nudity

The New Yorker Cartoon a Bit Too Nipply for Facebook

The original cartoon.

Facebook purity overlords temporarily banned The New Yorker’s cartoon page Monday evening for violating the social network’s standards on “Nudity and Sex,” which prohibit naked “private parts” including “female nipple bulges.” The offending content comes from a Mick Stevens cartoon that, in its original form, depicts a naked Adam and Eve leaning against a particularly knowledgable tree, nipples-as-dots fully exposed. But those dots proved too much nipple and led to a ban that prompted the magazine to ask Stevens for a re-draw. He obliged, and the result is Adam and Eve fully clothed in the midst of a camping trip.

The gain in clothes caused too great a loss in humor,” wrote The New Yorker’s Robert Mankoff, who griped over Facebook’s unevenly applied banning guidelines (published by Gawker). “But rather than fight the battle of the bulge, let’s point out, that while female nipple bulging, or F.N.B. for short, is a potentially serious problem, with as yet no known cure, it also has no known victims. That is, unless you count freedom of expression, common sense, and humor.”

The New Yorker Cartoon Too Nipply for Facebook