I know, I know; what was I thinking?
Here I am, a 56 year old woman, old enough to be a grandmother (hint to my married and engaged children!) and I violated the standards of Facebook by heading a post about lactation with a picture of …
[Stop reading now if you are easily offended. Cover your children’s eyes. Gather your strength]
… a lactating breast.
Oh, the horror! No wonder that I’ve been banned from Facebook for 24 hours. I should have realized that infants and children might have seen that picture and who can bear to think about the consequences of that.
The post in question was Babies are dying because breastfeeding advocates are lying written to highlight the small but rising death toll that has resulted from breastfeeding advocates lying about the benefits of breastmilk and demonizing formula, apparently a trivial problem in comparison with the serious problem of people being exposed (full frontal!) to lactating breasts.
You can view the picture here. Shocking, isn’t it?
I’ve changed the picture and I’ve appealed the ban, but I’m not particularly hopeful.
I realize that Facebook relies on algorithms to police it’s photos and I imagine that real nipples are verboten. Obviously we don’t want Facebook to become cluttered up with porn, but it does raise an interesting question: why is a female breast inevitably construed as pornography?
We have a real problem as a society if we say we want to encourage breastfeeding but then we turn around and ban all images of the female breast as inevitably pornographic. Which is it? Is breastfeeding a beautiful gift that a mother can give a child, or is it something so perverted that it must be hidden from children and everyone else?
Breasts are inherently sexual. I know that, but that’s not a bad thing. Sexual is not the same as pornographic and we should be mature enough as a society to realize that.
