There is so much causing offence right now. Take your pick from Tory in-fighting about the draft Brexit deal; the discovery that Facebook employed a PR firm to undermine critics by claiming, among other things, that they were agents of the billionaire political donor George Soros; and whatever the president of the US said most recently. But sweep aside such everyday barbarities for a moment to consider where a woman’s cleavage falls on your personal umbrage scale. Is it more offensive to you than, say, the thought of Dominic Raab and Boris Johnson vying for Tory leadership? What upsets you more: the UN poverty envoy’s conclusion that the UK government has inflicted “great misery” on its people with its “punitive” and “callous” austerity policies, or the space between a woman’s breasts?
Executives at BBC Africa deemed cleavage objectionable enough to warrant blurring out, which has yet to happen to any number of offence-inducing politicians. In a documentary entitled Fake Me: Living for Likes, a Kenyan social media star called Glamour Pam was interviewed in Nairobi about her love of Instagram. During the interview, her “chest” was “muzzed”, to borrow the unintentionally hilarious words of one report. This is how we talk about women in the 21st century.
“The decision to deal with Pam’s cleavage was made at senior editorial level at BBC Africa,” said one internal email justifying the decision. Allegedly, the concern was about the reaction in conservative African countries. But what about the reaction of every reasonable person on the planet?
I have watched the clip and observed a few inconsistencies. When we first meet Pam, who says she loves cameras and lives for Instagram (which has its own history regarding breast censorship), her cleavage is not blurred. A couple of frames later, the same cleavage has been “muzzed”. She is interviewed by another woman, whose cleavage is uncensored, presumably because her breasts are smaller and her top less low-cut. Really, is this how the logic goes? Cleavage needs to be above a certain cup size to commit an offence?
What does this censorship achieve? It invites you to compare cleavages, to look at breasts as though they exist independently. It makes you objectify women’s bodies. But neither the cleavage nor the woman baring it is offensive. What is deeply offensive is some media outlets censoring breasts while hate speech repeatedly slips through the net. As is often the case, the offence ends up lodging in the wrong place: a woman.
