Did Berkeleyside err publishing a nude photo?

June 21, 2011 11:14 am by Frances Dinkelspiel

Cyclists convene at People's Park before participating in the Naked Bike Ride Day. Photo: Robert Mills

Berkeleyside set off a storm of controversy on Monday when it posted a video of a group of naked bicyclists riding through Berkeley.

The shot displayed on Berkeleyside’s front page showed a naked man’s genitals and a naked woman’s breasts.

A number of readers complained, saying the photo was offensive and unprofessional, and should not have been posted. Rather there should have been a link to the video or a less graphic photo displayed, they suggested.

When the Berkeleyside editors sent out our intern, Robert A. Mills, to shoot the video, we thought he was merely reporting on one of the interesting slices of Berkeley life.

Mills tried to be careful in shooting the event and in most of the video the participants’ private parts are hidden behind bicycle seats and other obstructions. But there are glimpses of naked people throughout the video.

The video was posted to You Tube, which randomly selects three scenes from a video and rotates them as screen grabs. The first screen grab selected was the photo that some readers found offensive.

This has been a learning experience for Berkeleyside, as the editors did not realize exactly how You Tube worked. That said, when we did see the nude shots we were not that bothered by them. We did not rush to take down the video. You Tube did that for us later, probably because an irate reader flagged the video. According to You Tube guidelines, the video did not violate their community standards as the nudity was not in a sexual context. Berkeleyside then used Vimeo to repost the video. That service gave us more control over which image was displayed on the site’s front page.

We decided to poll our readers on Facebook and find out how many felt Berkeleyside went too far in posting the video. By 10:30 am today, 60 readers said no, Berkeleyside did not go too far, two said yes, and two were undecided.

If Berkeleyside upset readers, we are sorry. That was not our intention. We appreciate how quickly you let us know, and we appreciate the commentary in support and in opposition to our decision. Once again, the Berkeleyside comment boards have been a fascinating place to linger. Please share your views. The editors only ask — again — that we try and keep the discourse civil.

66 Comments

Print Friendly
Tagged ,
← Older Comments
  • Kinkajou

    It’s interesting how Berkeleyians are so easily offended, with Berkeley being one of the most free spirited places, it doesn’t surprise me that someone organized a Naked Bike Ride Day. On the contrary, it is considered indecent exposure and is illegal, and do the fact that there are plenty of Children out and about on this Summer Day, I can also see if Parents became offended. I have lived in Berkeley all my life and don’t believe “we” as a community should be blowing so much smoke over something like this.

  • Jude

    you’re kidding, right?  i can’t imagine how this could be considered the least bit offensive in 2011.  what happened to the 60′s???

  • Jude

    you’re kidding, right?  i can’t imagine how this could be considered the least bit offensive in 2011.  what happened to the 60′s???

  • http://www.webhamster.com/ The Sharkey

    They ended, and the City of Berkeley passed an ordinance banning public nudity in 1993.

  • DC

    Rightist prudes?  What silliness. It says nothing at all about political leanings what one thinks of this story.  Not everything thing in this world is political.  Some of us think putting everything through a political lens is tiresome.

  • Frances

    Did you ask permission from the naked bikers to post their photos?

  • Frances

    I am sure your advertisers are delighted to have their brand next to an old man’s dick on a bike…

  • Lisaev

    i was at a local kids store (Grove Street Kids-YAY!) when the nudists biked by. Pretty funny! Older gray nekkid dudes riding bikes. The delightful store owner and i dashed out to the street hardly believing our eyes and laughed. please file under ‘another day in Berkeley.”

  • John Seal

    Absolutely hilarious. The only thing more absurd than men getting their jumblies caught in their bicycle chain is other people getting their knickers in a twist about it.

  • berkeleymom

    It was funny, but not as funny as the article about Tony Taccone.

  • Flabby_hippies

    Two requests —

    1 – please add “NSFW” tags where appropriate, I do read Berkeleyside at the office and there are folks walking around who hail from much less enlightened corners of our region.

    2 – I’m okay with the nekkids, but I’d appreciate if you could balance the images of flabby and flacid with a few female hotties.  If only one showed up for the event, just keep repeating her picture .. if was just a bunch of old hippie dudes, go find some stock photos to make up the balance.

    thank you for your consideration

  • GPO

    Stone Age Chic or One Million Years BC, Berkeley Style
     
    I agree with the general gist of most comments here that this is much ado about very little and that it’s getting old already (puns intended…).
     
