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| Proving that most of us do have breasts, even if we aren't allowed to show them. |
Breasts. Even their mention can get people
flustered. I have a pair of my own. Most women do. This is evolution
doing a wonderful thing. We have breasts so that when we have
children, we can keep them alive. If we were a bird or some other
non-mammal perhaps we'd be dropping insects into our children’s
mouths, or perhaps regurgitating our food for them. But we don't. We
have these clever things that secrete a perfect feeding formula
directly into a child's mouth. Biology is wonderful.
Of course, very many men like breasts. Breasts
indicate that if a man is lucky enough to mate with us and we fall
pregnant, we will be able to keep his child alive. Evolution dictates
that keeping children alive is good. So if you want to breed with a
woman, make sure she has good breasts. But mostly in our society (and
I'm talking the society I'm familiar with – the mainly white, first
world, European-influenced world), it's all about nipples. At least,
it seems to be. You can post a photograph on Facebook with
practically all the breast except the nipple and areola exposed, and
that's fine – unless it's obscured by a baby's mouth, and then
that's not fine.
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| Two naked male chests that I'm very fond of. Not just an excuse to get Peter Graves and Spock on this blog. Not at all. |
The funny thing is that men have these things too,
and that is fine. I don't
know what would happen if you posted a photograph on Facebook of a
man with a baby's mouth over his nipple, but I imagine that would be
a-ok. But I dare say most hetrosexual women will find a picture of a
man's bare chest just as alluring as most hetrosexual men will the
woman's. I dare say that a lot of hetrosexual men would find a
picture of a provocatively dressed woman with her nipples covered
just as arousing, or more so, than a picture of bare breasts.
There are so many
issues here. The way that essentially male morals still run the
world, no matter how loud the voice of woman becomes. The way that
it's acceptable for women to be sexualised, and controlled by the
perception of their sexuality, in a way that men would never accept
for their own gender. The way that the function of breasts in Western
society has been completely subverted from their actual purpose –
to feed infants – into a kind of flag to inflame male desire.
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| My own breastfeeding photo. No problems on my Facebook account with it, luckily. I must have good friends. |
I have to admit
that I'm not the queen of breastfeeding. I didn't battle through all
ills and pain in order to nurture my children with the pure milk of
my breast. Oscar pretty much flat refused to feed. George developed
an allergy to milk very
early on. Ben – well, by the time Ben came along it was obvious to
me that you could raise healthy, intelligent, well-attached, and
happy children without breast milk, so he got his first few weeks and
then I elected to go back on the anti-depressants that keep me
(moderately) sane, and we went with all of the benefits of bottle
feeding. And there are
benefits, believe me, especially where my sanity is concerned.
But I do
believe in breastfeeding. I believe it's wrong to profit by getting
Third World mothers to bottle feed, exposing their children to all of
the perils of poor or no sterilisation, to a lack of protection from
the antibodies in their mothers' milk when they have poor or no
access to medical help, and to privation caused by their parents'
small resources being spent on formula feed. I believe that it is
heinous to do this purely so that companies like Nestlé
can sit back on their
profits. I believe it's wrong that the default setting in every
doll's set is the dummy, the disposable nappy, and the baby bottle
and that we seem to have forgotten that humans are, in fact, equipped
with the resources to feed their babies.
Most of all, and here I
come to the point of this post, I think that Facebook is wrong. I
love what I get from Facebook. Since I find phone calls and
face-to-face talking very difficult almost all my friendships are
upheld there and I dearly miss friends who have left. But Facebook,
it seems, hates breastfeeding. I have heard so many stories of
photographs of breastfeeding mothers being taken down from its pages
– not even public, shared pages, but private pages that are only
shared with people's friends. Conversely I have reported so many
public comments suggesting things like 'all Muslims should be
exported,' 'all Muslim men should be killed,' and other such lovely
sentiments, and this, it seems, doesn't come under their heading of
'hate speech' and is allowed to remain.
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| 'Emma' by Lies Thru a Lens on Flickr. I have no problem with this photo, but it's odd that Facebook would be far happier with an image like this than a woman breastfeeding. |
There is something
wrong with Facebook's policies if it believes that a picture of a
woman's breasts is more worthy of censor than a comment advocating
genocide and racism. There's something wrong with Facebook's policies
if it thinks that a picture of a woman breastfeeding her child should
be hidden while a picture of a woman bottle-feeding her child is
fine; when you can post pictures of animal cruelty, murder, and dead
bodies without issue; when a picture of an oil-sheened woman bending
over in the smallest of bikinis is considered less offensive than a
child drinking milk.
I don't know who
Facebook are trying to appease, but I don't want to be part of that
demographic, and I wish their censors felt the same.
