For what it's worth, I am offended by the existence of pornography, for a variety of reasons none of which involve my being squeamish about sex. I am not offended by including pornographic images on articles about those types of images. Indeed, I expect Wikipedia to have images illustrating articles whenever possible; I don't see why we should make an exception for articles about sexuality.

It is reasonable to ask that drawings rather than photographs be used whenever the subject is an act of violence, barring images of historical interest. I consider pornography, in general, a depiction of an act of violence. So I'm pretty happy that most of the pornographic images being discussed here are drawings. (Honestly, I was fairly surprised that these were considered so objectionable. I was expecting something horrifically biological. They're cartoons! No humans were harmed in the making of these cartoons.)

An authoritative educational resource for everyone should include that subset of everyone who want to learn about pornography, human sexuality, death, spiders, radical political movements, and all sorts of other objectionable things.

Maybe not spiders. We could leave spiders out.

Nepenthe


On Mon, Feb 14, 2011 at 6:44 PM, Andreas Kolbe <jayen466@yahoo.com> wrote:
--- On Tue, 15/2/11, George Herbert <george.herbert@gmail.com> wrote:
> From: George Herbert <george.herbert@gmail.com>
> But that claim
> has often been
> made by a lot of men, who also suspiciously were themselves
> offended
> by it, many of whom do themselves in fact object to any
> explicit
> imagery without regard to NOTCENSORED, beyond reasonable
> values of
> editorial judgement.


I am not offended by sexual content, or pornography. But pages illustrated
like these (not safe for work)


http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Cock_and_ball_torture_(sexual_practice)&oldid=367125005

(complete with spoken version)


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creampie_(sexual_act)


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gokkun


make us look like something else than what we want to be: an authoritative
educational resource for everyone.

As a community, we were not even able to delete the goatse image from the
goatse article on the basis of editorial judgment, and to agree to content
ourselves with presenting an external link for those readers unfamiliar with
the image and wishing to view it after they had read a description. The
image was, if I recall correctly, deleted on a technicality, despite the
fact that no mainstream published source discussing the image would include
it. If that is so, why should we? Because they are censored and we are not?
Used in this way, the NOTCENSORED argument becomes one against editorial
judgment per se.


> I am not going to lump Jimmy or Herostratus into that
> category, but
> the vast bulk of energy expended to remove explicit content
> seems to
> be done by people for whom the retort that Wikipedia is not
> censored
> is, in fact, a completely legitimate and completely
> adequate response.
>  They in fact make it harder for reasonable editorial
> judgement types
> to engage in discussion, as they're not very good at
> disguising their
> underlying moral contempt for that material and their fears
> that it
> will indelibly contaminate their precious children.


The fact is that most Wikipedians do not have children, or partners, and most
people out there in the real world do.

Andreas




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