For those of you who haven’t heard, facebook has joined the rank of the ‘Your breasts are there just for me to look at” club, whose members ‘til now included airlines, malls, nude sunbathing opponents and a bunch of teenage boys (sorry boys, I know you are well ahead of airlines and Facebook when it comes to the fine details of anatomy, biological function, and voyeurism).
It turns out that Facebook has been quietly removing the photos of breastfeeding women from their site—if they are obscene, of course, which only involves any sighting of that oh-so-erotic nipple that their baby is impudently hanging on to in order to, you know. eat and live.
On December 27th, Facebook members held a virtual nurse in, uploading breastfeeding photos to their pages, and updating their status to ‘Hey Facebook, breastfeeding is not obscene,”--also the name of the online group.
I joined. I breastfed my son to the elderly age of 16 months, enduring repeat bouts of mastitis that had me in the emergency room three times in one weekend and hand-expressing breast milk into paper towels in the bathroom during graduate school. I breastfed him in San Francisco MOMA, on the BART train and at parties. I whipped my boob out so fast that if breasts got whiplash I’d still be wearing a brace. I personally considered each act of public breastfeeding to be my own little political installation piece slash public health education intervention. If you stared at my breast, marveled at my shamelessness or felt a little bit uncomfortable, then I hadn’t just fed my baby, I’d changed society, one drop at a time. I felt it my public duty.
But the nipple is really just the tip of the iceberg. I marvel at a world in which (female) sexuality is so threatening and simultaneously so policed that we can’t see that it is our own discomfort and shame with our bodies and our sexuality that Facebook is trying to control. I am concerned that Facebook cannot separate sexual desire and biology, but I also wonder at the breastfeeding activists who try so fiercely to maintain that nipples ‘aren’t’ sexual. My nipples are sexual, but that’s not the problem—it’s when they are sexualized—and who has control over that—that it becomes an issue.
We can’t control how people will react to, sexualize and use photos—this is a huge issue with internet posting and re-posting of photos (see the Flickr controversy), including innocent photos of kids. But who’s to blame, here? If someone eroticizes a pic, do we blame the person in the photo, or the person who sees it as offensive? I realize that, ironically, this is like the exact opposite of my upskirting argument, where non-consensual photos were sexualized.
By the way, that's my son breastfeeding in the photo at the top. Sexy, huh? And here's a self-portrait of my co-worker's nipple (which, by the way, is welcome in malls, beaches, airlines and virtually every other locale in the world in its full, uncovered glory).
You tell me which is more, umm, titillating.
If Facebook is going to be doing some cleansing, they should start with the you-give-dirty-a-bad-name minds of its members, not by scrubbing nipples.
Tough call
Dr. J on Jan 08, 2009 08:30am