Facebook Nudity Ban Laid Bare [Topfreedom]

The rules Facebook uses to decide whether to censor users’ postings have been published for the first time, detailing its more liberal attitude to gore than to nudity.

A disgruntled former moderator has also told of how Facebook uses outsourced staff in developing countries to moderate the huge volume of material its users upload every day.

A document given to the staff of one third party content moderation firm tells them to delete “any OBVIOUS sexual activity, even if naked parts are hidden from view”. Meanwhile “deep flesh wounds are ok to show; excessive blood is ok to show” and “crushed heads, limbs, etc are ok as long as no insides are showing”.

“Slurs or racial comments of any kind” should be deleted, it says, but “humour overrules hate speech UNLESS slurs are used or humour is not evident”, meaning that comments reported to Facebook as hate speech should remain online if they are judged to be in jest and do not include racial slurs.

The rules are used by the third party firm to screen photographs, text and videos that have been “flagged” by one of Facebook’s 850 million users.

Until now, users have been forced to rely on Facebook’s relatively vague community standards to judge what it deems acceptable. On graphic content, the public page says "while we are a platform for sharing events that take place in your life and around the world, any inappropriately graphic content will be removed when found on the site."

The leaked rules for moderators are much more specific. For example, images of “urine, faeces, vomit, semen and ear wax” are banned, but images of "snot" are allowed, as are “cartoon faeces, urine and spit”.

Meanwhile depictions of illegal drug use should be deleted, moderators are told, except marijuana, “unless context is clear that the poster is selling/buying/growing”.

The rules were passed to the US gossip website Gawker.com by a disgruntled former employee of the third party firm, oDesk, who said the $1 per hour he received for screening Facebook photographs was “humiliating”.

The leak is likely to be seized on by critics of Facebook’s hitherto secret censorship policies. Last year it was forced to apologise for deleting a picture of a gay kiss, and it has long faced controversy over its ban on images of breastfeeding that include any part of a mother's nipple; last week a group of “lactivists” protested outside Facebook’s offices.

In response to the leak of its censorship rules, Facebook sought to reassure users their details were not being passed to third parties.

“In an effort to quickly and efficiently process the millions of reports we receive every day, we have found it helpful to contract third parties to provide precursory classification of a small proportion of reported content,” a spokesman said.

“These contractors are subject to rigorous quality controls and we have implemented several layers of safeguards to protect the data of those using our service.

“Additionally, no user information beyond the content in question and the source of the report is shared. We have, and will continue, to escalate the most serious reports internally, and all decisions made by contractors are subject to extensive audits.

"We are constantly improving our processes and review our contractors on an ongoing basis. This document provides a snapshot in time of our standards with regards to one of those contractors."

SOURCE: Telegraph

How To Practice Nudity In Your Family [How-To]

from wikiHow - The How to Manual That You Can Edit
Despite the good intentions of many parents, prohibiting household nakedness can have negative consequences for children. In our media saturated urbanised world, children like this are primed with an appetite for nudity related subject matter (of which most is unhealthy.) It takes a bit of work for the affected parent, but you can get over this and help your children to avoid some of these pitfalls of modern living. Fortunately as a parent you have the unique opportunity to provide a healthy environment for nakedness right in the refuge of your own home. Disclaimer: The purpose here is not to promote public nudity as a method for this How To; quite the contrary (see Warnings section below). This guide is intended primarily as a tool for parents who want to teach their children a wholesome understanding of human nakedness. This How To is intended primarily for use by parents in their home.

Steps

• Encourage family nudity without being abnormal. Young children have not yet acquired a sophisticated understanding of modesty, and really don't care who sees them naked. This is the time when the parent can mould their conscience without making them self-conscious of nakedness. This, in turn, will help children associate nakedness to routine activity instead of exclusively naughty activity, helping illicit forms of nakedness to lose their appeal later in life.
• Allow your children - from birth - to see you in ordinary nude situations (e.g.- dressing, bathing or showering, using the toilet) or any activity where nudity is a natural part. By being comfortable with your own body you will naturally convey the message to your children that nudity really is okay and not something to fear. There are naturally times in life when clothes must be worn for protection, for comfort, and to adhere to societal norms. However, by talking with your children about being comfortable with nudity at home, your children will grow up understanding that being nude & being seen nude at home isn't something "uncool, horrible, and utterly embarrassing."
• Start allowing/encouraging family nudity during potty training & continue through the school age years and beyond. You'd be surprised how quickly potty training takes root when your toddler/preschooler is allowed to go bare at home, but...be prepared for occasional "accidents" as well, and handle these situations calmly without anger or revulsion.
• As they begin to recognise differences between themselves and you or your spouse, explain to them the reason for these differences. Suggested explanations are: "Mommy's breasts are for giving milk to babies like when you were small"? or "Mommy and daddy have hair down here because our bodies are warmer, and it helps keep our bodies cooler (by retaining sweat)."

