Suddenly old Lukey had a mess of new subscribers — eventually topping out at over 15,000.

People were posting mashups of his videos and tributes to the kid. It was all classic, random YouTube idiocy. And then YouTube did something inexplicable: They yanked down Lukeywes1234′s channel.

Now if there’s one thing you should know about nerds, it’s that they don’t take too kindly to anyone smothering their self-expression. Lukeywes instantly passed from mere blip of the week into Internet legend. The tributes became more hyperbolic and Wagnerian.

And 4chan then took it up a notch, declaring Jan. 6 YouTube Porn Day. The idea? Simple. (To nerds, anyway.) Set up fake accounts and upload videos of porn mixed with more innocuous subject matter. (The words “Jonas Brothers” appear in the directive.) Set those videos to private. Then, today, go live. In your face, YouTube! You shut down Luke — we’re coming at you with bare breasts! Not, perhaps, the kind of tribute the young man himself would have wished in his name, but this thing is bigger than him now.

Yes, it’s really that juvenile. And yes, Luke’s resemblance to YouTube folk heroes like the Star Wars kid and the Numa Numa guy, as well as the response that seems straight out of the great Boxxy eruption of 2009, makes the whole affair feel a little contrived. Much of the response to Luke is just an old-fashioned, bandwagon-jumping excuse to game the system, and there’s an undeniable undercurrent of snark in the elevation of a guileless boy to YouTube “god.” But in the midst of the attempted pornrolling (for what it’s worth, I’ve been trawling YouTube all day for examples, and it’s a lot easier to find real porn just about anywhere else) and faux outrage, there’s a sweetness to the whole insanity as well. A boy puts up videos of himself, shot by his grandma, posturing as hero, and in the process actually becomes something of an unlikely hero. Why? Probably because, along with laughing at the amateurishness of the whole enterprise, people feel a real sense of fondness for a sweet kid goofing around with his computer. Perhaps they just like what one user summed up as Luke’s “genuinely funny and lighthearted innocence.” And sometimes — in the bizarre convergence of 4chan’s subversiveness and the fantasy play of a kid — championing lighthearted innocence means sticking a money shot in a Jonas Brothers video. 

How far to take retouching isn’t just an issue for glossy magazines anymore. As Glamour points out, there are over “70 iPhone apps to help you alter your photos before you press upload” – and even more possibilities once the images hit your computer. Perhaps that’s why Glamour readers are so comfortable with a little cleaning up here and there. The magazine reports that “Nearly 60 percent [of readers] feel it’s OK for a woman to tweak her personal pictures.” Moreover, a whopping “23 percent of women ages 25 to 29 do it; that number climbs to 41 percent among those ages 18 to 24.” The younger you are, it seems, the less inhibited you’ll be about retouching your image.

But readers are considerably less lenient when someone else is wielding the tools. “Only 43 percent of women said it was OK for magazines to retouch, and just 39 percent were comfortable with ads doing so.” Why so schizo? Perhaps the results reflect a level of previously unacknowledged vanity and hypocrisy – some rampant trend of falsifying our personal images. Glamour certainly takes a dim view of it, getting Susie Orbach, author of “Bodies” and “Fat Is a Feminist Issue,” to note, “It makes us think there must really be something wrong with us if we can’t even look as good as the average woman on Facebook.”

But there’s more to it. For one thing, unless you’re blatantly faking your looks for a dating profile (PS don’t), chances are whatever altering you do of your photos isn’t in the service of selling somebody an unattainable bill of goods. It’s one thing to be cool with zapping out a zit on a regular person’s avatar, but it’s another ball of wax entirely when a company is trying to sell a product based on an image that couldn’t possibly exist in the real world. Just this week, the British Advertising Standards Authority yet again yanked a major cosmetics campaign, noting that a recent L’Oreal ad featuring Rachel Weisz “misrepresented the results that the product could achieve.” And when magazines are peddling the fantasy that actresses are slinking into bikinis six weeks after delivering their twins, or, for that matter, that Faith Hill doesn’t have a collarbone and Kelly Clarkson doesn’t have a butt, well, perhaps readers are justified in feeling a little gun-shy. And, for another thing, the way that individuals use retouching isn’t always merely in service of looking as hot as possible. It’s often just about making the picture itself interesting – griming it up for a vintage effect, going crazy with the exposure. It’s a different kind of retouching, one that doesn’t begin and end with creating a fake set of abs on the cover of Ab Monthly.

