The Voltage Gate

Tara has brought my attention to Facebook's latest and greatest blunder. They have banned a Canadian woman named Karen Speed from the site for uploading breastfeeding pics to her profile, claiming that:

After reviewing your situation, we have determined you violated our Terms of Use. Please note, nudity, drug use, or other obscene content is not allowed on the website. Additionally, we do not allow users to send threatening, obscene, and harassing messages. Unsolicited messages will also not be tolerated. We will not be able to reactivate your account for any reason. This decision is final. Thanks for understanding.

So having pictures of a mom breastfeeding her child is equivalent to porn, shooting up and spamming? Nice. I'm sure that makes moms feel great about themselves.

I've been on Facebook for a couple years now after being harassed into it by friends at college. You get friend invites constantly, mostly from people you barely know from class, or a club or that you met at a function of some sort. On the front page feed, it gives a list of what your friends have been up to, such as relationship status, notes written back and forth and previews of pictures that they have posted. Most of the pics during the semester are taken at parties, and among the debauchery, there are always pics of girls wearing much less in front of a multitude of drunken idiots than they probably should, and yet Facebook has no problem with that.

Tara makes the essential point:

...it's... pathetic that in this day and age this is even a story. Newsflash: BREASTS HAVE A FUNCTION. They feed babies. Telling women that seeing them nurse is nasty and "obscene:" bad. Encouraging moms to breastfeed babies if they are willing and able: good. Simple. So why is it that a story comes along every 6 months or so where this has to be hammered into more heads?

Good question. Why is the breastfeeding pic obscene but the drunken string bikini barely covering anything not obscene? Is it the penetration? Perhaps. We do have a collective phobia of penetration as a society. I don't think that entirely explains it though.

I think it's the physiological act itself, as Tara said. A woman's breasts are largely viewed as a attractant for men, for a man's pleasure. It seems to make some men uncomfortable to think of them in any other way, that they could possibly have another use other than making them feel all tingly inside. And for a woman to be proud enough to share her power to nurture her own child with the world seems to be too brazen an act for America.

The decision makers at Facebook, just like the readers of Baby Talk, are superimposing their own prudish perceptions on these public displays of breastfeeding. The act itself is innocent, sweet and entirely natural; the offended peer through contextual lenses that shame and sexualize nudity, unable to look behind their cultural leanings to recognize the beauty of the mother and child relationship expressed through a fascinating physiological process.

If you're on Facebook, join the petition group that has been started. I want to see that apology sent out not only to Karen, but to all moms who breastfeed.