The (Straight) Male Gaze Rules on Sanitized Social Media

Well that is some bullshit.

This is it. We need some gay tech industry giant to create a gay safe space we can migrate to.

Look at the commoners Stokes posted, how in the fuck is that not hate speech and a violation of Facebook policy?

Cue the "but Facebook is a private company" trolls.

Where is all the hate the photographer is getting coming from? Only the US?

What is "male gaze"? Or any kind of "gaze"?

I understand his point, but I can't feel too bad for someone who's making a good living off of photographing all these hot, naked men.

He won't be making as good a living if FB bans his pics, r5.

R4 Really?

While I think that female nudity should be treated the same, I'm not really losing any sleep about nudity being removed from social media. Frankly, it should all be 18+, but if they're not going to do that, then it needs to be sanitized.

You're not going to like my response but here goes: His work looks like very low rent soft core pornography. He isn't a very skilled photographer, abuses HDR, doesn't know how to work a strobe-- it all looks like very cheap erotica. Bruce Weber doesn't deal with this because his work his tasteful. His facebook is littered with male nudes and he's a well known mo and also pervert. (Below)

Is there homophobia at play with Mr. Stokes targeted harassment? Most definitely. But there is no parallel to be drawn between the type of work he does and the Williams + Hirakawa photo of Serena used in contrast with his. He's being trolled with mass reports which set off an algorithm, it's not as personalized as he makes it seem. Facebook is far too big to personally go through and look at every picture reported for whatever reason, so when the homophobic trolls like the ones he screenshotted swarm a person with reports, there's a a response.

First world problems.

R9 It is homophobia, plain and simple. Why should less than %1 of Facebooks users get to determine whether a photo gets removed or not, when all of Stokes 600,000 followers keep coming back for his content? If it's the work of an algorithm, then it's a shitty algorithm. There are billions of photos on Facebook, why would someone take time out of their day to visit a page they don't like? If one wants to debate the merits or lack thereof of these photos, why not just do so in the comments?

Why, r5?

So are the good-looking men. Stokes makes money for both of them.

Are you saying photographers shiuld work for free?

Are you saying men shouldn’t be objectified?

What is your damage?

R10, Homophobia is not a "first world problem". It's an even bigger issue in the 3'rd world.

R11 As I've just said to you, it's the style of his work that registers as pornographic. I've seen far more homoerotic work from skilled photographers that don't seem to have the same censorship issues. From the types of comments he highlighted in the article, it seems like right wing trolls don't like his naked veterans/servicemen that went viral, so they fixated on exploiting FB's algorithms and as he mentioned-- outsourced content moderators from less developed countries.

What he and you are also missing is that work like this registers as FETISH work. There is what we would call "abelism" at play as well as homophobia.

And those comments are clearly violations yet Facebook did nothing about them.

Showing disabled people as beautiful is fetishisim?

R16 Yes. Diane Arbus is one of the most controversial photographers in history because of this. Stokes' work ranges from soft core pornography to these types of photos where a disability is highlighted. The two combined is obviously going to illicit a response from a content moderator in the Philippines. I'm not defending it, there is a double standard and Stokes deserves to have his work shown, but nothing will change until society changes or at least until FB stops outsourcing its moderating jobs to more conservative countries.

his stuff is SO FUCKING hot

Fetishism for some, inspiration to others.

What higher purpose can the Kardashian photo claim.

precisely

Stokes' article partly explains how threads keep disappearing on DL.

R19 Those pics are hot even for non fetishists. A beautiful man is still a beautiful man even if they are missing a leg.

These guys are so beautiful—what is the problem? Where is the homophobia coming from? Is it the Middle East?

Where is MOST of the homophobia coming from, I should say.

Deplorables, Rose.

On the Advocate article, their names are blurred out—why protect their identity?

I agree that his work should not be removed from Facebook. But I could see what Facebook was becoming years ago, so I deleted my account.

Any artist (particular anyone who flirts with the "adult" side of their industry) who builds their business model on social media is lacking in critical thinking skills. These platforms are subject to the whims of whomever is in charge and what social winds are blowing. Any adult artist must build their own infrastructure in order to thrive, succeed, and future-proof their career.

