Or, my weekend banned from Facebook.
Not sure if you noticed me missing last weekend. If you follow the Fit is a Feminist Issue page on Facebook, you might have wondered where we went.
We were banned from Facebook, sent to the virtual time out chair in the corner, for 24 hours. I was also forced to scroll through pages of rules about content and about community standards and then tick boxes promising my photos didn’t contain nudity. Mostly tedious. But I confess I’m a bit riled about what got me banned.
To be clear, it was me who did the Bad Thing, for which we were both punished since we both act as page administrators.
Here’s the story that got me in trouble this time,
Bare Reality: 100 women and their breasts
A hundred women have bared their breasts and their souls as part of a project to further understanding of how women really feel about their breasts, and how they really look.
Last time it was the story about the woman who took her photo everyday for forty years, wearing just a pair of plain white undies. Again, not particularly sexy photos but that’s part of the problem.
Friends say it’s pictures of breasts in particular that get you in trouble. Not model breasts but rather ordinary, aging, breasts without photoshop.
At first I was distressed that people who like our page would complain that we were offending them. You don’t have to like us after all. It turns out though the complaints likely weren’t from our followers. The posts are public and so once liked they show up in other newsfeeds.
So no more links shared on Facebook via our page that contain photos of breasts. We’ll share those links via a weekly link round up. I’m irked but I’ll live with it.
The double standards get me down. There’s lots of normative female nudity all over Facebook. Likewise photos of naked men. They’re all over my newsfeed. Here’s my recent favourite.
Our first weekly link round up will be this weekend.
Cheers!
A friend of mine posted a link to this same thing on the page she admins, and had the same outcome. Once she mentioned she got slapped on the wrist for it, I went looking for your link and sure enough….
I’m sorry you were punished by Facebook. Honestly, when I see a photo collage like that of a bunch of breasts it starts to all look the same….like breasts. I know that may not be the “right” message, but to me it’s kind of like crime on the news. Once you’ve seen enough stories about the same type of crime you start to tune it out because it becomes the norm and it’s a similar story every time. It no longer has a great impact on the emotions. The same is true for me and a lot of naked bodies….you start to notice how they’re all the same. In this case, there’s two in every photo, most of them are medium to light in tone, and most of them face a little to the outside. If they were placed individually, instead of as a group, I might notice them more. I might see the reason that people could get offended by a parade of breasts (not that I think we should ever be offended by human nature), but here I think it’s just flat out not the case. I applaud the project’s effort to bring awareness, but aesthetically they’ve made the breasts mundane and not something that’s unique or to be celebrated.