Kai
02-17-2010, 11:11 PM
BY STEPH GREEGOR
Published: Thursday, February 11, 2010 1:21 PM EST
The Other Paper > Archives > Front > Facebook angers area breast-feeders (https://www.theotherpaper.com/articles/2010/02/11/front/doc4b742855134e2842919509.txt)
A charge led by Facebook administrators to delete pictures of breast-feeding moms from its pages may land the social media site in the middle of a class action lawsuit.
“There have been rumblings since last December. A lot of people are really eager to call Facebook to task and we’re considering whether a class action lawsuit will be viable,” said Stephanie Muir, a Canadian administrator for the Facebook group, “Hey Facebook, Breastfeeding is Not Obscene!” “We want to hit them in the pocketbook so they’ll actually pay attention. Facebook is getting away with something they would not be able to get away with outside the virtual world. It’s basically discrimination.”
According to Lauren Damon, co-founder of the local breast-feeding advocacy group Hooray for Boobies who also breast-feeds her 1-year-old daughter, Natalie, Facebook picks and chooses which pictures of breasts stay and which ones go—playing favoritism, she said, to hot young women baring their chests.
“Guys can’t have fun with pictures of breasts if there’s a baby involved,” said Damon, who’s also a member of the targeted Facebook group. “For (breast-feeding) to be considered nudity, every single picture of every single male without his shirt on needs to be torn down,” she said, adding that “high school girls putting up their Facebook pictures” with “way more breast tissue than breast-feeding moms,” also should be taken down.
“If they’re going to censor, they need to censor across the board,” she said.
Facebook fired a warning shot Sunday to show it’s serious about taking down the group’s page by deleting Muir’s personal page as well.
“The group is still there. And I have created a different account for myself,” said Muir. “But everything I previously had is gone, including every single post I’ve ever made.”
On the chopping block is the advocacy group’s page of 250,000 members internationally, which includes more than 4,500 discussion threads on parenting topics, and more than 5,700 photos of breast-feeding women.
“(The group) is trying to back up the information and transfer it over to a safe place so they can’t destroy thousands of women’s work,” said Damon. “It’s deplorable what they’re doing.”
Muir said Facebook initially told the group they were in copyright violation and that’s why they were going to be removed.
“One of our administrators in Scotland e-mailed an inquiry and the response said, ‘We’re sorry, our message was in error. It’s not a copyright violation, it’s nudity and explicit sexual content that your group has been removed,’” said Muir. “They said in their statement it wasn’t the breast-feeding, it was the nipples that were the problem. They’re very inconsistent, which is a great source of irritation. They have changed their story a number of times.”
Muir said it’s an argument born of the Western world, where breasts have been hyper-sexualized, distracting the argument away from their natural purpose.
“It really ought to be women who decide when breasts are sexual, not Facebook or anybody else for that matter,” Muir said. “We use our mouths for sex, too, but we’re very clear in understanding that we use them for other things as well, so we don’t go around covering them up all the time.”
Legally, Muir’s opinion is supported by local legislation. Women’s breasts are allowed to be exposed in any public area that men can have their shirts off.
“There is a section of the Ohio Revised Code that basically says a mother is entitled to breast-feed her baby in a place of public accommodation,” said Carrie Davis, a staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union of Ohio, for a related story in June in The Other Paper. “So if you’re otherwise allowed, as a woman, to be in this public place, then you can be breast-feeding in this place. All of that’s covered under Ohio law.”
What aren’t covered under Ohio law are employment issues: Currently there are no state or local laws that specifically protect breast-feeding or lactating women in the workplace. Ohio, Wyoming and Massachusetts are the only three states that don’t provide any sort of employment incentive or protection to breast-feeding or lactating mothers, according to a 2008 article in the Policy Briefing Series journal titled: “State Policymakers: Breast-feeding and the Workplace.”
That report also stated that only seven states have implemented workplace mandates to support breast-feeding women, including California, Connecticut, Hawaii, Mississippi, Oregon, Texas and Washington. Employment law in the other 40 states fall somewhere in between.
“It really has wreacked havoc with a woman’s ability to mother her child,” said Muir. “We should be applauding women who breast-feed. It’s one of the best things you can do for your child.”