Social media (and I'm including all of the adult, sex-oriented sites) make it convenient for artists, models, and performers to promote their craft to a wider public. But if ANYTHING from the outside fucks with the system, then all of your hard work and goodwill amount to nothing.

Say what you want about sex workers, but there were guys who built loyal followings and successful careers on RentBoy. That was erased when the US government shut it down.

Facebook is fucking evil. They can pay as much lip service to promoting tolerance and equality as they want, but that only goes as far as a public stance to keep raking in the dollars. They get paid from the gay bashers too, and they like those dollars just as much. So they maintain a balance (that pisses off both sides) that mostly affects the "fringe" elements they deem unworthy. Yet people continue to use this awful service because it makes life "easier" and makes it more "convenient" to connect with "friends." I guess I've found that I just don't miss the people who only communicated with me on Facebook, and the relationships I maintain with people off of social media are actually more substantial, even if smaller in number.

Until people leave these platforms in droves, the corporations that operate them will continue to treat their product (which is their subscriber base) as poorly as they choose. They're getting paid (quite handsomely), so they don't care.

Social networking need to move to the decentralized "Fediverse" where commercial companies don't rule.

Apps like Mastodon on it already have millions of users.

There are no straight males gazing (or doing anything else) in the OP pic.

But we have to continue to fight that fight, R2. Let me step back. We had a battle over censorship well over 200 years ago, and our founding fathers wanted to ensure that freedom of expression was a central core value the new nation enshrined; hence, the First Amendment. Of course, at the time, the thought that a corporation (if they even had any idea of what the modern corporation would look like) would maintain monopoly control over supposedly free speech was as foreign to them as the idea that average citizens would have the right to own as many guns as they want thanks to idiots misrepresenting the placement of a comma in the Second Amendment.

Fast forward to present day, and here we are having to fight for our freedoms as much, if not more, than our forefathers did, only instead of having to kowtow to the whims of a despot king, now we have to bow down before thieves like Zuckerberg and corporate whores like Verizon. The irony is that the platforms are never held to account for their policies, even-handed application, and/or any of the content on their sites. No, they got special dispensation to be completely free from the consequences of their actions because old people in Washington couldn't wrap their heads around the internet and what it was becoming.

So it is with some schadenfreude that I listen to conservatives whine about censorship; it's due to their beliefs that corporations are a special class of people (read: better than mere mortals) that we're faced with growing censorship amidst a wildly varying application of corporate policy.

Like many of the problems we face in the modern world, we could solve this easily if we wanted. We don't want to. It's that simple.

Great post R30, and for the record, I've been shouted down by liberals when I defended the conservatives' right to post what they wanted on social media, not because I agree with everything they have to say, but because I fought for their right to say it. But they keep hammering that private organization line because it suits their agenda. Sometimes, we need to step back and look at the bigger picture.

However, there is a precedent to defending the rights of free speech in the context of anti discrimination which would certainly apply to this case.

R30, hear, hear!

I don't find his work pornographic at all. This country is becoming more puritanical every day.

He mentions the outsourcing of censorship to third world countries might be one reason. I do not agree. From where I am - Europe - it looks more like not only censoring of male nudity but also the lack of censoring of violence and racism is because of the depraved morality and downright stupidity and ignorance of right wing US-American evangelicals. The kind of people that support and back up Trump.

Instagram keeps shutting down pages that just feature the male body, even if it's fully clothed. They have ramped up enforcement of their vague rules and people can get banned for no reason other than trolling or overzealous banners. FB and Instagram think this will help them continue being relevant, when it's the political memes and shit that need to be removed, they are the most toxic.

The writer gets its correct--straight males think pics of nearly-naked females are fine but nearly-naked (often just shirtless) is not,.

[quote] straight males think pics of nearly-naked females are fine but nearly-naked (often just shirtless) is not,.

That's weird because straight men don't get turned on by male nudity. It's like when I'm passing a Swimsuit Illustrated cover at the grocery store. I may casually glance once at the cover but then never look back, whereas if it's a male showing just a little skin I might look at it over and over and even flip the pages.