Why did Instagram censor this photo of a fully clothed woman on her period?

As part of a visual rhetoric course at the University of Waterloo, the Toronto-based poet and artist Rupi Kaur has been working on a photo series with her sister Prabh about menstruation. The photos are understated, grainy, totally non-graphic; their purpose, Kaur says in an artist’s statement, is to demystify and destigmatize the female body -- to make viewers “realize these are just regular, normal processes,” nothing to reject or shame or shun. How fitting, then, that within 24 hours, Instagram took her photos down.

On March 25, Kaur received a message from Instagram that a photo of a woman lying in bed -- fully clothed, with a blood stain on the sheets -- had been removed for violating the site’s “community guidelines.” (Those guidelines only formally forbid nudity, illegal activity and images that glorify self-harm.) But when Kaur reposted the photo, Instagram removed it a second time -- provoking Kaur to pen a sternly worded open letter to the site that’s since been “liked” more than 54,000 times on Facebook.