Tips

• A focal point for nudity that enables the whole family to participate together is very helpful. An indoor swimming pool is ideal, but not practical for most families. Saunas are also excellent for this, but are not as common in the U.S. as Europe. Other water related ideas could be an outdoor pool below or above ground. A cheaper yet more practical idea that works year round would be a hot tub. Children see this as a heated kiddie swimming pool they can use water toys in too.
• A great side benefit to wholesome understandings of the naked body in the home is that when the time comes to explain human reproduction, there will be less tension from the children. They will not have the distraction of embarrassment when discussing (what for others can be) 'shameful' body parts. This in turn, will keep the communication lines open during adolescence.
• There are many great books on pregnancy and adolescence that separate the romantic (i.e. sexual) aspect from the physiological changes of puberty. These books provide a very neutral clinical look at breast and pubic hair growth during the teen years, and include very candid photos of actual births. Influences like these help separate nudity from sex in the child's mind, and provide a framework where family nudity can flourish to the benefit of all.
• Realise that not all shame is bad shame. Good shame is ingrained to help us avoid compromising situations. But other shame is the result of social conditioning during childhood, and unnecessarily predisposes us to clothes compulsiveness.
• Respect others' standards. One good approach is to point out that other people are not accustomed to nudity, and it's kind to respect their wishes. This may mean keeping the curtains drawn, or willingly closing the bathroom door when guests are present, for example -- a practice that encourages courtesy, but not shame.
• Young adolescents naturally develop increased modesty around the time of puberty. Don't force someone to be nude. Wearing pants for a while may help the transition. Being around other teens who role model comfort with their bodies will be reassuring.
• For families where the children are older it may be difficult to change attitudes. In some cases big decisions may need to be made in order to break free from habits. Such changes may include ridding the home of magazines (men's magazines, fashion, or sports related material), television, or other media that subtly foster a "nudity is sex"? mindset. Peers are also part of the equation. It may be necessary to move to another region to get a fresh start. Teenagers especially are very keen on whether the parents walk the talk, so if a parent still models these attitudes so will the teens.
• The goal is to provide children the opportunity to see nakedness in a way that is almost non-existant in our society: to make it a neutral, non-sensuous part of everyday life in its proper context. This goes a long way toward innoculating them from the enticements so easily found outside the walls of your home and in the marketplace.

Warnings

• Be careful about with whom you share your family practices. Not all people will easily come to the conclusions you intended. Nudity and sex are still considered to be related in our society; this stems partly from puritanical attitudes, but also from decades of hedonistic influence by the swingers movement, from influences such as Hedomism II in Jamaica, the SunnyDaze Resort in Colorado, and events like Nudes-a-Poppin in Indiana.
• Although this should be obvious to any well-meaning parent, care is advised during moments of intimacy and marital relations. Since the genitalia are a major source of pleasure during these times, be careful to instead emphasise the primary functions (birth canal, urination) of genitals to younger children. Anything beyond that may overpower their emotional stage of development and work against the wholesome environment you are trying to maintain. Marital intimacy is best left behind closed doors.
• Avoid exposing children to nude photography from fine art, or internet sources as some of this has a subtly skewed pornographic message that untrained eyes will not immediately recognise. The best example is you, your spouse, and older siblings or relatives who bring a very real element to human nakedness.
• Exercise proper hygiene. When exercising family nudity, always encourage/require the use of a towel for sitting. As any parent can tell you, young children don't always exercise the very best cleaning methods after using the potty. Don't be embarrassed about teaching good, healthy personal toileting hygiene to your children. They look to you to teach them properly and correctly.

Article provided by wikiHow, a wiki how-to manual. Please edit this article and find author credits at the original wikiHow article on How to Practice Nudity in Your Family. All content on wikiHow can be shared under a Creative Commons license.

