A friend of mine posted pictures of herself topless on Facebook prior to her mastectomy, and they haven’t been removed yet. Perhaps it’s because the pictures were taken at a party, and it’s hard to recognize her as topless in the thumbnails. I suspect, though, that they haven’t been removed because no one complained. It seems like Facebook’s admins don’t go looking for offenses but respond to complaints.
I’d call that an example of Facebook’s inconsistency.
i’ve seen that in action. one of my friends there posts a lot of art photography and there are visible nipples and buttocks in some of the shots. none of them have been removed because none of her friends have complained.
Of course it would also be pretty impractical for Facebook employees to approve every single photo upload manually. The question is “who are all these prudes who submit complaints about non-sexualized depictions of nipples on Facebook?”
I don’t see anything wrong with a complaint-based enforcement policy. Sure, it’s inconsistent, but the real concern is the criteria for distinguishing legitimate complaints once the complaint is made.
The identities of the complainers could be listed in the place of the removed image. Would provide the chance to see who they are, and, if in friend list, remove them.
Perhaps the same sort of prudes who forced the temporary instigation of Facebook’s "real name policy".
I have no problem with a complaint-based system, even though I realize now it sounds like that’s what I was saying. You’re right that it would be impractical–not to mention requiring a huge increase in the workforce–to manually check each photo. It would be nice to have an appeals process, but I guess that would be almost as impractical.
And Handler was talking about Instagram, not Facebook, but maybe if having nipple shots taken down becomes a problem for enough people there’ll be an uprising to overturn the policy.
Thank you. It was people like Sam that made this country great once.
According to every class or reading or anything I have every seen on the topic of why women have fatty breast tissue it has been hypothesized that they have them as a sexual display.
So, evolution seems to have sexualized the female breast, not Instagram or some larger social movement.
The question is, is there a such a big risk in seeing a sexualized body part that we have to give women different/lesser rights to protect society from the power of boobies. I think we would be able to handle it, but we have fucked up shit before.
But sexual and sexualized don’t suggest the same thing. Sexual seems to refer to an innate characteristic, whereas sexualizing indicates a person making something sexual which wasn’t already so for whatever reasons.
Also, “display” is a loaded term here, especially when talking about public appearance! In most human areas, “display” means a deliberate act of communication, such as bumper stickers displaying my pet causes, or body language displaying an attitude. While “sexual displays” of the body refer to biological sexual traits - i.e. anything you can use to tell men and women apart. If hanging testicles or round breasts are anybodys display, it is DNA itself. One obviously does not choose to use their natural body shape as a form of social communication. Changing or concealing the body are reactionary. Concealing the breasts (or nipples) is fundamentally no different a tactic than wearing a burqa to conceal the outline of the body, it is a reaction against the physical facts of the body to satisfy (weak, IMO) ideological ends.
This points to a curiously irresponsible underlying attitude I have witnessed in some traditions of Christianity and Islam (which may well be present in other traditions as well) of framing women as immoral sources of temptation, with the strong, ethical men lacking the ability to manage their own sexual responses. It is the woman’s responsibility to make certain that the man is not aroused by her presence. I cannot fathom for the life of me how nobody points out the absurdity of this assumption, and it is so culturally pervasive! In more modern western cultural traditions, this has developed into the more recent “secular” attitudes about public dress and/or nudity. People are generally not afraid that they will see sexual imagery or actions which they find objectionable - they are afraid they will see sexual imagery or actions which they will find stimulating! But rather than take personal responsibility for this, they prefer to blame others. It is basically a codified way of saying: “Since my personal discipline is not commensurate with my ideals, I blame you for my embarrassing sexual arousal, so all of this needs to be hidden away”. So I interpret pressure towards standards of decency and modesty as being completely selfish - not the “socially responsible” morality which most advocates claim it to be. It does not and cannot remedy the deeper problem of their neurotic attitudes and faulty conditioning.
you are technically correct (the best kind of correct) that women’s breasts are there for nourishing their young, but that argument is similar to my argument that a flaccid penis would be okay and non-sexual since it is just a pee-tube in that state.
we live in a society that eroticizes body parts beyond perfect minimal utility, so cleavage of the female bosom, butt cheeks, and even non-turgid peni are still mostly confined by bathing suits by social contract, with the understanding that the more skin near, or of these areas that is shown is considered to be more provocative.
also, testicles and peni are external in the same free-to-the-body sense that many breasts are, so unlike the close-to-the-body flatness of a woman’s pubic mound or a man’s flat pecs, they draw the eye, ergo, more erotic provocation is available.
Plumbing is a classic porn scenario, as any fule kno 
I think that’s the case for TV/cinema in Britain.
Griefers and assholes, usually.
It’s a “sexual display” like peacock feathers and the noses of proboscis monkeys, etc. fat in the breasts doesn’t increase milk production its purpose seems to be to attract male attention.
I am totally not offended by nudity, but I also see how it can help get work done if we cover up our sexual organs during business hours.
