#FreeTheNipple campaign is trending again on Instagram and Twitter, for the last few days. This equality movement focused upon the double standards regarding the censorship of female breasts is being supported by fiery feminists, some Hollywood actresses and hundreds of real, everyday women, since it first began in 2014. But recently, one man gave new life to the campaign when he scammed Instagram authorities to prove how wrong their censorship system really was.
For those unfamiliar with Instagram’s controversial censorship rules, the social networking site allows male nipples to be displayed on photos, but not female nipples.
So five days ago, James Shamsi decided to test it by cropping a photo of a man’s chest (his own, to be specific) and posted it on Instagram. He even asked his social network ‘friends’ to report the post, saying it was part of an experiment, which he was working on.
The move worked. A few hours after it was posted, Instagram swooped down to ban the image because it was violating its Community Guidelines.
But when Shamsi wrote to Instagram saying that those are really a man’s nipples, the ban was revoked and image re-instated.
“Instagram reinstated the photo because these were male #facepalm,” Shamsi wrote in a subsequent Instagram post.
Shamsi wanted to prove the double standards of Instagram, because when cropped, a man’s nipples look the same as women’s nipples. So is this discrimination justified?
Shamsi isn’t the first one to start a campaign along these lines though. Last year in June, Associate Professor Micol Hebron suggested that women simply paste male nipples over their own scandalous lady ones. A brilliant suggestion, which actually worked.
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TBT to that time, over a year ago (June 2014) that I posted an image of male nipple and told everyone to put it over…
Posted by Micol Hebron on Friday, July 3, 2015
“Our goal has always been to find a balance between enabling people to express themselves, while also making sure that our large, diverse, global community feels comfortable. Striking the right balance is hard and examples like this highlight the complexity of this issue,” said Instagram, in reply to The Daily Dot on the Shamsi affair.
Yet there have been small, but satisfying victories too, off late. In April this year, Instagram was forced to rework its ‘No-Nipples’ policy, to allow pictures of mothers breastfeeding children and post-mastectomy scars to be put up. This has helped a great deal with campaigns like public breastfeeding and so on.
But the female breasts continue to remain…a tissue of contention.
Image Courtesy: Facebook/Free The Nipple
More on>> Balancing Act
