One of our very first posts on SocImages was a Wrestle Mania billboard. It featured a bunch of muscle-bound men without shirts, but their nipples were photoshopped out. They were too suggestive of women’s nipples (which are obscene, obviously) and possibly against the law.
Nipple-phobia is back with a particularly amusing example from Facebook. Company policy requires deleting images of “female nipple bulges” (defined as “naked ‘private parts'”; male nipples, with or without bulges, are excluded from the ban). This prompted Facebook to take down a New Yorker cartoon by Mick Stevens, see if you can figure why.
Robert Mankoff mocked the incident.
To be fair, and here I begin my own mockery, we are talking about Eve here. And she had lost her innocence — and the innocence of the entire human race — with her “original” idea. So… you know, she was a dirty, dirty gal who did a bad, bad thing and would realize the importance of covering up those “dirty pillows” sooner or later. Facebook was just ahead of the curve. I guess.
Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.
Comments 17
maisnon — September 18, 2012
I think that "dirty pillows" is from Steven King's novel "Carrie."
Julie — September 18, 2012
If you want a tit site, make your own. If your'e on someone else's site, you play by their rules, the same as if you were in someone else's home.
Matt — September 18, 2012
Meanwhile, the list of hate speech they refuse to ban, contra their terms of service, continues to grow.
MJS — September 18, 2012
Facebook has that rule to keep people from turning their site into a porn-fest and there's no real way to legislate "good taste" on a broad scale And I can guarantee you that if they didn't have that rule the amount of porn posted would drastically outnumber the amount of "tasteful" images.
Wehaf — September 18, 2012
I watched an episode of Dr. 90210 once, on which one of the patients was a MTF transgendered individual getting some feminizing surgeries on her face, and breast implants. They do before and after shots, so there was an image of her (nude) torso, pre-surgery, and post-surgery. Her nipples were shown in the pre-surgery photo, in which they weren't backed by any breasts. They were blurred out in the post-surgery image, despite being the exact same nipples. So even the presence of silicone or saline in the vicinity of a nipple can make it obscene, it seems.
OBSCENITY BREAST SCALE = FACEBOOK BAN « — September 19, 2012
[...] time the ban was for an obscenity sale I created as a reaction to “Disturbing Dots: Facebook Ban’s Eve’s Nipples” on Sociological Images. Facebook took down a New Yorker cartoon by Mick Stevens due to the [...]
Ric Laze-Jadapante — September 19, 2012
As a reaction to this article, I made a handy scale for breast obscenity and received a three day ban from Facebook. I wrote a post about it here:
http://ericalapadat-janzen.com/2012/09/19/obscenity-breast-scale-facebook-ban/
oofstar — September 19, 2012
the similar ban on television is also sketchy, though my examples are old. you can show people simulating sex on tv as long as there are no breasts or sex parts shown. you can show a fake breast on a woman, as happened on the view when one of them was showing some kind of fake breasts shirt. on kids in the hall, when it was on comedy central, not HBO which would obviously be different, they had a male actor playing a male character with breasts, and showed the breasts. the breasts were fake. and on in living color, they had a male actor playing a woman. the actor was not wearing fake breasts, but they showed his actual chest AS IF THEY WERE THE FEMALE CHARACTER's.
there is a consistency to that but it is still stupid. you can have rules against lude photos without specifying specific body parts. and you can ban men from showing their nipples without it really getting in people's way.
Brenda — September 19, 2012
This pedant want you to fix the incorrect apostrophe in the title of this post. Thanks.