Nursing Moms Angry About Facebook Not Letting Them Post Pictures Of Their Boobies
When it comes to mothers nursing in public I usually side with the mothers. Breast feeding is important to many parents (my wife breast feeds), and sometimes the little tykes get hungry in the most inconvenient of places. As long as a mom exercises a bit of discretion (don’t just whip the booby out and attach the kid) I think those critical of public breast feeding can get bent. It’s a perfectly natural thing, you prudes.
But posting pictures of yourself breast feeding online is different altogether.
Web-savvy moms who breast-feed are irate that social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace restrict photos of nursing babies. The disputes reveal how the sites’ community policing techniques sometimes struggle to keep up with the booming number and diversity of their members.
Facebook began as a site just for college kids, but now it is an online home for 140 million people from all over the world. Among the new faces of Facebook are women like Kelli Roman, 23, who last year posted a photo of herself nursing one of her two children.
One day, she logged on to find the photo missing. When she pressed Facebook for an explanation, she got form e-mails in return.
Facebook bars people from uploading anything “obscene, pornographic or sexually explicit” — a policy that translates into a ban on pictures depicting certain amounts of exposed flesh.
Roman responded by starting a Facebook group called “Hey, Facebook, breastfeeding is not obscene!”
I agree that breast feeding is neither sexually explicit or obscene, but as a privately-owned company Facebook is free to exercise its own standards when it comes to posted images. If they don’t want breast feeding pictures that’s the way it is, and it’s not the same as saying a woman with a hungry baby can’t find a quiet corner in a shopping mall to nurse her baby under a blanket.
Because posting a picture of yourself breast feeding so that others will see it is not the same as needing to feed your kid while out and about. One circumstance has a level of desired voyeurism the other does not. I don’t know of many mothers (outside of the militant ones who seem to want to walk around with their boobs hanging out daring people to object) who want strangers oggling them while they nurse.