Regardless, Glamour is clearly ready to heed the words of its readers. It’s not just altruism at play here: too many public embarrassments when the unaltered versions of overly enthusiastic photo spreads appear and your credibility is shot to hell. Yet it’s also an acknowledgment that, as Glamour puts it, “retouching has its limits — or should — and Glamour plans to take a stronger role in setting ours.” What’s at stake isn’t the softening of expression lines or removal of sleep-deprivation dark circles – those things will go on. But a too perfect image loses not just its humanity; it loses what sites like Flickr have based their whole appeal on: interestingness. “You told us you don’t want little things like freckles and scars removed,” Cindi Leive wrote, adding, “And while our policy has always been not to alter a woman’s body shape, we’ll also be asking photographers we hire not to manipulate body size in the photos we commission, even if a celebrity or model requests a digital diet.” Beautiful girls in beautiful photos still sell magazines – and by extension, lipstick and jeans and all the aspirational dreams associated with them. But a pledge to go a little easier on the alterations suggests the possible beginning of fashion’s unlikeliest trend ever. A dash of authenticity.

Lagerfeld’s remarks came within a piece in which he also declared, “If I was a woman in Russia I would be a lesbian, as the men are very ugly,” and that “Nobody wants Greece to disappear, but they have really disgusting habits – Italy as well.” He also claimed that Michelle Obama once said, “Why you don’t like my big black ass?” (the First Lady never said any such thing), and asserted that “People in magazines are 50 percent bimbo and 50 percent pregnant women.” So Adele gets off pretty lightly in the whole thing. Okay, his math might not be that far off on the magazine content thing, but it’s safe to say that while the man can rock a double-breasted silhouette like nobody’s business, he might just be a total moron.

Yet despite his unique version of high praise for Adele, plenty offense at Lagerfeld’s remarks. Fashion publicist Kelly Cutrone shot back on Twitter “Love Adele Boycott Chanel.” Anderson Cooper added Lagerfeld to his weekly “Ridiculist,” calling him, spectacularly, a “fashion designer and Edward Gorey cartoon character and chronic foot-in-mouth disease sufferer.”

For his part, Lagerfeld, perhaps sensing accurately that it’s one thing to put down Russia, Greece and Italy, but you do not want to screw with Adele fans, beat a hasty retreat from his remarks. “I’d like to say to Adele that I am your biggest admirer,” he added in Metro later in the week. “Sometimes when you take a sentence out of the article it changes the meaning of the thought. What I said was in relation to Lana Del Rey and the sentence has since been taken out of context from how it was originally published. I actually prefer Adele, she is my favorite singer and I am a great admirer of her. I lost over 30 kilos over 10 years ago and have kept it off. I know how it feels when the press is mean to you in regards to your appearance. Adele is a beautiful girl. She is the best. And I can’t wait for her next CD.” Thanks for tossing Adele the bone of a “beautiful face,” Karl.

It’s significant that in his original story, Lagerfeld very clearly decreed Adele “a little too fat,” but the paper’s writer Kenya Hunt quoted it Wednesday as “a little bit fat.” Frankly, neither line is cool, but Lagerfeld’s true observation, his deeming Adele “too fat,” shouldn’t be altered or toned down. It’s significant because it implies not merely that she is particular body type, but that said type is unacceptable, that it is “too” much to deal with. Too fat for whom? Not Adele, clearly. Not her throngs of fans.