My point was just that breasts are not sexualized by sociological phenominon. They are sexualized by the evolution of human sexuality. It is in fact the evolved purpose of fatty tissue around the human female breast. Now humans may add focus and fetishize that sexual display etc etc, but apparently that has been happening long enough for it to be hard wired in our brains and selected for in our offspring.
But Instagram has been consistent about banning images of genitalia, whereas they have been inconsistent and arguably unfair in their ban on images of nipples.
You don’t understand evolution. Or at least you’re mischaracterizing it badly.
Evolution has no purposes.
Fatty tissue around the human breast may lead to men noticing it more, and that may lead to superior chances of reproduction, but it’s not a purpose. It’s more of a statistical tendency.
But, let’s ignore that (really, it’s a common mistake and even many people who know better use the term loosely, and that’s quite probably what you were doing as well, I just feel the need to point it out). So, the female breast has a tendency to be treated as a marker for human arousal.
By that same token, the SHAPE of the breast is also (to use the sloppy terminology) possessed of the evolved purpose. In fact, you might argue even moreso, because the nipples are more or less the same (aside from the milk ducts, which aren’t readily visible) in men and women, while the shape is more distinctive.
Are we obliged to force women to disguise the shape of their breast, in deference to the ‘evolved purpose’ of that shape?
Again, you are confusing sexual with sexualization. There is no deliberate purpose or intent behind making our bodies they way they are, they simply are.
Here’s an example of a great, far-out theory of evolution being used to justify contemporary sexual mores. I don’t remember where I read about, or who’s idea it was. But it posits that breasts are a tool which allowed us to evolve into appreciating the missionary position as the preferred means of congress for enlightened contemporary sexuality. How? Because male apes and other animals have historically mounted females from behind, so they recognize the pair of round buttocks as a sign of where they should go. So, by gracing human women with even more prominent round features on her front side, this encourages human males to engage in sexual activity from the front.
This attributes ephemeral human values of some cultures and contexts to biology over a vast span of time, all while presupposing that one sexual position is better than others. And I won’t even guess how flattering it might be to refer to a woman’s breasts as “pseudo-buttocks” - try it sometime!
The other big conceptual bugbear we haven’t even mentioned is that nudity does not even equal sex in the first place. This is easy enough for anyone to demonstrate - how many minutes of your life have you spend nude? And how many of those were you engaged in sexual activity? More than 50%? I would be skeptical if it was more than a few percent for even the most promiscuous people. So, why inconvenience people to discourage something which doesn’t even happen very often? How can we take from this a reasoned, moral position which is universal enough to apply to all people?
There is not intent because there is no one to intend. That isn’t to say that feet aren’t for walking and eyes aren’t for seeing.
Maybe the theory that says that women have developed fatty breasts for reasons of sexual attraction is bullocks, but it’s the only one I have ever heard.
Evolution is a process. I am not sure how it would have a purpose or how I would suggest that it does.
Traits are selected for. Traits of how bodies look and how males choose mates are just part of the process which determines the likely traits of offspring.
Well, evolution as a whole has no purpose, but it does give results that act just as if they had one. There’s a meaningful sense in which a lung is meant for breathing, a wing for flying, or a peacock tail for attraction. The term used is teleonomy; it’s not the same thing as a teleological purpose assigned by intent, but it’s enough of a purpose for informal sense.
That’s kind of a nitpick, and I do agree with the rest of your post - an evolutionary benefit doesn’t determine how we must act, and singling out nipple exposure wouldn’t follow either way. I thought I’d bring it up, though, because this is something you hear a lot:
Breasts in human women are unusual for sometimes storing a lot of fat independent of lactation. That might be adaptive, and a function in sexual attraction is a possible explanation. But you could invent other causes; something related to cryptic estrus, an artifact of having children most of the time, some sort of spandrel, who knows.
And while this is a popular answer, I haven’t seen much to establish it. To start off with, like a lot of evolutionary psychology it seems to be based only on western stereotypes, as if “Married with Children” were our gold standard. Any claim about our evolution needs to look at humanity as a whole; do other cultures all treat breasts in such a sexual way? They definitely don’t all cover them.
Even if you don’t go abroad, though, there is a more serious problem. Male peacocks all have large tails, and you can see the size is a major factor in attracting mates. And there are lots of other animals like that, where flashy colors or pheromones are how reproductive value is assessed.
But people aren’t like that - women don’t all have large breasts. Some people never really store much fat there at all, and yet they find partners and raise families all the same. In fact, look at some most attractive or most desirable or whatever lists, and you’ll see women with smaller breasts aren’t even excluded as lingerie models and other professions based mainly on appearance.
So although there’s supposed to be sexual selection for larger breasts, there’s not even a clear reproductive handicap in not having them. The few studies that have been pointed out to me seem to find that there are different preferences for different people and in different circumstances, which is really what I’d expect. People are really variable.
To sum up: it could be an interesting hypothesis, but it seems to need a lot of work before it is anything else, and right now there isn’t enough to say sexualization of breasts is any different from sexualization of necks or legs or chest hair. Not to say it would justify imposing that judgment on everyone either way.
