Poll: Who among you on YC care to see a woman not wearing her burqa?

The common thread argument is that it's a natural occurrence and shouldn't be obscene; this doesn't change anything that it is something that some people don't care to see as something publicised. Lately it seems that people are so quick to jump to the argument of "protecting MY rights" in this case to display something 'natural' that they completely forget to show consideration for the people who just don't want those sort of things on their screens every time they want to leave a profile comment.

It's fine if you want to dress immodestly at home, it's not fine if you're pushing it in the faces of people who just do not want to see it. Time has proven the statement "your rights end where mine begin"

Exactly. That's why this is interesting. It's all arbitrary.

We can't just eyeball obscenity. Not if it's to be a law or a policy.

Obscenity needs to be prevented. Nudity is obscene. Bare breasts are nudity. Exposed areola are bare breasts.

To make breastfeeding OK we could make an exception to the rule. So we'd need to add in an 'unless' at the end of the above statements. Seems hopelessly complex. We obviously can't live without all of the above statements.

Or, we could just accept that our bodies are not something we should be ashamed of.

Isn't it a bit weird how you cannot show a couple of nice boobs on a news site, but you can show a man who's had his legs blown off by a bomb and is lying in his own blood slowly dying? Which is more obscene/offensive/likely to cause upset?

In the US or Australia you'd rarely see a man who's just had his legs blown off by a bomb, unless it was fictional. News organizations are loathe to show actual violence during wars.

watch sbs

Good point. SBS is indeed an exception.

That was really my point. Sort of. My point was also that in order to have a policy you have to nail down something that is un-nail-downable, like defining obscenity.

There is nothing inherently obscene about breasts. Actually breasts are a funny case because in some places it was always OK to see them, while in others it wasn't. Genitalia are almost universally banned (& we don't often encounter issues with public childbirth so it's not the same sort of issue). There isn't anything you could describe as 'rational' about the bans.

Anyway, normally we eyeball it in the day to day, make a policy for laws & try to avoid the area where definitions get fuzzy.

If you feel so inclined there are all sorts of things you can do to dance around the definitions. Cover only the areola. Show a slow zoom-out shot of an areola starting with individual cells. Let the regulators decide where the shot needs to stop zooming out.

Breast feeding is an issue at the core because it is very inconvenient for mothers of young infants to be banned from public breastfeeding. They either can only go out only for short periods of time or need to go & sit in the bathroom to nurse. That's not nice.

There are a million different things that a million different people "don't care to see" but that doesn't mean we should censor all of them.

I certainly don't think Facebook's policies should be more restrictive than the FCC, which AFAIK doesn't ban breast feeding (I think their criteria is no nipple/areola... ahem, Janet Jackson).

I think at least part of the reason they push it is because in most of North America in the summer there's a gazillion fat male slobs with giant breasts walking around (and their pictures are easily found on facebook).