Rich-
The cost of catering to those who are offended by the images is a mouse-click from those who are not. The cost of catering to those who would be offended by having masked images is the non-participation of those who are offended by the images.
That is an incorrect statement. The cost of an additional mouse click (and finding out that there is an image to click to in the first place) may very well have the same effect on some readers as showing the image may have on others. To cite your own example, if we started censoring .. uh, excuse me, "masking" images of women's faces like that, I would 100% certainly leave the project, as would probably many others. And the argument for doing that is no stronger or weaker than the argument for masking the clitoris photo. In fact, I predict that if we masked *all* somewhat sexually explicit pictures (penises, buttocks, breasts ..) in this way, several people would be annoyed and/or leave the project.
If we are more forgiving of our own biases than of those of other cultures, then we effectively endorse a certain "POV" of what is and what isn't offensive, and this flies in the face of everything this project stands for. The standard of "near universal offensiveness" is the only one which avoids this problem.
Well, not the only one. Category tags on images and category filters in the user preferences might also work. Then you could have something like:
Show the following images in articles: [ ] Animals [ ] Fictional animals [ ] Rabbits [ ] Women [ ] Overweight women [ ] Overweight women wearing party hats [ ] Priests etc.
If we wanted to create a real family filter, we could add another set of options: [ ] Allow me to view filtered images on a separate page [ ] Allow logout [ ] Preferences password
Censorious parents could then force their children into viewing only images of priests and rabbits, etc. (although such a filter could be easily circumvented). Others who merely want to avoid being "surprised" by offensive images could enable the "Allow me" option and would get a "View image" link on filtered images.
I'm not saying that I support such a system - my own POV is strongly anti- censorship and I'm not fond of any system that makes it easier for parents to indoctrinate their children - but from the standpoint of Wikipedia policy, this would be acceptable. "Masking" images that are not universally offensive is not.
Regards,
Erik