Women Deserve Better from Facebook

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What Facebook Continues To Tell Us About Violence Against Women (Fem 2.0)

Earlier this year, my Facebook timeline was flooded with my friends reposting an image of a breast cancer survivor’s chest tattoo that Facebook repeatedly deleted because the image of a woman’s naked chest technically violated their nudity policy. Facebook eventually relented, but it reminded me of an episode of that Comedy Central atrocity known as The Man Show, in which a man who’d gotten breast implants on a dare came on and showed off his implants. Despite his chest looking every bit like a naked woman’s, there was no censorship. I’ve always considered the American obsession with censoring naked female breasts comical, but these two episodes, taken together, just leave me scratching my head.

I had my own, much smaller, run-in with Facebook’s rules last year as I began to publicize The Prostitutes of Lake Wobegon. About a year ago I started a Facebook page for the novel so I could use Facebook to help spread the word once I’d been shortlisted for the Dundee International Book Prize and “the cat was out of the bag” on my novel. I begged my friends to help the page get twenty-five likes, the minimum required to get your own custom URL, so I could get something like facebook.com/theprostitutesoflakewobegon or facebook.com/prostitutesoflakewobegon before someone else took those URLs for their own use, much like cybersquatters have seized domain names for ages. The moment I got my twenty-fifth like, I immediately tried to grab those URLs, only to be told by Facebook that they weren’t available. Dejected, I tried loading both URLs to see who’d gotten them. As it turned out, no one had gotten them, and a quick test on my part revealed that Facebook doesn’t allow “prostitute” in custom URLs. Yes, that word could be used in a page URL to help promote an actual prostitution service, but given the number of non-prostitution services that could have use for “prostitute” in their name (help for prostitutes being abused by their pimps, for one), Facebook blacklisting “prostitute” in their page URLs just doesn’t make sense to me. I eventually had to settle on facebook.com/TPOLW, although Facebook has no problem with me using “Prostitutes” in the page’s title. Go figure.

It is in the context of both these episodes that I find Facebook’s decision to permit the “Women Deserve Equal Rights — And Lefts” image mentioned in the Fem 2.0 article above so perplexing. Remove those two incidents, and there’s a very uncomfortable free speech dilemma that would really pit my pro-First Amendment tendencies against my feminist beliefs in a way that would keep me up thinking about the issue into the wee small hours of the morning. If Facebook deemed the mastectomy tattoo picture against its guidelines (at least long enough to cause the huge uproar that led to them reversing their decision) and they blacklist “prostitute” in their page URLs, though, I don’t see how they can consider an image of a battered woman cowering in front of a man’s clenched fist — with words inciting violence against women printed on top — acceptable for their service.

Over the past few years, Internet memes have taken over popular culture more and more. Yesterday I actually had to explain to one of my classes the history of the rickroll, but all of them know about more recent things like the Harlem Shake. Although most people think of more benign things like “Gangnam Style” and LOLcats when they think of Internet memes, there is a dark underbelly to Internet memes that trades not only on racism and sexism and homophobia and similar malignancies, but in the advocacy of outright violence and murder against marginalized and discriminated groups. Treating women as objects of abuse and virtual slaves to men is one of the most common tropes in this culture, to the point where even My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic utilized one of them in one of their episodes as a “wink” to the show’s older Internet-driven fanbase, depicting physical relationship abuse. This is a huge black mark on the show’s history, and it defies description how there has not been a large movement to have this scene removed from the episode, especially after the way Hasbro reacted to the whole Derpy controversy.

It’s wishful thinking to believe that hateful and violent meme images like these don’t have a negative influence on people who lack the skills to contextualize them for the garbage that they are. Yes, humour can be squeezed out of even the most vile concepts by keeping them concepts and not getting into actual unacceptable acts — the whole George Carlin “imagine Elmer Fudd raping Porky Pig” thing — but it still takes a skilled comic to get an appropriate joke, and the only attempt at “comedy” most of these meme images make is to denigrate the very groups they attack as stupid or worthy of abuse. The comments on the “And Lefts” image that the Fem 2.0 article talks about — “You ‘feminists’ [sic] need to pull your heads out of your asses and accept that you deserve a beating if you fucking provoked it,” just as one example — show just how widespread the problem is. Most of these comments are likely from sexually-frustrated fourteen-year-old boys who’ve never even gotten close enough to a woman to strike her, yes, but some of these are from grown men, and as someone who has dealt with many survivors of relationship abuse in my life, including in my own family — it is a sensitive issue for me — I can speak from personal experience to the existence of this culture that treats abuse of women as not only acceptable, but something to be lauded.

I have always been a strong proponent of the First Amendment, but no rights are absolute. The First Amendment does not protect child pornography, nor does it protect those who incite panic by yelling “Fire” in a crowded room when there is no fire. One of the litmus tests that has often been used to determine whether or not the First Amendment is applicable to a given instance of speech is if it has the effect of promoting violence. That can be a grey issue with a lot of instances of speech, but the “And Lefts” image, to me, is a clear-cut instance of advocating violence. The text on the image can be easily reduced to “women deserve to be hit,” and the picture behind the text clearly shows the context in which that message is meant.

Granted, I’m not a legal scholar, so my reasoning as to why that particular image doesn’t fall under First Amendment protections may be faulty, but keep in mind that, in this particular controversy, the entity determining whether or not the image should be publicly posted is not the government, but Facebook. Nudity is legion on the Internet, but Facebook, as its own entity, is within its rights to determine that it will not allow photos of naked bodies to be posted on its service. Likewise, it is within its legal rights to say that nudity is not okay but that the “And Lefts” image is acceptable. When it does so, though, it sets a dangerous precedent that could lead to images even more vile and repulsive than the “And Lefts” image being posted, and if this is the case, many people are likely going to consider whether or not they will continue to support Facebook by maintaining an account on their service. I certainly will.

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