Instagram Is ‘for Girls’. Why is That an Insult, Mr Musk?

Apparently, your masculinity now depends on which app you open.

Choose the wrong icon and you risk expulsion from the boys’ club. Somewhere between uploading a photograph and watching a Reel, a man must apparently surrender his credentials. Elon Musk has offered his verdict: “Instagram is for girls.”

And we are supposed to understand why that is a bad thing.

Musk reportedly posted the remark in response to Geiger Capital, which announced it had deleted Instagram, describing it as an “inherently female app” with “zero benefit”. Read together, the exchange leaves little mystery about how “female” is being deployed. It supplies the reason for the dismissal.

The obvious question deserves to be asked without embarrassment: what, exactly, is wrong with something being for girls?

Musk has a commercial interest here. He owns X; Instagram belongs to Meta, the company led by Mark Zuckerberg, which also owns Facebook. A businessman mocking a competitor is hardly a revelation. The revealing part is the weapon he reaches for.

He could argue that his platform offers a better experience. He could discuss what users can do on it, whom they can reach, or why their time would be better spent there. Instead, this particular put-down asks an old prejudice to do the persuasion.

If you are a man, the implication runs, you should worry about being associated with the other lot. A curious pitch for technological progress.

The boys’ club has a checkout

Advertising has been here before. In Britain in 2002, Nestlé’s Yorkie chocolate bar carried the slogan “It’s not for girls”. A perfectly ordinary consumer choice became a little performance of belonging. Buy the chocolate; join the club.

The rivalry makes the parallel particularly apt. Marketing Week’s contemporary account described Nestlé’s positioning against Mars, which was seeking to attract more women. Gender supplied the vocabulary for a contest between competing brands.

More than two decades later, the product is a social platform and the provocation comes from its rival’s owner. The underlying invitation is familiar: make a purchase, or a platform choice, that reassures you about the kind of man you are.

There are legitimate reasons to design products for particular audiences. People have different needs, and businesses should understand them. The objection begins when a female association becomes evidence of inferiority, or when male customers are encouraged to treat ordinary preferences as threats to their identity.

Consider Bic’s “For Her” pens, which attracted ridicule in 2012. Pink and purple stationery became an occasion for women to mock the suggestion that writing required a specially feminised product.

That episode exposed the absurdity of attaching gender instructions to everyday objects. Musk’s remark applies the same impulse to an app. Even our phone screens, apparently, require separate entrances.

This is also a remarkably patronising way to address men. It assumes their confidence is so fragile that downloading a rival’s product might endanger it. A grown man should be able to enjoy a photograph, follow a chef or watch a dance without requiring clearance from the masculinity department.

Zuckerberg complicates the picture

It would be convenient to cast Zuckerberg as the enlightened businessman on the receiving end of an adolescent taunt.

His own words make that difficult. On Joe Rogan’s podcast in January 2025, Zuckerberg praised “masculine energy” and argued that a corporate culture more accepting of aggression had positive merits. He also acknowledged the value of different forms of energy. That qualification matters.

So does the distinction between the two remarks. Zuckerberg was discussing workplace culture; Musk was disparaging a competing platform. They were making different arguments.

Yet Zuckerberg’s formulation raises its own question: why assign a gender to the qualities a business should value?

Ambition, resilience, decisiveness and competitiveness are available to women. Empathy, patience and cooperation are available to men. An organisation needs to judge when those qualities help, when they fail, and how people exercise them. Calling a quality masculine tells us precious little about whether it produces sound decisions.

A forceful executive can be wrong. An empathetic colleague can be right. Aggression is no guarantee of competence.

The irony is hard to miss. Instagram can be dismissed as female by one technology leader while the man leading its parent company calls for more masculine energy in corporate life. Neither formulation gives us a useful way to assess the product or the workplace.

Both make gender do explanatory work it cannot bear.

The joke still needs an answer

Of course, the defence is ready: it was a joke. A bit of trolling. Why dignify it with a column?

Because jokes reveal what an audience is expected to take for granted. This one needs “girls” to register as a downgrade. Remove that assumption and the insult loses its engine.

A joke can be casual and still deserve scrutiny. Readers are entitled to examine the premise, especially when the speaker has a business interest in the product being mocked.

There is no need to claim that Musk devised a calculated campaign to move users from Instagram to X. The exchange does not establish that. Its effect as rhetoric is clear enough: it invites the audience to judge a competitor through a gender hierarchy.

Nor should the rebuttal depend on assembling famous male Instagram users or proving that the app has plenty of men.

Imagine, for a moment, that every person using it were female. Would that settle anything about its usefulness, creativity or commercial worth? Would the work conducted there become less serious? Would its users’ attention become less worthy of respect?

A defence that says “men use it too” quietly accepts that male participation is the certificate of legitimacy. It leaves the insult’s underlying assumption untouched.

A lesson from ‘Like a Girl’

In 2014, Always launched #LikeAGirl, a campaign that challenged the use of girlhood as shorthand for weakness. Its central insight was simple: language can teach girls to think less of themselves, and those associations can be challenged.

Always was selling products. Its message belonged to a commercial campaign, with all the scrutiny that entails. Even so, it demonstrated that a business could seek relevance by questioning a familiar prejudice.

Musk’s remark reaches for that prejudice again.

He is entitled to dislike Instagram. He is entitled to compete fiercely with Meta and mock Zuckerberg’s products. Readers are equally entitled to expect an argument that survives the removal of a schoolyard sneer.

If X offers something better, explain it. If Instagram deserves criticism, make the case. “For girls” describes an audience. Mr Musk still owes us the insult.