A women’s university rowing club had their images banned from Facebook after their nude charity calendar was branded pornography by the social media giant.
Female students from England's University of Warwick Rowing Society took it off for the tasteful photo shoot, which sold 1,500 copies, and raised thousands of dollars for Macmillan Cancer Support.
The 17 members of the group stripped down to nothing but sunscreen — posing in their boat house and while in action on the River Avon — before posting the pictures on both Facebook and Twitter.
Facebook reportedly removed the group's page for its "explicitly sexual content."
"We always made the amendments and took the pictures down — even though they were no racier than the others — but a few days ago they emailed and said the page was being completely removed," said the group.
"They say it is because of nudity but we are not violating any of their terms and all the pictures we post are not indecent images or inappropriate."
"To have this page unfairly taken away is going to affect our sales for the 2015 calendar and decrease the amount we can make for charity.
"There are loads of similar nude charity calendars who have Facebook pages plastered across the site - why aren’t they being asked to takes theirs down too?"
The group has sent countless emails to the US site in order to try and explain their situation but have yet to receive a response.
"It is a charity calendar — how can it be porn?" asked one female rower.
"The Facebook account for the male rower’s charity calendar hasn’t been deleted and their page is the same as ours," she added. "It is borderline sexism."
The female rowers raised about $1000 for the cancer charity with their first artistic calendar in 2013. It also caused controversy when it was labelled as "tacky" for portraying women as "sex objects."
But they took things a step further and this year’s calendar — which features the girls totally naked — and have made over $4000 for the same cause.
And, it looks like the ladies just got a lot more men interested in the sport of rowing.
No comments:
Post a Comment