Fred Bauder said:
Although many of our potential readers might object to
these
images they are unobjectionable.
Well the Pioneer plaque was controversial in its day. The Philadelphia
Inquirer apparently retouched the copy of the image to hide the male
genitals and the female nipples. The Chicago Sun Times at first published
an unaltered picture and then successively airbrushed out features with
each later edition. The LA Times carried the picture on its front page,
and received angry letters about tax-payers' money being used to "spread
this filth, even beyond our solar system", and decrying the lapse of the
newspaper's standards in depicting "sexual exploitation" on its front
page. The two figures are shown standing side by side, some distance
apart, facing the viewer. The man's hand is raised in greeting. Some
feminists objected to the "passivity" and "submissiveness" of the
female
figure. One man insisted that the man's hand was raised in a nazi salute,
and proposed that another spacecraft be sent out to destroy Pioneer 10
along with this symbol of fascism. Frank Drake, the ETI researcher who
along with Carl Sagan had designed the plaque, later remarked that the
image had turned out to be "a cleverly disguised Rorschach test." (The
Depths of Space, Mark Wolverton.)
As well as the mission (it was Pioneer, not Voyager) I got the author of
the plaque wrong. It was not Sagan's third and last wife Ann Druyan but
his second, Linda Salzman, who drew the nekkid people. John Naugle,
NASA's associate administrator for space science, approved the drawings
after erasing the single line representing the woman's vulva.