Somehow, in this day and age, the fact that a young woman of ample proportions is making it is considered revolutionary – unnerving even. That’s not just Lagerfeld-specific idiocy either. This very week, New York Times magazine writer Jacob Brown crowned Lana Del Rey as “the perfect antidote to Rihanna-Gaga overload — dare we say, a skinnier Adele, a more stable Amy Winehouse.” Really? Who knew that the world needed a “skinnier” antidote to Adele, that her size was somehow on par with the late Winehouse’s addictions?

Thank God that Adele herself, who underwent throat surgery in November currently and has the top-selling album in the country, has a different set of priorities — one that doesn’t include giving a toss about what some fan-brandishing fashion designer or Lana Del Rey slobbering Times writer or anybody else thinks about her body. She tells Anderson Cooper on Sunday’s “60 Minutes,” “I don’t want to be some skinny mini with my tits out. I really don’t want to do it and I don’t want people confusing what it is that I am about…. I’ve never seen magazine covers and music videos and been like, I need to look like that to be a success.” She’s right, she doesn’t. She’s up for six Grammys this Sunday and has even managed to adorn the cover of Vogue, despite her crippling handicap of weighing over 100 pounds. She tells Cooper, “I represent the majority of women and I’m very proud of that.” But whatever your size, she represents a whole lot more — dare we say, a breathtaking voice of sanity in a size-obsessed world?

At issue is the group’s contention that by hiring Ellen DeGeneres for a new campaign, the department store is “jumping on the pro-gay bandwagon” and turning away from “traditional families.” The organization warns darkly that “Unless JC Penney decides to be neutral in the culture war then their brand transformation will be unsuccessful.” There is so much to love in that sentence alone. Culture war! Brand transformation! Fearless disregard for the rules of comma usage after a subordinate clause! “The majority of JC Penney shoppers will be offended,” they continue, “and choose to no longer shop there.”

JC Penney, however, which recently declared that “We share the same fundamental values as Ellen,” has  remained unmoved from its perch on a “pro-gay bandwagon” in the midst of a “culture war.” (I hope that bandwagon is reinforced.) Also unmoved: the woman at the center of the controversy.

On her daytime talk show Wednesday, DeGeneres cheerfully opened by talking about Proposition 8 being overturned in California, then segued into a riff about her partnership with Penney’s. “Normally I try not to pay attention to my haters,” she said, “but this time I’d like to talk about it.”

After announcing she was “proud and happy” that JC Penney was sticking by her side, she explained to America that “Being gay or pro-gay is not a bandwagon. You don’t get a free ride anywhere. There’s no music, and occasionally we’ll sing, ‘We Are Family,’ but that’s about it.” And she noted that “For a group that calls itself the Million Moms, they have only 40,000 members on their [Facebook] page. They’re rounding to the nearest million.” It was a witty retort to a campaign of hate, though frankly, not nearly as hilarious as the Million Moms’ depiction of DeGeneres as an “open homosexual spokesperson.”

On her show, DeGeneres read some of the hundreds of supportive messages that have been posted on the Million Moms’ own Facebook page since their campaign against her launched. DeGeneres has also received public support from, of all people, Bill O’Reilly, who said on his program Tuesday that the protest was “a witch hunt and shouldn’t happen.” When you’re too loathsome for Bill O’Reilly, you’ve really outdone yourself, loathsomeness-wise.

One Million Moms describes itself as an organization for people who are “fed up” and “tired,” one that devotes itself, seemingly exclusively, to complaining “on behalf of our children.” On her program Wednesday, DeGeneres said, “I stand for honesty, equality, kindness, compassion, treating people the way you want to be treated, and helping those in need. To me, those are traditional values.” Even the most die-hard shopper knows that values aren’t just reasonably priced furnishings from the Cindy Crawford collection. They’re how you live. And if you’re going to be on a bandwagon, who wouldn’t choose the one without all those angry people on it?

It seems fair enough to create a boundary on a social media site. And it doesn’t take much searching – likely in your own friend feed – to see plenty of mothers who have profile photos or family albums that depict them proudly nursing their children.

