Nipplegate

From Bob Mankoff's blog The Cartoon Bureau.

The New Yorker has a Facebook page, which a lot of you like, or maybe it’s just one person with a lot of time on their hands, liking the page over and over again. But in any case, it’s a whole lotta like. We like that.

What we don’t like is that we got temporarily banned from Facebook for violating their community standards on “Nudity and Sex,” by posting the above Mick Stevens cartoon.

Hoping to get back into Facebook’s good graces, Mick redrew the cartoon for us, but the gain in clothes caused too great a loss in humor.

Some sleuthing showed that the offense was actually caused by the inclusion of these two dots in the cartoon,

which, by the way, also contained these two non-offending dots.

Can you spot all four of them in the banned cartoon? Hint: it’s like “Where’s Waldo?,” but for nipples.

A Facebook document that outlines the company’s banning guidelines was recently unearthed by Gawker. Here’s the relevant snippet:

Well, Mick’s cartoon was well within the guidelines of the first rule, although this previous New Yorker cartoon, by Karen Sneider, would have run afoul of that injunction:

But kudos to Karen for handling the nipple problem so dexterously, shielding the innocent from those bits of both sexes, even though, as the guidelines say, “male nipples are ok.” It’s the “female nipple bulges” that are the problem.

Just to be clear.

Not O.K.:

O.K.:

Now, we could have fought the ruling on technical grounds, because, let’s face it, these female nips, by any stretch of the imagination, no matter how prurient, are just not bulging:

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.
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Update

JOKE ALERT! JOKE ALERT!

The following sentence in the post above was a joke: “Hoping to get back into Facebook’s good graces, Mick redrew the cartoon for us, but the gain in clothes caused too great a loss in humor.”

I feel compelled to state the obvious because the obvious wasn’t obvious to Gawker:

After the ban, the cartoon was even redrawn by its author, Mick Stevens, to feature a clothed couple, though “the gain in clothes caused too great a loss in humor,” Mankoff writes.

Nor in New York magazine’s Daily Intel item:

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. 

Mick redrew the cartoon not for Facebook but especially for the blog post. The purpose was humor by way of ridicule. Adding clothing not only renders the cartoon humorless but meaningless as well.