Nudity, Sexuality, and Censorship

There’s an interesting pattern I’ve seen over and over: a lot of people equate nudity and sexuality.

This probably isn’t news to you, but I think it has some really important consequences. One of them, of course, is that there are all sorts of laws regulating things like nudity or topless women in public, even when there’s nothing sexual going on.

I suspect that one reason that a lot of folks freak out about women breastfeeding in public (or in photos on Facebook) is that if you equate uncovered breasts with sex, seeing a mother feeding her child is going to make you think of both infants and sex. If you can’t separate breasts-as-erogenous-zone and breasts-as-food-source, then you can either avoid looking at breastfeeding (hard to do in public), or demand that moms cover up or go away.

But sometimes, it goes the other way. For example, I recently tweeted this picture:

The twitter app I use automatically uses lockerz.com to store photos and adds a link so that my followers could see the image. And within minutes, the photo was removed. If you clicked on the link, this is what you’d see:

You’ll need to click on the picture to see, but the reasons listed are:

1. It was removed by the person who uploaded it
2. The link you clicked was not valid
3. The connection was lost during the file upload
4. The photo contained nudity or SPAM
5. The photo was a copyright violation

I can only assume that their justification for pulling the photo is the idea that it contained nudity. But if you look, you’ll see that a) she’s still got her underwear on (though clearly, not for much longer) and that b) he could be wearing shorts or underwear. You can’t see anyone nipples or genitals, the usual standard for defining nudity. Sure, nudity is implied in this photo, but there’s nothing showing that isn’t showing in plenty of other photos I’ve seen on lockerz.com. In fact, because of the way the photo is cropped, there’s less skin showing than in the average Sports Illustrated swimsuit photo.

What there is more of in this picture is sex, or at least, implied sex. I’m certainly not denying that. But there’s nothing in the list of reasons given that says anything about sexual expression or activity. It says “nudity”.

If these two people were covered in spandex or liquid latex so that no skin was showing, would it have been pulled? It seems to me that if lockerz.com wants to pull photos that are about nudity, they need some clarity around what that means. And if they want to pull photos that are too sexual (whether implicitly or explicitly), they need to make that clear. Nudity doesn’t equal sex and sex doesn’t require nudity.

Just saying.