U.S. Rep. Carolyn B. Maloney, (D-NY) and Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-OR) are sponsoring a joint federal resolution, introduced June 11, that—if passed—would include breast-feeding women as a protected class under the Civil Rights Act for employment purposes.
The pending federal legislation is called the Breast-feeding Promotion Act of 2009 (H.R. 2819) and includes five provisions dealing with breast-feeding mothers, the three most notable of which are: Amending the Civil Rights Act of 1964 “to protect breast-feeding women from being fired or discriminated against in the workplace,” providing tax incentives for businesses that “establish private lactation areas in the workplace or provide breast-feeding equipment or consultation services to their employees,” and ensuring nursing mothers have “break time and a private place to pump” for employers with 50 or more employees.
“(Our group) is about bringing more awareness to protecting, promoting and supporting breast-feeding mothers,” said Muir. “And we’re not going anywhere...well, not willingly.”
And breast-feeding moms mean business. After a Sept. 1 Ohio Supreme Court ruling that upheld Cincinnati-based Totes/Isotoner Corp. 2005 firing of employee LaNisa Allen for taking unscheduled breaks to pump breast milk for her 5-month-old son, 3,600 breast-feeding mothers of the Yahoo! group PumpMoms called for women everywhere to boycott the company’s gloves, galoshes and other products.
Facebook may now face a similar public-relations problem.
“We’re going to continue to keep a strong presence,” said Muir. “It’s still a mystery to me how anyone could feel so strongly to interfere with a community of a quarter of a million people. You know, you have options; if you see a breast-feeding woman (or her picture), you can either harass her or you can use your neck and swivel your head in the other direction. We ultimately just want them to leave breast-feeding pictures alone.”
Facebook originally was launched by Harvard student Mark Zuckerberg in February, 2004, as a social networking site for undergraduate students. By September, 2006, the site had vastly outgrown its original undergrad clientele, and site administrators began to introduce filters to monitor what was being uploaded.
It became evident very quickly, said Muir, that photographs of breast-feeding mothers would not be tolerated, as they were often deleted from personal pages. That’s when the advocacy group, “Hey Facebook, Breastfeeding is Not Obscene!” was born, to help normalize the image of breast-feeding mothers.
Published: Thursday, February 11, 2010 1:21 PM EST
The Other Paper > Archives > Front > Facebook angers area breast-feeders (https://www.theotherpaper.com/articles/2010/02/11/front/doc4b742855134e2842919509.txt)
A charge led by Facebook administrators to delete pictures of breast-feeding moms from its pages may land the social media site in the middle of a class action lawsuit.
“There have been rumblings since last December. A lot of people are really eager to call Facebook to task and we’re considering whether a class action lawsuit will be viable,” said Stephanie Muir, a Canadian administrator for the Facebook group, “Hey Facebook, Breastfeeding is Not Obscene!” “We want to hit them in the pocketbook so they’ll actually pay attention. Facebook is getting away with something they would not be able to get away with outside the virtual world. It’s basically discrimination.”
According to Lauren Damon, co-founder of the local breast-feeding advocacy group Hooray for Boobies who also breast-feeds her 1-year-old daughter, Natalie, Facebook picks and chooses which pictures of breasts stay and which ones go—playing favoritism, she said, to hot young women baring their chests.
“Guys can’t have fun with pictures of breasts if there’s a baby involved,” said Damon, who’s also a member of the targeted Facebook group. “For (breast-feeding) to be considered nudity, every single picture of every single male without his shirt on needs to be torn down,” she said, adding that “high school girls putting up their Facebook pictures” with “way more breast tissue than breast-feeding moms,” also should be taken down.
“If they’re going to censor, they need to censor across the board,” she said.
Facebook fired a warning shot Sunday to show it’s serious about taking down the group’s page by deleting Muir’s personal page as well.
“The group is still there. And I have created a different account for myself,” said Muir. “But everything I previously had is gone, including every single post I’ve ever made.”
On the chopping block is the advocacy group’s page of 250,000 members internationally, which includes more than 4,500 discussion threads on parenting topics, and more than 5,700 photos of breast-feeding women.
“(The group) is trying to back up the information and transfer it over to a safe place so they can’t destroy thousands of women’s work,” said Damon. “It’s deplorable what they’re doing.”