The problem, however, is Facebook’s capriciousness enforcement terms, and how maddeningly punitive and arbitrary they can be. Some women skate by with nary an eyelash batted at their pictures. But a person whose photo is deemed by Facebook to have an unacceptable degree of nipple will not just find the picture removed, but often her account temporarily deleted on a vague “breach of terms of use” charge. Treating women like petty criminals for posting what are obviously not sexually explicit images is just stupid business.

So on Monday, mothers took to Facebook’s headquarters in Menlo Park, Calif., and offices all over the world to do their lactating in person. As childbirth educator Emma Kwasnica, who attended a nurse-in in Houston this week, told the local CBS affiliate, “There’s no other way to look at it. We’re being treated as pornographers.”

Judge for yourself — though be prepared that the occasional nipple may qualify the images as NSFW — the “Topfree Equal Rights Association” has a neat compilation of photos that Facebook users say have been removed over the years. Some of them dare to show a contentiously exposed, not-in-use breast along with a baby contentedly latched on the other one.

None of them seem especially incendiary — and none of them look that different from other photos that  survived just fine on Facebook. The idea that the biggest difference between the photos that stay and those that are deleted is “users who complain” is insulting. It tells women to be prepared to be punished, largely on the basis of whether someone else decides they ought to be. And in the same week that a jackass like Staples co-founder Tom Stemberg whined that the Affordable Care Act, which grants a “reasonable break time” and space for working mothers to express milk, will turn America’s workplaces into sinisterly futuristic-sounding “lactation chambers,” Facebook’s ongoing boneheadedness speaks to a larger issue. It illuminates the depressing reality that breast-feeding, after all this time, is still deemed inappropriate, unproductive and just plain icky. And that a nipple, even one with a hungry baby nearby, is just darn scandalous.

Why does it matter? And why would a woman choose to post a photo of her baby at her breast, anyway? Well, for starters, if you’ve got a baby, chances are high that you’re in a near-constant state of having somebody clamped on you. If somebody wants to take a picture, odds are good that’s what it’s going to be. It’s often sweet, tender and special, and photos encourage other people to accept it and maybe even give it a go themselves. A photo, after all, is a defining statement. And it’s one any mother, especially a new one, should be free to make.

With a relentless social media nightmare and a surge of high-profile promises of financial support for Planned Parenthood on its hands, the Komen foundation had, by Friday, backed off, apologizing “to the American public for recent decisions” and vowing to “continue to fund existing grants, including those of Planned Parenthood.” Yet the shadow of its anti-Planned Parenthood bigwig loomed large, especially for an organization that insists it has no political agenda. So as a new campaign for Komen to oust Handel was picking up steam across Twitter and Facebook on Tuesday, she stepped down.

Her departure doesn’t appear to be that of a woman cowed by the events of the recent past. She says she has declined any severance package, and in her resignation letter, she says she is “deeply disappointed by the gross mischaracterizations of the strategy, its rationale, and my involvement in it” and that “neither the decision nor the changes themselves were based on anyone’s political beliefs or ideology.” Indeed, Handel could not possibly have gone rogue on this one and implemented the disastrous decision about Planned Parenthood all by her lonesome. But in a Huffington Post story Sunday, Laura Bassett reported that a Komen insider told her “Karen Handel was the prime instigator of this effort, and she herself personally came up with investigation criteria. She said, ‘If we just say it’s about investigations, we can defund Planned Parenthood and no one can blame us for being political.’”

For now, the matter seems at an end. A representative for Planned Parenthood referred Salon this Tuesday morning to the organization’s statement from last Friday and told us, “We have no plans to say anything further.” But in this crucial election year, the Komen mess and the departure of Handel send a powerful message — that when you screw around with screenings and services to women who might otherwise not afford them, it does not go unnoticed. You say it’s not political? It’s about women’s health and women’s bodies. It’s political as hell. And it will be in November.