Breast with nipple!

[avram]

So, about the breastfeeding icon kerfuffle — you’ve heard, right? Here, get up to speed — I’m probably not going to bother participating in the mass pseudo-deletion of accounts. I’m certainly not going to be going back to Paid Account status (mine lapsed a few weeks back). And I’ve already downloaded a copy of Textpattern with a view towards getting my old blog up and running again, ’cause who the hell needs all this crazy we’re a community no we’re a business bullshit?

Meantime, I worked up a protest icon of sorts, but I don’t think it really hits the spot, what with that being a baby bottle nipple, and with the tension about breast- vs bottle-feeding being part of the driving force behind the kerfuffle. So I won’t be using it. But anyone else wants it, go ahead.

Comments

[gentlyepigrams]

I thought you were one of the few people who had anything sensible to say about the whole thing.

Post a link to your blog if you start it again so I can sub to your feed.

[avram]

Well, it’s one of those things where I agree at least a bit with both sides, and think there’s plenty of bad behavior on both sides. Melissa Singer’s comment on Making Light made me smack my head and realize that this was one of those cases where there’s an issue behind the issue, and that other issue is driving the anger.

Heh, RSS feed. Y’know, there are going to be some advantages to using a blogging package instead of just wiring it all up myself out of half-assed Perl snippets and shoe polish.

[gentlyepigrams]

Oh, yeah, totally, breast vs. bottle and all that implies. Way to start a flame war. hardvice, who started all this, must be feeling mighty, mighty smug if he read any of that.

There are no heroes here. LJ Abuse comes off badly, as it often does, the breastfeeding people come off as unreasonable gits, and the pseudo-deletion is an even stupider form of protest than not buying gas one day to protest high gas prices. I feel marginally stupider for having read up on the matter.

[whumpdotcom.livejournal.com]

Off Topic, but I'm about ready to go back to homebrew blog software, because:

1. Wordpress' support for standards bites.
2. I've found the current builds Moveable Type annoying to work with when you want to customize templates.
3. Outside of LJ or Making Light, weblog comments aren't that useful.
4. cynthia1960 is interested in starting a book review site, so that would be a cool bespoke blogware + µformats project.

[pavel-lishin.livejournal.com]

Pages won't load, I'm going to try and guess what happened:

1. Some woman who's nuts about breastfeeding to the point of being militant makes a userpic with a nipple.
2. Said woman pisses off someone with LJ mod powers.
3. LJ mod powers warn her to remove icon; she tells them to cram it up their shriveled, moldy assholes.
3. LJ mods delete her icon.
4. Woman puts it back up.
5. Repeat until LJ mods boot her from Livejournal.
6. Woman pours sand into vagina and complains that LJ hates mothers and women.

Am I right?

[whumpdotcom.livejournal.com]

Nope.

[whumpdotcom.livejournal.com]

1. hardvice reported to LJ abuse for default icon of topless woman.
2. hardvice says if you're banning my icon, then you should ban that icon of a breast feeding infant too.
3. User with breastfeeding icon pissed off.
4. Other users complain that there's a difference between a page three girl and a photo of an infant breastfeeding.
5. LJ staff say, no, there isn't according to the rules.
6. Some users lose the plot and think LJ/6A is anti-breastfeeding.
7. * conjecture * 6A staff contemplate that line from Richard III about killing all the lawyers.
8. More users adopt breast feeding default icons.
9. At the same time, at least one user scours the site looking for users with a breastfeeding primary icon and report them as TOS violations to abuse.
10. At this point, the one day boycott was proposed. [ed. I don't think the boycott will do any good, raising the matter to the Mena/Joi/Anil level might.]

Meanwhile, there are backstories:

1. Breastfeeding mothers, already tired at being shunned, yelled at, etc. think: "Jesus on a Segway, here's another place the culture's gone hating on us."

2. The crowd who normally tries to remove Harry Potter, and/or Our Bodies, Ourselves from libraries has now decided to go after LJ, Facebook, MySpace etc, and want those sites banned from schools and libraries. Legislation has been introduced.

So, instead of your rather vapid sterotype, there is an actual story behind this.