Faceboob

Let me see if I can make everybody unhappy. I haven’t done that in a while.

The proprietors of Facebook can’t seem to decide whether images of babies and boobies are obscene. One day they’re permissible, the next they’re censored. Babycenter had an article yesterday about the booby-brouhaha, and I nearly jumped on the Facebook-hating bandwagon myself. How dare they? And then I took firm hold of my emotions for a moment so I could think about what’s really going on here.

Is Facebook hating on breastfeeding moms? Is Facebook discouraging breastfeeding? Is Facebook violating anyone rights? The answer to all of these things is no. I told one of my friends this morning that I thought Facebook was wrong, but the more I think about it, the less concerned I am about Facebook’s policy. I actually don’t think they were wrong to remove those photos at all.

The people who decide what to censor at Facebook are well within their rights to yank down whatever pictures they deem to be too revealing. You agree to their terms of service when you sign up. Tough cookies if you don’t like it. You don’t have to use Facebook. Granted, life without it is a little bit harder, due to its ever-expanding grip on the internet. Regardless, you are still quite capable of not going there, so just delete your account if you don’t like their policy. I quit Facebook for a few months once. The world kept turning!

Personally, I don’t find the images of moms putting baby to breast to be even remotely titillating (sorry), and I’d never report them as obscene, but I can see why some might. Some of the banned (and unbanned and then banned again, ad infinitum) images are showing a whole lot of skin. Not only are there a lot of people who just don’t want to look at your entire upper body, naked as the day you were born, but there are also a lot of men who probably are incredibly happy to look at your undressed self.

Just because there’s a baby in the picture doesn’t mean a certain kind of person won’t get off on it. Facebook might very well be protecting the mother and child in those photos from the eyes of some pretty disgusting perverts. Maybe you don’t care what kind of thoughts people are having while they’re looking at your images, but Facebook does have a legitimate interest in keeping that kind of traffic off their site. I think it’s pretty naive of the moms to put those pictures on the internet and assume that just because their intentions and actions are innocent, other viewers will honor that innocence by not misusing the images for pornographic purposes.

I have a right to breastfeed my baby. There is truly nothing obscene about it!  But I don’t have a right to upload pictures of that on someone else’s servers. It’s up to Facebook to decide what is in or out of bounds for their business.

I’m much more concerned with the silly whining of a bunch of moms who think that breastfeeding their babies entitles them to disregard all of the rules and mores of the society around them. I am a staunch advocate of the rights of mothers to nurse their babies in public, so don’t think I’m attacking the act of baring a boob where someone else might see it. I’m emphatically not.

I’ve nursed 4 babies now, for a total of 4.5 years (and counting). I know all the difficulties that come with the rude comments, stares, and business owners who don’t understand the law. I also know that there are boundaries that need to be maintained if a nursing mother wants to be respected and honored as a mother.

Perhaps lactivists need to take a step back and actually think about the kind of exposure they’re getting for their cause. Breastfeeding is not a holy act. It is a practical one. I think we’ve lost all sense of proportion when we start insisting that because there is a baby attached to a naked boob, no one else has a right to even look away.