helen-louise's journal

My userinfo was last updated 2005-11-05 and I'd been thinking it needed revising for a while, but had little incentive to do so. Then tonight I had a colossal chocolate craving, which led to me veganising an old recipe for chewy cookie-like brownies rather than using my "standard" low fat chocolate fudgey sauce brownie recipe. And it seemed completely crazy that I've gone on this long without adding "experimental baking" to my interest list, because it's definitely something I do a lot of! So then I ended up editing the whole userinfo, and...

Things that fell off my interest list this time:
3 Colours Red, Grand Theft Audio - bands I like, but which are dead and no longer producing new material.
Talkers - my usual way of chatting to people when I first got online. Now I do irc instead.
Jake the Rake - adjectivemarcus's excellent poly cartoon, but he's busy with other projects now.
Linda McCartney sausages - they're veggie sausages. They're also vegan. They're also not made of soya. To be honest, this was here mostly as a silly interest - I was always the only person to have it, and I've been an official member of the Too Many Interests To Fit in 150 Club for years.
PS2 - as in Playstation2. I'd been going to drop Pride flags, but figured i'm much more interested in Pride flags than the Playstation2, a console I care for only because it's the favoured platform of Bemani and Harmonix.
Sleeping - I'm not actually that big on sleeping! It seems like a waste of time.
Threesomes - Intermittently asexual, too much effort, etc.

Things added, all of which in the "I can't believe this wasn't already on there!" category:
avoiding online drama
cycling
ethical living
experimental baking
nintendo DS
tricycles for adults
trikes
veganising recipes

( Complete text of new userinfo for posterity. )

At 20:15, I noticed on irc that I'd discovered I needed to go to ?skip=580 on the Default View of my livejournal friends page before I could see stuff I'd read before. I said:
baratron: ok, i'm going to read from ?skip=580 to ?skip=300, and no later. as if i try to read too much at once, i get information overload and my brain explodes.
baratron: i know that once i get started the temptation will be to read EVERYTHING, because it all has WORDS ON.
baratron: but if i do i'll get a headache and feel twitchy

It's now 01:09, I've got to ?skip=300, and I'm stopping. There are lots of reasons why I get so behind with livejournal, and one day I should articulate them. But not now. Going to play Sims 2 for a bit, then sleep :)

After some hours, I've caught up the Default View of my friends list from ?skip=600 to ?skip=420.

I may be some time getting round to reading your post, but I still love you :)

So, there is apparently a bit of a war going on because livejournal has deemed a woman's default usericon as "inappropriate". The icon apparently showed her breastfeeding her child. It's now been removed, so I don't know what it looked like.

All of the arguments I've seen about this so far have tended to go on about "the 50 states" and "the First Amendment". But Livejournal is an international community, with many users from Canada, Europe, Australia and New Zealand. So I don't care about First Amendment "rights", because I don't really understand what they are. Instead, I want to point out the mistake in livejournal's current reasoning.

This is what the livejournal FAQ looks like at the moment. Notice it's been updated as of 2006-05-20. ( Copy & paste )

Note the specific wording of the FAQ. In particular, icons which contain nudity or graphic violence tend to be inappropriate for default userpics. Speaking as a European, I have to say, OMG WTF? Breastfeeding is nudity now? When did that happen?

Whenever I run up against rules that involve "but everyone knows what x means"-type logic, I get made uncomfortable. If I can't understand a rule, I might break it by accident. Saying something like "well, everyone knows what nudity means" doesn't actually make sense to me, because what nudity means in my country is not the same as what it means in other countries. For example, topless sunbathing is de rigeur on beaches in the South of France - and I mean that it's not just usual, it's expected. You'll be looked at strangely if you wear a bikini top, and possibly hear a muttered comment of "ah, les anglais". Scandinavians happily strip off in mixed-gender saunas with strangers. So what does nudity mean from an international perspective? In some countries, women are expected to cover their heads, in others both men and women are expected to dress modestly and cover shoulders. How can livejournal ban "nudity" without first defining it?

I feel that if livejournal is to say icons which contain "nudity" are inappropriate for default userpics, they need to define which parts of the body count as "nude". I am presuming that naked heads and hands are allowed, simply because no one's ever complained about those. What about naked arms? Backs? Legs? Bottoms? (I'm guessing not bottoms.) If I took a picture of my naked legs, that would be nudity, wouldn't it? Especially if all of me was naked at the time, but I cropped the image to only show my legs. So is that ok? If it is ok, why is that ok, but my naked breast isn't? How about naked babies? Are they allowed? Is the issue about the breastfeeding mother nothing to do with her breast, and actually to do with her baby?

You might think I'm being deliberately stupid for the sake of making a point, but I'm not. People need to understand rules in order to obey them. This is particularly true for livejournal users who have disabilities such as autistic spectrum conditions, for whom things which are "obvious" to "everyone else" do not make sense. I have several autistic friends on my lj friends list, plus many other friends with other disabilities who love the internet as an accessible means of communication. Livejournal is a tool for keeping people in communication with each other, and rules must be understandable to all livejournal users - including those who have disabilities.

I believe that, rather than simply saying that nudity is not allowed, livejournal must define the parts of the body that must be covered in default userpics, and also specify explicitly whether this restriction applies only to photographs, or also to icons of paintings, cartoons, or screenshots from video games. If it is indeed the nipple that makes the breast indecent, then that argument must apply to men as well. (I'm reminded of the Aerosmith album "Get a Grip", which has, as the CD illustration, the nipples of the five band members.) And it must be consistent.

I would post this to livejournal Customer Service if I could find a direct link - Contact Info seems to send you round in circles to direct everything through lj support, which really doesn't seem like the right place for this. It needs to be sent to the policy makers, not the enforcers. Update.