On Fri, 22 Feb 2008, Thomas Dalton wrote:
Then forget the gerbilling. Imagine it's a picture of a gerbil, but on the wall behind it is a poster showing a big penis.
We'd remove that, even though we wouldn't remove it if the poster had had clouds on it instead.
Clouds are a natural part of a gerbil's habitat (ie. the outside world), posters of penises aren't.
You're just nitpicking the example. If the picture showed a gerbil in front of someone's computer monitor because that was where he happened to snap the picture, we wouldn't demand the monitor be airbrushed out, even though a computer monitor isn't naturally part of a gerbil's habitat. If it was a poster of someone's sex organs, we would. This is not because one is more "prominent", or because one is more "natural"; it's because one is offensive.