Boobs

...my youngest sister recently purchased an iphone which she uses for two purposes: long-distance chats with me and to take topless pictures of herself...anyone who grew up in southern california, like we did, won't be alarmed by the second function, for as we all know: mirrors lie, but pictures never do...my sister has lost a significant amount of weight in the last six months and to get an accurate and objective view of herself she snapped the picture, not to send to anyone (take note brett favre) but for her own scrutiny...had she been more adept at using her smartphone, she may have deleted the photo as soon as she got done analyzing her trouble zones...

...as it is she's a single mom with three kids, two under the age of seven, and she is easily pulled away from a bout of self-loathing by a trip to the emergency room or a full-blown temper tantrum...and pictures are left on the phone...

...enter FB...

...you see where i'm going, right? okay, then no more set up...yes, my sister accidentally posted a picture of herself topless on FB...and she tagged a friend in it...then spent half an hour trying to take the photo down when she realized the mistake...

...so for thirty minutes there was a topless photo of my little sister on FB...

...and for thirty minutes she tried unsuccessfully to take the picture down using her iphone...finally, she had to boot her computer and remove the photo using it...granted, i don't own an iphone, simply a lowly ipod, but it seems to me that removing a photo using the same device she used to post it shouldn't take half an hour to remove...is this user malfunction or a cunning way for FB to get young women to leave up topless photos of themselves just long enough for perverts to save them to their hard drives?

... while i never saw the picture of my little sister's boobage myself, in the same week i got a post in my newsfeed of this photo:

...why were so many of the FBers opposed to this photo women?
are they really that flummoxed by another woman's breasts?
what's at the heart of that sort of pathology?
oh how i wish i'd done that psych minor in college...

...according to my friend who reposted the picture, this is the chest of a woman who had a double mastectomy after being diagnosed with breast cancer...FB said this photo violated their nudity guidelines and "promptly" removed it after it was originally posted by Lee Roller...Roller then reposted the picture in protest and thousands of other FB members shared it to do the same...but some FB members actually agreed with the decision, calling the photo obscene...

...say, huh???...

...honestly, i had to stare pretty hard before i knew what i was actually looking at...it seemed like a tasteful and artistic midriff, not a topless woman...i don't understand the obscenity...

...and when did women's breasts suddenly become obscene? has someone notified national geographic? are the statues at the Louvre being draped in white sheets as we speak? are breast-feeding mothers being carted off to breast prison? 

...never mind there are 400,000 legally employed strippers in the US, that annual strip club revenue is $3.1 billion, that the global market for strippers brings in $75 billion annually: we can't have breasts exposed on FB...what will we tell our children? how to explain what a breast is? its function? or cancer? how to sit them down and explore the ways men in this country have unabashedly criminalized and demoralized the female form? how to make our daughters even more ashamed of their bodies?

...how dare a cancer survivor flaunt her breastlessness!

...is that the real obscenity that's being pussy-footed around here? are FB and its minions of like-minded obscenity police opposed to this photo because this woman's stereotypical trademarks--her boobs--are missing? that instead of breast implants she went against the grain of a male-dominated, sex-crazed culture and got this amazing tattoo?...if her boobage was clear from the get-go, swelling and filling the screen, would the photo have been removed "promptly" or would Roller have struggled for a half hour to remove it himself?