On 9/30/2011 8:53 AM, Milos Rancic wrote:
As mentioned in some of the previous posts, I think that it is much more feminist to defend right of girls to be sexually educated, even if it would mean secretly browsing Wikipedia articles on sexuality, than to insist on comfort of adult females in offices and questionable background of one pseudo-ideological position.
From a feminist perspective, I would think there's clear reason for concern that the kind of sexual education (not just) girls would receive while browsing Wikipedia articles is built upon and reinforces many social elements connected with the oppression of women, and that the selection and presentation of images is a big part of the problem. Having divergent approaches starting with such basic topics as penises and vaginas suggests that that the difference in treatment is pretty pervasive. It's good to support education for girls, but if the kind of education provided is just going to perpetuate the problem, it's fair to question whether it's being conducted appropriately.
On this score, it seems likely that we are failing to live up to one of our core principles, that of neutrality. I think we need significantly better editorial judgment applied to many of these articles to address it. That will be a challenge as long as we have a male-dominated community that lacks much appreciation for the nature of the problem, and often fails to recognize how diverse its manifestations are. But I suspect that if we were substantially closer to a neutral approach in our coverage of these topics, there might be much less pressure around the principle of resistance to censorship.
--Michael Snow