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