[Foundation-l] Blog from Sue about censorship, editorial judgement, and image filters

[Michael Snow]

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