ffffound vs the nude

Somewhat to my surprise, I've found myself still using ffffound quite heavily over the past couple of months. There seems to be something relaxing about bouncing down the page scanning the nice design and pretty pictures.

However, early on, I (and others (look at Michal Migurski’s comment)) noted that as well as all the posters held up by headless designers, photos from the 1960s and bits of Helvetica, there were a fair few pictures of people, primarily women, occasionally not wearing very much. Personally I just bounced past most of them, and on the odd occasion they cropped up in my recommendations and were particularly irksome, marked them as inappropriate. Somewhat to my surprise, the last few months haven't really seen a big change in the ratio of such images to the more design-led ones, which is a good thing; the tight rein on invites probably has a lot to do with it.

Today, however, the front page turned up this image, which reads

helloworld. I am using ffffounddotcom. I am a graphic designer. therefore I love design. I would like to tell you something.
the pussy, the boobs, the whatever of your girlfriend has nothing to do with design.
design ≠ sex. pictures: yes. your sister anatomy: no thanks.

Of course, if there are gynaecological pictures, I don't want to see them either. As I said, though, they're pretty rare and tend not to escape onto the front page, and if they do, users have a "not appropriate" button, which seems to work (albeit slowly; I think there's a human in the loop somewhere.)

Anyway, this is what ffffound itself says it's about:

FFFFOUND! is a web service [which allows people] to post and share their favorite images found on the web

I note this doesn't say anything about "design", only about inspirational images. Looking at the history of art, one can hardly deny that beautiful women have often been muses. In fact, I'm surprised quite how dry and literary ffffound is, considering it's dominated by the image at the expense of text. Nonetheless, there are a lot of people's collections (mine included) that are dominated by monochrome images and a surfeit of typography. Perhaps thousands of years of cultural indoctrination that the word is better than the image is hard to shake off, especially for a programmer who dabbles in design. From that point of view, the surprise isn't that there's porn - or stuff approaching it - on the site, but that there's not more of it.

Anyway, I think the point is that, from an initial sniffiness about the images of people on the site, I've come to realise that there's more to life than black, white, red, and Helvetica, even if I don't add it to my stream.

(There's another category of image that you see rarely on ffffound, although it is getting slightly more common; the Fark / Worth 1000 / somethingawful / b3ta joke. I can only recall seeing one or two in the last few hundred images that have graced the front page, and I think that, in the long run, I'm more worried they'll take over than that the artsy nudes will.)