Why Do We Give Children Such Confusing Messages About Their Bodies? [Family]]

This article is from the Mail Online by Liz Fraser, publish on 28 April 2011:

Last week, during one of the hottest Easter holidays on record in the UK, my three children and I went to the local park.

It was sweltering, and after an hour or so of running about with a football, my daughter, Phoebe, who has just turned 11, had turned into a sweaty, par-boiled lobster and desperately wanted to take her T-shirt off to cool down. But she didn’t.

When I asked her why on earth not, she said in an exasperated voice, as if I didn’t understand anything, ‘Mum, I can’t take my top off in a park. People will stare and point!’

Once I’d picked my jaw up off the grass and tried to make sense of what she’d just said, I realised to my utter dismay that her fears were probably completely justified.

Where boys often take their tops off in the hot summer months, many girls, even as young and totally undeveloped as my younger daughter, already feel that they ‘shouldn’t’ expose their top halves in public. Because their nakedness is somehow . . . wrong.

To realise that my own daughter already feels this way came as a real shock to me. I was raised by parents who never shied away from stripping off and jumping in a mountain lake or sunbathing topless on the beach, and I was never even aware of my own nakedness as a pre-pubescent girl. Naked or not — it made no difference to me. I felt totally free, and happy.

Now a parent myself, I’m trying to raise my children similarly: we are very comfortable with our own nakedness at home, and I still often share a bath with my younger children, both Phoebe and Charlie, who’s 7, and quite happily get undressed in front of them.



Liz Fraser believes that millions of children in Britain, have been indoctrinated with the idea that nakedness is rude, naughty or shameful

They see nothing strange about it at all, and the little ones aren’t shy about dancing around naked. They’re kids, after all!

But despite all this ease around nudity within the family environment, they have picked up on the message from outside our home that showing naked flesh in public is something unthinkable, even for children.

They, like millions of children in Britain, have been indoctrinated with the idea that nakedness is rude, naughty or shameful — and that it’s always, always connected with sex.

Though the children are thankfully too young to know about such a gruesome thing, the public’s media-fuelled terror of paedophilia is now so strong that many parents don’t want their children to be seen naked by strangers ‘just in case’ they are photographed and put onto the internet, or peered at by sexual predators.

A naked child has become, for many, a potential sex abuse incident, rather than the beautiful, pure thing it is, despite the reality, which is that — mercifully — abuse by paedophiles is far less prevalent than the furore that surrounds them would imply.

Turning the clock back to the Seventies when I was a pre-schooler, hot summers were all about wearing almost nothing, and our photo albums are bursting with pictures of us as children, naked and happy.

There we’d all be in the local paddling pool or swimming pool, splashing and shrieking happily in nothing but our pants, and often not even that. And nobody minded at all.

Then when I was ten we moved to the South of France for a while, and I remember everyone sunbathing topless, completely relaxed about it. Nobody thought about ‘covering up’ to hide their bodies.

In the local swimming pool, showers were communal and we’d all strip and get washed and changed side by side in the middle of the changing room, chatting away as we did so. Nobody stared. Nobody found it embarrassing or weird. It was considered as normal as brushing one’s teeth.

But when I came back to Britain the following year, the rules for girls my age seemed completely different to the ones abroad. I found that in the changing rooms everyone locked themselves away in separate cubicles, to change in private, ashamed to let their nakedness be seen. If they had to change on the beach they’d perform a bizarre hopping dance ritual under a towel, attempting to remove pants, while putting on bikini bottoms simultaneously, without showing an inch of Forbidden Flesh. Not even for a millisecond.

None of my friends swam or sunbathed topless. Instead, they hid themselves away, squeezing their pubescent breasts into bikinis whose purpose was, paradoxically, to make the wearer look sexier than if they had nothing on at all. It seemed that wearing sexy swimwear was OK, but to be naked and natural wasn’t. Which I found very confusing.

And to be honest, I still do. Beaches this summer will be full of toddlers wearing bikini tops. One mum I know impressed upon her daughter: ‘It’s to keep your boobies covered up.’ Her what?! She’s three years old!

I always bought one-piece swimsuits or just bikini bottoms for my girls when they were little. Why would I want them to wear a bikini top that’s designed to cover breasts, which they quite clearly haven’t got?

Most damaging in all of this is the bizarre paradox that this whispering, blushing shunning of nakedness comes hand in hand with our culture’s obsession with sex and sexuality.

