I accidentally entered into the Instagram world where people obsess over tights

Like most young people, I’ve become a slave to the corporate machine that is endlessly regurgitating apps and technology that we can all waste our lives on.

As a female with cripplingly low self-esteem, my need to achieve acceptance through the approval of strangers has translated to Instagram being my timewasting app of choice. However, somewhere along the way, my uncoordinated mixture of duckface selfies, endless photos of my dog, and heavily filtered travel pictures opened the door to a dark and mysterious area of Instagram. This area is the world of tights obsessives.

As you can see, my Instagram feed is pretty similar to any 21 year old girl

Everyone knows there are Instagram pages that are just downright pervy. The internet’s obsession with female rear-ends has led to countless pages that worship bums, and everyone knows that the site is a temple for the fitness-obsessed, who gaze upon super-toned bodies with religious fervency.

However, it came as a big surprise when I realised the extremity of the internet’s niche obsession with tights. After allowing one page to repost my photos, I was soon met with comments and messages from fans of tights who were keen to get me on board. Even months after the original incident occurred, there’s still moments of disappointment when I realise that the little message icon is simply just another person requesting to see me in my nylons.

When I started to realise that the tights fans were definitely clutching at straws

Possibly the worst part of my induction into the world of tights fans is that it was entirely my own fault. I was flattered by someone wanting to regram my photos, and jumped onto the opportunity to gain more followers and thus feel more accepted like the mindless sheep that I unashamedly am. It wasn’t until I checked the page later and realised that they over-zealously tagged things like ‘feet’ and ‘legs’ that it dawned on me that I wasn’t being appreciated for my excellent taste in leg attire, instead, parts of my body were being used as some kind of weird thrill-seeking search option.

The beginning of the end #regrets

The irony lies in the fact that I’d never consider myself to be the sort of person with legs or feet that a few people on the internet could become enthralled with. As someone under 5’5 with an unwillingness to part from pizza, I lack the long, slender legs that I’ve always associated with these types of obsessions. Where some people have willowy branches, I have stumpy things that have to rush with cartoon-like haste just to keep up with the pace of my long-limbed friends.

As for a thigh-gap (the holy grail of Instagram) my own legs are so solidly together that I’m waiting for the call from Donald Trump to use my chunky barriers as a cheap option for his favourite wall. People requesting to see photos of my tight-clad legs, unaware of the horrible myriad of bruises and winter leg hair beneath, was only an added surprise to this bizarre situation.

After the original incident occurred, I learnt my lesson about agreeing to let people use my photos without properly checking everything beforehand. With this in mind, I decided to continue using my account the way I knew how to (by posting vacuous photos of clothes, make-up, and myself). You can picture my frustration when the tights fans continued to show their support for what I had previously considered a pretty irrelevant part of an outfit, even leaving comments about my tights on photos of nail-art.

Sometimes, it wasn’t even nice pairs of tights that they complimented. I have the grace of a drunken squirrel, and this means that the majority of my tights have been ripped so many times that they’re essentially just cobwebs made of stringy nylon. So when I received compliments on some of my scummiest pairs of tights, my suspicions that it was less about the tights themselves and more about being a bit of a perv were pretty much confirmed.

One of the many requests

The tights fans themselves are a pretty odd bunch, although they seem nice enough. Their wording is reminiscent of the sort of thing you could imagine uttered by an old man rasping down the phone during a crank-call, with phrases like ‘nylon-covered feet’ sending a shiver of repulsion down my spine that can only be matched by people over 12 who use the word ‘panties’. I’ve not replied to any of the requests, in the vain hope that I’d get some sort of reputation amongst the tights loving community as being a bit of a frosty bitch who’s not worth talking to.

This doesn’t seem to deter some of those messaging, who take my silence as a cue to send me a smiling emoji, or more bizarrely, a photo of me from my own Instagram, as if seeing my own face would encourage me to share my feet with the world.

Where my style becomes an afterthought

I have often considered exposing myself for the leg and feet fraud that these accounts have made me become. Perhaps if I shared a photo of my legs in all their bruised, lumpy glory, or a #nofilter shot of my heavily blistered feet, they’d be so repulsed that they’d never bother requesting another pic again.

Fortunately for the general public, I’m unwilling to inflict that horror on the world, and so the pestering will probably continue. Take this as a warning for any of you who consider letting in the wrong kind of people through social media. As for me, I’ll surrender myself to the fact that on my wedding day, I’ll lean in to kiss my husband, and he’ll whisper those eternally-tarnished words: ‘I can’t wait to see your nylon-clad feet later’.