What's Facebook's problem with Leonard Nimoy's nude photography
A little known facet about Leonard "Spock" Nimoy who passed away earlier this week, was his penchant for taking nude pictures. In 2007, he published a book called The Full Body Project which contained pictures of fat women reprising famous paintings. A selection can be seen here.
After the actor's death, a fan posted one of his pictures, based on Rafael's The Three Graces, on her Facebook timeline in memoriam. The picture has three fat women in a sort of embrace. We see the naked front of two and the naked back of the third woman standing between the other two women. In Rafael's original painting, the women are, true to the title, graceful figures, holding an apple each, and taking us momentarily into the Garden of Eden.
Nimoy's picture, to be sure, does not inspire the same feelings, until we ask ourselves why not. The women are fat, for one, and even as we gawk at them, we contest this instinctive conditioning that fat is not beautiful. The women's bodies are not a sight to behold - their breasts sag, hips protrude, the skin folds upon itself to yield a diseased look. But their faces tell a different story. They are not old or sick, in fact. They are only fat. It is we with our weird ideas about beautiful who are heaping tch-tchs upon them. The expression on their face says they could not care less. While the women are not conventionally beautiful, the picture forces us to concede that they are regular women, not some culturally determined artistic ideal, and for that reason alone, deserve our respect.
Nimoy may be accused of fetishing fat but his reasons were more political. In a New York Observer piece, he was quoted as saying: "The average American woman, according to articles I've read, weighs 25 per cent more than the models who are showing the clothes they are being sold… Most women will not be able to look like those models… And the cruellest part of it is that these women are being told, "You don't look right".
I was drawn to this story because the fan who posted the Rafael-inspired picture on her Facebook timeline was asked to remove it by the good people at the tech company. Facebook has elaborate, and frankly Byzantine, rules on posting nudity, and one is never sure when one might step on a mine. The curious thing: Facebook was cool with a picture of the original Rafael painting but not with its simulation. The obvious thought bubble: Is the problem nudity or fat?
Critics might argue that a painting is never nearly as provocative as a photograph. In Rafael's painting, we only see a likeness of the human form, while in Nimoy's picture, we see real women, with their peach-shaped figures and tumescent bellies. The sight of skin - real flesh-coloured skin - can evoke all manner of reactions, from arousal to disgust. But does that truly capture the nub of it? What if Nimoy had chosen to photograph nubile, lissom women for his project? Would the pictures be still so revolting?
Is there a staple definition of what constitutes "beautiful" or are we condemned to respond with our ingrained biases? Then there are broader questions around the expectations that women in particular are loaded with. Nandita Das famously tapped this debate by appearing for the "Dark is Beautiful" campaign, a long-overdue denunciation of the Indian fetish for light skin. But a culture of physical beauty can be oppressive for men too, as the burgeoning fitness business in India indicates.
Finally, how do we wrap our head around tech companies' position on this? The internet has been a great tool for freedom of expression but there are still no-go areas. Nudity apparently is one of them. This is what Facebook says on nudity:
"Facebook has a strict policy against the sharing of pornographic content and any explicitly sexual content where a minor is involved. We also impose limitations on the display of nudity. We aspire to respect people's right to share content of personal importance, whether those are photos of a sculpture like Michelangelo's David or family photos of a child breastfeeding."
"Content of personal importance" is subjective at the best times. The line between nudity and porn is delicate enough for interested users to cross without perhaps even meaning to. In my experience with pictures of homosexual love on Facebook, nakedness is fine, as long as there are no shots of genitals. This might be where Nimoy's picture fell afoul of the censors.
Happily, there are other options. Twitter and Tumblr have no reservations on nudity, so that porn stars too can have accounts. But since Facebook is where our nearest and dearest reside, our inability to post stuff that speaks to us can mean the loss of something fragile and important. As a society, we may have a long walk to freedom from tyrannical definitions ahead of us but online we should be able to hope for a less suffocating ecosystem. Beauty is not a one-way station and it is time Facebook allowed greater remit in letting us define it.