Somewhere in a dark corner, Facebook is eating the tiniest morsel of crow. At least for the moment.

Remember the misogyny fan page on Facebook that I recently wrote about?

It's gone.

Just like that.  The only way I know it is gone is because I've been checking in regularly.  Facebook doesn't seem to communicate with the account holders who report offensive content, which seems to be a poor choice in customer service to me, but I suppose that's their right.

Either way, the page is gone, even though I'm not exactly sure how or why Facebook finally chose to remove it.  I think it's reasonable to believe that enough of us reported the page and pushed Facebook to act, so I'm going to count this as a small victory.

The disappointing thing is that originally, I was counting this as a big victory.  After I wrote about  the hypocritical Facebook policies regarding images of women's bodies and showed images of the highly sexualized and objectified pictures of women's breasts that Facebook allows next to my banned breastfeeding picture, most of the objectifying images and applications suddenly disappeared from Facebook.  Since that post had a lot of exposure, I was hoping and believing that the hundreds of people who reported those images had helped to get them removed.  So before writing this post, I decided to check back in and see how Facebook is doing on equally applying their policies regarding images of breasts.  We know they're still removing images of women breastfeeding, so I had foolishly hoped that they're at least also applying their ignorant policies to the content that objectifies women and is actually offensive.  No such luck.  A quick search for "tits" and "boobs" on Facebook brought up many of the images from my original post that had initially been removed.   Even more disheartening were the many new fan pages and applications that go even further to objectify women's bodies.

Maybe I'm just paranoid.  Maybe I'm starting to reek of Facebook conspiracy theory.  But any way I look at it, I cannot find any reasonable explanation for why Facebook would remove misogynistic content when they're getting a lot of negative publicity over it, and then quietly re-instate that content when the buzz dies down.  From every angle, all I see is Facebook contributing to a social structure that allows for violence toward and hatred of women.

Will the misogyny page come back in a few weeks?  I don't know if it even matters.  The real misogyny page is the one that opens when you visit www.facebook.com.