make it without me.

I control your money, and you’ll never recover.

I’ll cut you off from all your friends.

I’ll tell you exactly how to make me happy, then change my mind the next day.

These were things I had heard before.

But when they were coming from Instagram, I believed them.

If you’re reading this and we don’t already know each other, I’m Lina Dune, the creator of @askasub. I began my Instagram account in 2019 with one mission — to create content for kink-curious adults that would make them laugh, make them feel seen, and teach them safety practices and negotiation tools that would empower them to explore their desires.

Between my memes and my Friday story Q&A’s, I was fortunate enough to build my audience up to 115,000 followers from January of 2019 to December of 2022. This also gave me a platform to launch a podcast and share my online courses, which teach on topics from how to recognize red flags on dating apps to mindfully negotiating longterm relationships to how to use safe words and aftercare. More than anything, though, the community that formed on @askasub gave me a sense of belonging like I’d never felt and gave so many others a place to connect and be seen.

But on January 17^th, 2023 Instagram suspended my account for “sexual solicitation.” This had happened four other times during my tenure on their app, and each of those times my account was restored because it was clearly used for education and humor, and was not in violation of their terms. However, on February 10^th, my account was permanently deleted on the grounds that it was “promoting sexual violence, exploitation, and assault.”

When practiced by mindful participants, BDSM and kink are the farthest thing from violence. They are the pinnacle of consent. But in order to make them so, participants rely on finding good resources to disseminate not just the broad strokes and how-tos, but the realities and nuances of creating a sexual practice that cares for all involved.

When I began @askasub, I set out to create the resource I badly needed. But finding resources that spoke to me with empathy and a sense of play were scarce when I began my Instagram journey. The more I posted, the more humbled I became by the many testimonials I received from people who felt seen by my work. The community that formed around @askasub gave people a chance to find their voices, to avoid near misses with predators on dating apps, to leave abusive relationships and discover new and empowered sexualities. It wasn’t just the content — it was seeing that other people were resonating with it too. It was our heartfelt and supportive comments sections. It was the success stories I received in my Friday Q&As. Instagram, for a while, enabled this gathering that brought people joy and comfort. But as they’ve increased their censorship of their own users, communities like this are rapidly disappearing.

Whether Instagram likes it or not, adults have sex. And sex-having adults comprise the majority of their user base. And because our culture is saturated with kink iconography, those adults are going to encounter BDSM on Instagram. But when Instagram takes down accounts like mine and so many others that promote safety practices and share red flags with newbies, they are turning their platform into a weapon, and directly in its crosshairs are marginalized people who are fated to never find their desperately-needed communities.

I have seen firsthand the way predatory people leverage the language of BDSM to ensnare unsuspecting newbies on Instagram. Those people’s accounts are still active. And more are being made every day. Instagram cannot stamp out BDSM entirely, or even sex itself, so it needs creators like me present on the app to enforce its own community guidelines. If Instagram wants to be a “safe place” as they repeatedly claim in their guidelines, sex educators like myself should be an enshrined and protected class on their platform.

But making Instagram more inclusive is only a small piece of the puzzle. We all know these algorithmic social media platforms are bad for us. I don’t know about you, but Instagram has been killing my attention span. It has given me a complex about my body. These apps were supposed to be fun. But now, every aspect of the user experience is getting more and more hollowed out, to the point that simply logging on feels, as a recent article from the New York Times put it, like strolling through an abandoned mall with “nothing but a calendar store and a place selling beepers.”

So today is the end of my years-long campaign to create corporate-approved, sanitary content so Instagram can sell ad space next to me. No more will I modulate the tones of self-discovery, pleasure, and awakening for the prying eyes of a company that’s desperate to push blurry Reels down my throat.

Because knowing yourself, loving yourself, discovering the multifaceted and complex inner world your desire is calling you toward — that journey should be nowhere near an activity called “Doomscrolling.”

So here’s the plan. And it’s a little different than what we’re used to. We’re getting lean, we’re getting wily, and this raccoon army is going to pop up in so many places it’s gonna be like internet whack-a-mole. Anybody who loves getting consensually whacked is at the front of the line, and everybody else is welcome too!

Allow me to play concierge to your new journey beyond the algorithm…

If what you liked about the Instagram was the Friday Q&A’s:

Friday Q&A’s will now be hosted on the Ask A Sub Discord. This part of Discord is free and public and anyone can join. Do so at this link! Our first Q&A is this Friday, 2/17.

If you liked the community in the comments section:

Join Patreon and unlock our private Discord channels. This is a paid subscription starting at $5/month so we can keep the community well-moderated and accountable.

Come chat on 30+ channels about your interests, make friends, get gassed up, and maybe learn a thing or two. We’re particularly known for our Red Flag Screenshots channel, where folks share messages they’ve received on apps in an effort to keep each other aware of how to stay safe. We also share recipes, pet pictures, cute selfies, and spicy/silly/funny stories of real life BDSM scenes. You’re gonna love it!

If you want uncensored, mostly short-form ephemera, musings, bits of kink history, and playful transmissions from the kink world:

Subscribe to this substack. It will always be free, but if you want to tip me for my time with a paid subscription I’m going to find some way to thank you!

If you want more podcast:

That’s coming this Friday! Search “ask a sub” wherever you get your podcasts.

As for the memes…

I will continue to post them on Twitter, but I’m also amassing an archive of them on a public discord channel. See them now here.

I still have a small presence on Instagram on my backup account @lina.dune. I’m also launching @askasub2.0 with the intention of continuing to disseminate shareable content that reaches vulnerable people early in their journeys, with the full knowledge that Instagram is inhospitable to sex education (and fun in general), so I will likely get deleted again. But so what! This community is too special to be contained to just one app.

All this to say, the spiritual center of gravity and home of @askasub will now be the trifecta of Patreon, Discord, and Substack. Join me wherever you’ll be happiest.

And if you’re a sexuality creator, or want to support our cause, please come sign my petition on change.org. Let’s make a ruckus.