“Our world is a world in which carelessness reigns,” are the first lines of The nursing manifesto by The Care Collective. Her words resonate in today’s digital world, where attention is currency and empathy often feels automated. Sociologist Beverley Skeggs once described Care as the backbone of capitalist societies. Doing the work is important, but it is underrated.
In the age of the information economy, sharing is important. Likes, comments and shares have become measurable signs of care and sources of income. On Instagram, every five-second reel hides hours of unseen work: scripting, editing, subtitling, research, and staying on top of trends. Scrolling reels and increased screen time are social and economic currency for such platforms. The pressure to constantly create and stay visible is real. And so it is with burnout. In the virtual space where knowledge is free, the intellectual and digital work of creators remains unpaid, invisible, feminized and unnoticed.
For sex educators on Instagram, this invisible work is tied to gender roles, trolling, and censorship. Teaching young people about sexual health, consent, pleasure and relationships is not easy and is often dismissed as “dirty” or “immoral”. Despite these challenges, many of them are redefining what care means in digital spaces, turning exhaustion into solidarity and visibility into resistance.
Feminization of care
Content creation on Sex Education is highly gender specific. Talking about pleasure, sexuality, the orgasm gap, menstrual health, and gender identity, especially in women, has historically been overlooked. In the online public space, education about sexual health and female pleasure reflects this ancient, undervalued work of women.
An exception is sometimes a male sex educator and a gynecologist who creates content on Instagram. As a male educator in a respected medical profession, Dr. Meanwhile, female educators are targeted for their body image and appearance and labeled as indecent, shameful or immoral. Speaking of trolling, Dr. Cuterus says: “A common troll I get is comments like fatherless behavior and comments about my body.”
This difference shows how gendered norms of respectability and expertise shape the public legitimacy of sex educators. When women talk about sex, it violates the moral code of modesty. Men who talk about sex are not considered immoral, but rather untrustworthy. Their masculinity protects them from moral scrutiny, but they are trivialized because they enter a feminized realm of care and pleasure.
Mechanical reproduction of care
The emotional, intellectual and embodied work of content creators is often undermined. It must be produced as a carefully packaged performance in the format of reels, infographics, and clickbait advice to produce what suits the platform while emotionally draining the educator.
P, a forty-year-old sex educator, described this tension succinctly: “I get hundreds of DMs from people about their marriages, sexual dissatisfaction, trauma, sometimes at 3am.
A sex educator must always be available, sensitive and responsive. Women and queer educators emphasized the need to respond quickly or risk the messages being ignored. Gayatri, a young married sex educator on Instagram, @gayatrisaHe says: “Some people really need help. I try to respond to all DMs. But some are downright offensive. I block haters or negative comments. I don’t care anymore.”
Women’s intellectual work and emotional attention are taken for granted. It becomes an infinite resource that resonates Nancy Fraser (2016) “Capitalism treats worry as an infinite reservoir” metaphor. Your work is fed into an algorithm that rewards attention without caring.
Dr. Cuterus talks about how algorithmic systems turn care into performance: “I have to make everything sound fun or easy, otherwise Instagram will report it. But these are serious topics. In the end, you make content in a digestible way because that’s what works.”
What counts as consumable content should be consistent with the visual and moral codes of the platform. A cheerful, byte-sized file that’s visually clear enough for people to see.
Digital violence in online sex education
The most disturbing part of this economy is the violence educators face every day. Many experience sexual harassment under the guise of curiosity.
A 30-year-old queer sex educator says, “I used to keep my DMs open and people would chat to me about their sex life problems. However, it was more like harassment than real problems. Someone could actually get confused if it wasn’t about how to play with breasts, but most of the time some men would ask me questions like that to harass me.”
They go on to talk about providing advice via video calls and where “flashing of private parts” is common. When asked what they had done about the incident, they said: “Nothing. Block them and move on.”
Who do educators turn to? The platform itself underestimates the work of sex educators as explicit, obscene or risky. A forty-year-old sex educator who speaks openly about female pleasure on Instagram says: “People call me a porn star on my reels when I openly talk about my sexuality as an aging woman.”
Despite India’s online harassment laws, reporting such incidents remains cumbersome. Blocking, reporting, or not caring is the best option. This silence is not apathy, it is exhaustion. Platforms rarely take responsibility, and algorithms often amplify hate by rewarding outrage and engagement. Sex educators, especially women and queer creatives, become easy targets in a system that values visibility but offers no protection. K, another sex educator, says that her content is banned, flagged or reported by the platform itself for its sexual content. She says, “I’ll change the spelling, I’ll use euphemisms, but my content keeps getting flagged. I keep getting notices from Instagram saying my content is being banned, which has affected my growth. There are no stand-up jokes about sex that get banned, but factual content gets deleted immediately.”
S, 23, who runs a sex education site that focuses particularly on young people’s sexual health and relationships, explained how care under this regime is shifting from collective to individualized care. “I used to think of it as community education, but now it feels like follower therapy[…] People want personal validation more than learning. The emotional labor is endless.”
Beyond solidarity towards collective care
Sex education is still not institutionalized in India. Social media acts as a bridge to close the ignorance towards sexuality. Without adequate support infrastructure, it is difficult for independent educators to survive. With the constant demand to produce something and little or no reward in the form of likes, shares, and subscriptions, educators must battle the invisible world of algorithms. As young sex educators grow on Instagram, they are also creating a collective network.
Acts of collective care and resistance emerge. Educators are joining forces with social media certificate courses to combat the arbitrary regulation of algorithmic content.
Articaa 28-year-old sex educator who founded The Secs Project For online sex educators, the support system that educators have built is discussed.
“It’s very good to have this network of other like-minded sex educators. The comprehensive and inclusive sex education that we want to do can become an echo chamber.” […] But you share ideas, brainstorm together, talk about different concepts, and get feedback from others. We work together and drive our content forward together. Celebrity educators with a million followers are so humble. I just DMed someone when I had a thousand followers and she was just so nice and open-minded.”
These small solidarities reflect a form of radical care: not just emotional support, but a political practice that thinks beyond the logic of capital.
Annika Amber is a PhD candidate in Sociology at the University of Hyderabad.
