From the Jewish Week about the absence of pictures of women in Charedi publications:
There are… Facebook groups exclusively dedicated to this issue. An administrator of one of these groups, who describes herself as a “yeshivish rebbetzin,” started her group to organize yeshivish community members to fight the exclusion of women. She says the change will come when the readers of these magazines, not the Modern Orthodox community, speak out against this practice.
“This needs to be a movement from within,” she said. “Nobody wants to be changed by somebody from the outside.”
Her group, which has over 500 members who have to identify as “past, current, or potential subscribers” to magazines like Mishpacha and Binah to join the group, encourages members to write letters to the magazine editors explaining why they have unsubscribed.
“They are afraid of their readership and their advertisers,” said the group administrator. “These are decisions that are being made as business decisions that are somehow being seen as philosophical decisions, and they’re not.”
(S)he hopes that the push from the right-wing community will have an impact.
“This time the movement is from within the readership, within the target audience of the publications that exclude pictures of women,” she said. “And I think that’s why we have potential to make change happen.”
LADIES AND GENTLEMEN!!! We live in a new generation that has seen unprecedented change in tradition and practice. No longer do religious Jews have to turn to the gemara and shulchan aruch, to rabbonim or poskim, in order to know what is the will of Hashem. Now we have FACEBOOK GROUPS that decide!!:-) [The smiley is if it weren't so sad and destructive - THEN it would be funny].
Even "yeshivish rebbetzins" who have undoubtedly never learned one page of gemara in their lives are now the decisors of Jewish law.
This is AWESOME!!! I would like to start a Facebook page myself.
We'll start with sof zman kriyas shma. Let's abolish it. Men are tired and need to sleep late at times.
Then we will get to borer. Gotta get rid of that so we can eat our boney fish on Shabbos without having to worry.
And ahhh - the chumra of bnos yisrael שאפילו רואות וכו' כחרדל יושבות ז' נקיים. Too machmir. People can't take it. I will speak to this "yeshivish rebbetzin" and we will get word out.
There are so many. The possibilities are ENDLESS!!:-) Thank G-d for Facebook.
All satire aside: There are numerous poskim who discuss the printing of pictures of women. Some [such as Rav Nissim Karelitz in his sefer חוט השני] forbid it completely. None recommend it.
If there is a reason to look at a woman then you may look [according to the Mishna Brura and others]. One may [nay, must] be normal and live in this world. But why actively bring this ירידה בקדושה upon ourselves?? If you go to a shul with a mechitza then you understand that a man looking at a woman is not holy. Even in shul when one is davening he is liable to have illicit thoughts. Certainly when one is sitting on his couch reading a magazine. Those who don't think it is a problem are either ignorant of the many sources on the topic or simply don't care.
Here is one sample from the sefer מחזה עינים:
עיין גם בס' גן נעול פרק י"ג, בנתיבות ההלכה חלק ל' עמ' ק"מ ועוד ועוד
