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.