As a scientist friend of mine, and father of one, put it: ‘Public nudity is a crime here, and yet pornography and hypersexual advertising is everywhere in the UK and North America.




Songs of innocence: 'Compare this [Britain] to other countries, where nudity is seen as part of life, and where children are raised without ever thinking to question it'

‘The ever-present appearance of sex and sexual messages in our culture and media goes along with fear and horror at actual nudity — and causes all kinds of problems for people’s sexual activity and self-confidence.’

When nudity is considered unacceptable, but highly-charged sexual messages in advertising and pop videos are not, is it any surprise that so many children are growing up with a confused attitude to their bodies, or feeling ashamed to take their tops off in a park when they’re hot?

What’s even more extraordinary is that violence and bad language are tolerated far more liberally than nudity on television and in films, especially in the U.S. and UK.

Millions of children every day are sitting down to watch programmes that show grim acts of violence or aggression, yet when it comes to showing a naked breast in a shower the censors come down like a ton of bricks and insist it’s covered up, or blurred.

The message our children pick up is that blasting each other to pieces and using foul, aggressive, threatening language is fine and dandy, but showing a nipple? Perish the thought!

Compare this to other countries, where nudity is seen as part of life, and where children are raised without ever thinking to question it. One former classmate, who is Spanish and has a two-year-old daughter, commented: ‘Kids run around naked in Spain on beaches and in parks in the good weather and it’s totally normal.’

Another friend, who is Swedish, but now lives in Canada, told me: ‘Canada is on a par with the U.S. in terms of excessive prudishness. When we go to the beach, it’s the Swedish mums who let their toddlers run around naked — and they get lots of dirty looks from their Canadian counterparts!’

And so despite the fact that I appear to be in the distinct minority, I continue to fight hard against our very British culture of bizarre, unhelpful prudishness.I still change in the middle of the changing room at my local pool, without adopting body-shielding tactics. I know my children find this a little bit odd, and probably wish I didn’t. When nobody else is naked, why is Mummy?

Well, because Mummy happens to think that there’s nothing wrong with it and she’d rather teach her children that their bodies are beautiful and natural just as they are, and don’t need dressing up in sexy clothes or to be hidden from view to be acceptable.

SOUCRE: Mail Online

Breastfeeding Mothers Stage Brighton Flash-Mob [Health & Wellbeing]

This article was taken from The Huffington Post:

A hardy group of mothers staged a breastfeeding flash-mob demonstration in a city centre to declare their right to feed their babies in public.

Up to 40 mothers, some accompanied by their partners, descended on Brighton, East Sussex, and breastfed their children in front of Christmas shoppers.

Claire Jones-Hughes, 38, organised the demonstration after she was criticised by customers in a cafe for breastfeeding one of her daughters last week.

She was confronted by a group of four middle-aged women and a man in her favourite vegetarian restaurant, Wai Kika Moo Kau, after feeding four-month-old Callie.

Mrs Jones-Hughes said: "One woman said, 'It was very unpleasant watching you feed. You should have covered up more'. When I protested, the others joined in, and the man said, 'You should have used a towel'.

"I was really shocked, especially as I'd gone to a lot of effort to be discreet. You usually get nice comments when you're with a baby, and I couldn't believe I was having this conversation. In their world, it was completely unnatural that they should see me doing that."

Despite the support of another customer, Mrs Jones-Hughes was visibly shaken and reduced to tears by the incident.

She said: "After they left, the manager came over to ask what happened and was mortified when I told him. When I calmed down it reminded me of all the stories I've heard from other women who've had similar experiences."

After drumming up support online, Mrs Jones-Hughes encouraged other women to brave the cold to feed their babies as part of the flash mob at the Clock Tower.

The customer services manager, who also has a three-year-old daughter Lexie, said she hoped the event would give confidence to mothers who are nervous about breastfeeding in public.

SOURCE: www.huffingtonpost.co.uk

The Naked Truth on Family Nudity [Parents & Family]

This article is from Parents.com:

A Parents.com expert resolves one mom and dad's disagreement about being naked in front of their kids:

Q. My wife thinks there's nothing wrong with taking a bath naked with our two boys, even though they are now 1 and 3. Frankly, this makes me uncomfortable. I say it's time she covered up in front of our children, but she thinks I'm being a prude. How can we resolve this difference without arguing about it anymore?

Read The Whole Article @ Parents.com