I can’t help but wonder if the Venus de Milo ever had (and if it as yet retained…) dark areola pigment, would it have been utterly destroyed by now or perhaps just hidden away in some secret collection like the Vatican’s?

How large of a fat deposit must be behind the area of darker flesh before it’s considered a boob? My chest area (which happens to be male), has more “bump” than some of the women I’ve dated.

In my state, male areloas are safely displayed around any area where a substantial amount of water can be found (i.e. ocean beaches, ponds, rivers, lakes, even cement-lined pools and hot-tubs. Surely it’s the more agressive FEMALE areola to which they are directing their suppressive attention? Here they must be corraled by the all-powerful inpenetrable pastie (even in men’s clubs where children are not allowed…), which I must assume acts as some sort of a blinder, similar to that which one places on a horse, to keep the beast from running wild in the streets…

Surely it’s no accident that beast and breast are so similarly spelled…

That said, I see where Facebook is coming from. I read a statement from one of their PR people that explained it a little better than the article you posted did (though for the life of me, I can’t find it now), and it stated that they were not removing photos because they were obscene or pornographic, they were removing photos because they contained nudity, which is against the Facebook TOS. I feel that it’s important that they remain consistent in what they remove, and it’s tough to justify why they removed a 20-something girl without a top on at the beach, and left a 20-something girl without a top on at the beach holding a baby, you know? I’ll admit, they probably have inconsistencies as to what exactly counts as nudity (I heard it was nipple or nothing). However, Facebook is a huge website with millions of members and tons of staff and I would imagine it’s somewhat difficult to maintain a completely consistent standard, especially when it’s more or less a judgement call 90% of the time anyway.

And before anyone says “but there are tons of boobs all over Facebook and THEY haven’t been removed!” the statement I read also said that the photos that had been removed had been because Facebook received complaints about them – they didn’t go around looking for photos to remove.

Anyway, my point isn’t that nudity is bad or wrong or shameful (I feel the exact opposite, actually) but that Facebook needs to be consistent in the policies they enforce, and if boob isn’t allowed, then the context doesn’t matter, boob isn’t allowed.

And yes, it makes Google look much worse in that light.

To be clear, aureola and areola do exist as distinct words with different (though similar) meanings and different linguistic origins. “Aureola” has its roots in the Latin for “gold” and refers to things like the golden halo in religious icons; “areola” has its roots in the Latin for “area” and means (among other things) the dark area around the nipple. However, the words are confused so often that many respectable sources list both “spellings” as alternates of each other — which is how I went (very slightly) astray in drafting this post.

In this case, the word attributed to Facebook’s policy was aureola, in the source from which I quoted. So, “aureola” was the search I did. At the time, I thought we were looking at a simple case of alternate spellings; now, I’m better educated.

Still, when you turn Google’s safe search on and do the search I mocked, it filters out many of the dictionary definitions, including the two I linked to. Does anybody think this is not risible?

To my eyes, this makes Google’s filter look worse, not better. When you search for a word, that properly means “a golden ring” but is commonly used to mean “the flesh around a nipple”, why does Google filter out the very definitions that might help to clear up the confusion? What’s unsafe about the definitions I linked to?

Not that I don’t totally agree with your opinion on the whole issue, but it looks bad if you factually undercut yourself.