Earlier this year, Facebook had to publicly apologise for an image-censoring cock-up that triggered a furious protest campaign on the site. It had boobed. Literally.
The hoo-ha began when Sharon Adams, 45, from Slough, uploaded post-mastectomy pictures of herself to raise awareness for breast cancer. The photos were taken down by Facebook administrators, allegedly due to their “nudity” and “sexual content”. What Facebook had tagged as “sexual”, however, was not the image of a breast but the lack of one.
The British are notoriously awkward in their attitude towards women’s breasts, especially when it comes to breastfeeding. I recall cases of women being thrown out of Job Centres for nursing their babies or told to cover up at the pool side because “there are children around”, as if a child could possibly associate the feeding of a baby with anything untoward. One Birmingham mother found the constant disapproving stares so disturbing that she went on to invent a product called Mamascarf —a large scarf which can be tied around the feeding mother’s neck thus shielding both baby and boobs from intrusive eyes.
And yet this is a nation of men and women who cannot stop talking about breasts.
Breastfest
Whether we like it or not, it is impossible to escape the sight of exposed cleavage everywhere we go, especially when temperatures soar. Heaven help us when global warming truly kicks in.
The media further encourages breast worshipping in a culture that portrays flaunting one’s ‘assets’ as positive behaviour. While men ogle at Page 3, women buy glossies to admire, or sneer at, celebrity bodies labelled ‘too fat’ or ‘too thin’, and analyse their boob close-ups for surgery. Magazine images of stars on the red carpet, glammed up in revealing outfits, or coming out of the sea in skimpy white bikinis, can impress upon us a distorted reality in which women routinely look like, well, stars. The message is clear: forget modesty; the more on show, the better.
And after all, celebrities+boobs do sell products. And what is commercial is good.
Good boob, bad boob
Women say high heels make them feel confident, as they can ‘stand tall’ both literally and figuratively. Likewise, breast exposure can be an effective confidence booster. It gets attention. It turns heads. It makes them feel womanly, sexy. So much so women suffering from lack of self-love will often confuse it with a need for larger, surgically enhanced breasts. So at what point do good boobs turn into naughty ones? If showing breasts in public is positive, why does a suckling baby attached to it make it scandalous and taboo?
Breastfeeding can be extremely uncomfortable, even painful. I am certain the last thing a mother has in mind when whipping out a breast in public to feed her baby is to use it as a sexual weapon. Ironically, many women are made to feel like a failure for wanting to walk away from it, or choosing to bottle feed their offspring instead, as Viv Groskop illustrated in her Guardian column. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.
Facebook’s reaction to Sharon Adams’ cancer images may have been a genuine mistake. They rectified it by apologising and allowing her to re-upload the photos. But their first gut reaction is symptomatic of society’s warped attitude towards the human body and sexuality.
One in nine women in the UK are diagnosed with breast cancer every year. People like Sharon Adams, who expose the type of breasts the world would rather not see, are only ensuring other women do not have to lose theirs for lack of awareness about a very common female cancer.
If you’ve got’em, flaunt’em. But the lesson to be learned from this is that, ultimately, it is your own attention and love your breasts need the most.