    Still, I was left to ponder the “larger picture” here, trying to connect various Berkeley related news stories and Berkeley inspired values.  Here’s what I came up with.  There seems to be a common strain of what I will term “primitivism” which permeates many Berkeley “progressive” ideals these days.  Granted, most residents don’t really live up to these ideals, but they still shed some precious light on the state of our local “civilization.”  Our “wants” tell us a lot about who we really are at bottom.
     
    If you were to construct a Berkeley utopia, it would seem to take us back to a pre-motorized peasant or possibly even Stone Age world.  In order to save the earth from further environmental degradation caused (primarily) by carbon emissions, we would return to moving about on our own two feet, possibly with the aid of horses or oxen to draw heavy loads or carry us more significant distances.  Even bicycles, when you think about it, require too much noxious technology to build and to operate (paving nature?).
     
    Next, like feudal peasants with small vegetable patches accorded to us by our “community lords” (in the current political clime, that would be Master Bates), we would strive to grow as much of our own food as possible and then barter for what we cannot.  This is also a form of primitivism in a pre-monetary economy.
     
    While we nominally do wish our children to be “educated”, we get far more excited about teaching them about farm work and peasantry than about trigonometry or Shakespeare.  Sure, the pretext is that gardening informs a healthier and fresher diet and that it’s a great entrée to the biological sciences, but mostly we seem excited that the next generation might learn the “authenticity” (as Zola put it) of the soil.  Sort of a more benevolent version of Blut und Erde.
     
    Now we come to the matter of wearing clothing in public which, from the Garden of Eden myth onward, almost seems like the basic premise of civilization or distinguishing ourselves from other beasts.   Granted, most of those lauding public nudity on city streets or on bicycles (which, after all, are not exactly like riding horses or Centaurs) only do this as a de rigueur pose of sophistication.  Americans are such prudes and puritans!!!  We Berkeleyans are more post-Modern Euros who don’t need to respect or abide by bourgeois morality and conventions.  We snicker at conventions like going around with your clothes on in public at 65+ years old.  We are better than that. 
     
    So, to summarize, the ideal Berkeley person, would seem to walk around naked or with a loin cloth, ideally as an agricultural Bedouin, along  an outed creek bed which is clean enough to fish or drink from directly without purification.  This Berkeley tribesman never  uses mechanized or motorized transportation, grows his own food in a small private or communal garden and lives in a pre-monetized, stone age, barter economy like a character from a Rousseau discourse, preferably in some type of low impact hut or teepee without the concept of property rights.    Even so, Conan is emphatically not welcome within our tribal lands.
     
    Maybe a touch of incongruous solar or wind power to boil your coffee in the morning in lieu of collected firewood (and who could grow sustainable coffee in this microclimate?).  Maybe some type of powerful Native American contraceptive herbs too as a deviation from pure Nature?  Overpopulation is killing the planet!  Native Americans lived very lightly on the earth.  Do we also keep some livestock animals or do we just hunt for occasional ceremonial feasts to honor our pagan gods?  Or would the ultimate Berkeley ideal take us back prior to both the age of domesticated animals and agriculture?  The Earth demands “justice”!
     
    How about computers and internet connection?  How do they fit into stone age chic?  I just don’t know.  I guess when you live semi-naked in a real mud hut village, tending your crops all day, you don’t need to communicate or interrelate online anymore.  Maybe that’s the solution to that dilemma?
     
    All wonderful ideals!  How they square with being a modern “Progressive” who derides hidebound, turn back the clock, fearful conservatives who cannot evolve or adapt to change remains a little mysterious…  At least to me…

  • Jesse Townley

    2 things.

    1. Someone said that re-posting the photo was a big f-u to the apparently small number of people who were offended (not counting the “should’ve used a NSFW tag” commenters). I don’t think so. The story is the reaction on fb/in the comments, and having the photo in question there illustrates it quite nicely.

    2. Personally, I didn’t notice the photo/video the 1st time around because I use the RSS feed, which allows you to scan through the new articles without seeing them. Perhaps this is a method the SFW folks can use when surfing Berkeleyside at work.

  • Mike Farrell

    You forgot one of the most deeply held positions in Berkeley: “Don’t park YOUR car in front of MY house”

  • GPO

    Good point.  Or in my Berkeley Utopia, don’t park YOUR cart in front of My hut…

  • Lori

    I’d rather look at naked old people for days rather than look at a dead animal beheaded and skinned!

    Sheesh, I don’t even fit in in Berkeley!  ;-)

← Older Comments