Muir said Facebook initially told the group they were in copyright violation and that’s why they were going to be removed.
“One of our administrators in Scotland e-mailed an inquiry and the response said, ‘We’re sorry, our message was in error. It’s not a copyright violation, it’s nudity and explicit sexual content that your group has been removed,’” said Muir. “They said in their statement it wasn’t the breast-feeding, it was the nipples that were the problem. They’re very inconsistent, which is a great source of irritation. They have changed their story a number of times.”
Muir said it’s an argument born of the Western world, where breasts have been hyper-sexualized, distracting the argument away from their natural purpose.
“It really ought to be women who decide when breasts are sexual, not Facebook or anybody else for that matter,” Muir said. “We use our mouths for sex, too, but we’re very clear in understanding that we use them for other things as well, so we don’t go around covering them up all the time.”
Legally, Muir’s opinion is supported by local legislation. Women’s breasts are allowed to be exposed in any public area that men can have their shirts off.
“There is a section of the Ohio Revised Code that basically says a mother is entitled to breast-feed her baby in a place of public accommodation,” said Carrie Davis, a staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union of Ohio, for a related story in June in The Other Paper. “So if you’re otherwise allowed, as a woman, to be in this public place, then you can be breast-feeding in this place. All of that’s covered under Ohio law.”
What aren’t covered under Ohio law are employment issues: Currently there are no state or local laws that specifically protect breast-feeding or lactating women in the workplace. Ohio, Wyoming and Massachusetts are the only three states that don’t provide any sort of employment incentive or protection to breast-feeding or lactating mothers, according to a 2008 article in the Policy Briefing Series journal titled: “State Policymakers: Breast-feeding and the Workplace.”
That report also stated that only seven states have implemented workplace mandates to support breast-feeding women, including California, Connecticut, Hawaii, Mississippi, Oregon, Texas and Washington. Employment law in the other 40 states fall somewhere in between.
“It really has wreacked havoc with a woman’s ability to mother her child,” said Muir. “We should be applauding women who breast-feed. It’s one of the best things you can do for your child.”
U.S. Rep. Carolyn B. Maloney, (D-NY) and Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-OR) are sponsoring a joint federal resolution, introduced June 11, that—if passed—would include breast-feeding women as a protected class under the Civil Rights Act for employment purposes.
The pending federal legislation is called the Breast-feeding Promotion Act of 2009 (H.R. 2819) and includes five provisions dealing with breast-feeding mothers, the three most notable of which are: Amending the Civil Rights Act of 1964 “to protect breast-feeding women from being fired or discriminated against in the workplace,” providing tax incentives for businesses that “establish private lactation areas in the workplace or provide breast-feeding equipment or consultation services to their employees,” and ensuring nursing mothers have “break time and a private place to pump” for employers with 50 or more employees.
“(Our group) is about bringing more awareness to protecting, promoting and supporting breast-feeding mothers,” said Muir. “And we’re not going anywhere...well, not willingly.”
And breast-feeding moms mean business. After a Sept. 1 Ohio Supreme Court ruling that upheld Cincinnati-based Totes/Isotoner Corp. 2005 firing of employee LaNisa Allen for taking unscheduled breaks to pump breast milk for her 5-month-old son, 3,600 breast-feeding mothers of the Yahoo! group PumpMoms called for women everywhere to boycott the company’s gloves, galoshes and other products.
Facebook may now face a similar public-relations problem.
“We’re going to continue to keep a strong presence,” said Muir. “It’s still a mystery to me how anyone could feel so strongly to interfere with a community of a quarter of a million people. You know, you have options; if you see a breast-feeding woman (or her picture), you can either harass her or you can use your neck and swivel your head in the other direction. We ultimately just want them to leave breast-feeding pictures alone.”
Facebook originally was launched by Harvard student Mark Zuckerberg in February, 2004, as a social networking site for undergraduate students. By September, 2006, the site had vastly outgrown its original undergrad clientele, and site administrators began to introduce filters to monitor what was being uploaded.
It became evident very quickly, said Muir, that photographs of breast-feeding mothers would not be tolerated, as they were often deleted from personal pages. That’s when the advocacy group, “Hey Facebook, Breastfeeding is Not Obscene!” was born, to help normalize the image of breast-feeding mothers.