Delirium-
It seems that you are assuming what you find
personally offensive has
"near universal offensiveness", and what you do not find personally
offensive does not.
I'm willing to tolerate quite a lot of images that I find personally
offensive. For example, I tolerate and defend a link to goatse.cx, even
though I find that site highly offensive. I'm personally no big fan of
violence, but I would defend the inclusion of such pictures where they are
useful.
It is simply not true that I am arguing to justify my own moral
preconceptions. I am arguing for minimizing censorship. I think I have a
very good track record of doing so consistently and without bias. You
appear to be advocating a ban in explicit imagery, on the other hand, that
purely suits your personal feelings. Before accusing me of bias, you
should reflect on your own.
For example, I'd argue that close-up pictures of
genitalia are considered offensive by a similar proportion of the
world's population as pictures of someone slitting their wrist (the
latter appear quite often in mainstream movies, for example, while the
former generally only appear in pornographic movies). So then we'd have
to include those too. And if our article on [[feces]] has pictures of
feces, our article on [[clitoris]] has a detailed photo of a clitoris,
our article on [[suicide methods]] (hypothetical; I'm not sure if such
an article exists and Wikipedia is too slow to check at the moment)
includes photos of slit wrists, and so on, a large proportion of
Wikipedia will simply be unreadable by a large number of people. I
certainly wouldn't read it, anyway, and I'm more liberal in these
matters than most people I know.
The fact that you compare human body parts to suicide methods and
excrements is somewhat disturbing, but let's not get into this. Just some
basic cause and effect. Feces are prone to carry disease, that is why most
human beings are taught to avoid touching or even eating them (there may
also be a biological taboo that is triggered by the smell and/or taste;
note that baby feces smell differently). Similarly, most human beings with
a functional brain avoid pain, as such, events that are likely to cause
pain or death, as well as images of pain and death, are likely to trigger
the emotional associations that have been built through a lifetime to
teach avoidance thereof.
I challenge you to point to a single culture that had a notable absence of
the feces taboo. I doubt that one exists. However, it is easy to see that
many cultures have much weaker nudity taboos or none at all (the latter
usually living in warm climates where clothing is not required -- hiding
our bodies constantly obviously creates a mystery about them). Some
societies have condoned or required suicide in certain circumstances, but
the act itself has usually been a private one. Some cultures celebrate
violence and sadism, but that is simply the opposite of a taboo; we need
not pander to it by including as many gory pictures as we can find (nor
should we endorse a violence taboo by including none).
Instead, we should apply the standard of maximizing our usefulness and
neutrality. When writing about suicide methods, illustrations of different
methods would be entirely appropriate. (I'm fairly certain people would
trot out the "how-to" argument to prevent such an article from getting too
instructive, although I disagree with that logic.) Photos and blood add
little to the usefulness. In articles about body parts, photos help with
the identification and should not replace but complement illustrations. In
how-to articles, abstract illustrations are often more useful than photos,
but if someone came up with a good, not unreasonably violent "suicide
methods" video, hey, why not.
As for suicides in movies, they are rarely very explicit, unless the
movies are made for shocking purposes, which validates the taboo rathern
than refuting it. Nudity in movies on the other hand obviously varies a
great degree by culture -- I've seen full erections on regular German
daytime TV, not sure about clitorises.
You sound like you may be arguing that close-up
pictures of a clitoris
are of a similar level of offensiveness to photos of women without a
veil, which is simply not true: the former are far more offensive to far
more people.
Yeah, because the latter are a subset of the former ;-). Current dominant
western attitudes regarding sexuality are descendants of views that
culminated in anti masturbation electric schock devices and [[bathing
house]]s. There is a clear relationship between these attitudes that
cannot realistically be denied.
The "near universal" standard seems to pass your "feces and suicide"
test.
Feces is almost universally considered repulsing, and suicide is almost
universally a private matter (justifying some toning down of the imagery).
I therefore submit that this test is fully sufficient as our guideline for
deciding whether and where we want to censor ourselves.
Regards,
Erik