What Alina shared with me between sips of already cold coffee was this: On Instagram, there are women — let's call them "the doll mothers" for simplicity's sake — who have a small problem. They want to show their breasts (for artistic reasons, naturally), but they're not allowed to. Instagram, that great digital virtue guardian, deletes bare nipples faster than you can say "OnlyFans".
Now you might think: tough luck. But evolution didn't equip humans with oversized brains for nothing. And so someone — probably during a sleepless night or after their third gin and tonic — had an epiphany: Babies! Or rather: plastic babies!
These Reborn Babies that Alina mentions are a chapter unto themselves. They're dolls that look so real that even my mother would initially mistake them for actual infants. And my mother raised three children, mind you. These things cost about as much on Etsy as a decent suit at C&A.
Anyway, this developed into a fascinating cat-and-mouse game with Instagram's algorithms. The artificial intelligence now faced a problem that would have even made Kant scratch his head: If a woman pretends to breastfeed a doll that looks like a real baby — is that a nursing mother (allowed) or a scantily clad lady (forbidden)?
While the servers were still smoking, business flourished. The "nursing mothers" busily linked their OnlyFans profiles, and the viewers… well, the viewers did whatever viewers do when they see a woman pretending to nurse a doll.
The end of the story is as predictable as a "Tatort" on Sunday evening: Eventually, the penny dropped at Instagram. Probably when an intern was scrolling through their feed during lunch break and choked on their quinoa sandwich.
Because sometimes reality is so absurd that it puts even the most creative April Fools' jokes to shame. This story is one hundred percent true. Crazy, right? Perhaps next time something seems too bizarre to be true, we should remember: On the internet, every day is a bit like April Fools' Day.