Breastfeeding fetishism
But it raises the question: If you find your breastfeeding photos are being used for sexual gratification of another person, what can you do about it?
Ashley Reed is an admin on a Facebook support page and said she shared a gorgeous photo of herself nursing her baby. She encouraged the page's followers to share their own photos, but she soon noticed someone had shared the photo to his own Facebook page for unpleasant reasons. She realized it wasn't because it was a pretty picture — the man is a self-proclaimed breastfeeding fetishist, and she says he made a crude comment about the photo.
Image: KJCT8
She had no choice but to take the photo down, but she was inspired to create a petition that could possibly prevent something like this from happening again in the future. The petition reads:
There is a growing number of men who are sharing breastfeeding pictures for sexual purposes on Facebook. We need to change that.
I am asking Facebook to change the setting on a Page Owners account so we will be able to Approve and or Deny shares on the public page from any of our post.
This way we can better protect our images and fans.
The profile of the man in question was discovered to be involved in tons of inappropriate breastfeeding photo use, where he'd share the photos with a caption that included the words "Milk me" — including popular breastfeeding advocate Paa.la:
Breastfeeding photo exploited
She, along with many others, reported the inappropriate use of these photos, and she says there are steps moms can take if something like this happens to them. "I blocked him," she tells me. "Blocking keeps him from seeing me and me from seeing him. Unfortunately, then I can't see what he's doing — if he's sharing more of my photos from my website or continuing to mess with other pages. After he was reported enough times, I believe Facebook removed his profile. But he supposedly has multiple accounts. It's very easy to do that."
She says she doesn't like the idea of her photos being used for sexual arousal. "But it's a small risk I take to help women across the globe," she shares. "And there are those people who fetishize just about everything, so there's no protecting anyone, stopping these people from being turned on and browsing the internet and Facebook."
The admins of Breast is Best without Fear say they will continue to share nursing photos, but they hope Facebook will add another measure of protection for Facebook owners to determine who can or cannot share the images they post.
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