Defining what is pornographic is clearly tricky - does the above plaque on board the Pioneer 10 spacecraft count? Perhaps… In the course of research on online pornography for an upcoming report on harm and offense in the media I came across this quote which raised a smile in the report Youth, Pornography and the Internet - an otherwise fairly grim read:

Content drawn from mainstream art and science has been called pornographic. For example, a plaque carried on Pioneer 10, the first space probe to leave the solar system, was called pornographic because it included engravings of nude human figures. … one newspaper published the images on the plaque, but erased the nipples, saying that "[a] family newspaper must uphold community standards." Another newspaper affiliated with a religious denomination said that the plaque should have had praying hands rather than nudes. And a major newspaper printed the image in full, but received a letter from a reader that said, "I was shocked by the blatant display of both male and female sex organs. . . . Isn’t it enough that we must tolerate the bombardment of pornography through the media of film and smut magazines? Isn’t it bad enough that our own space agency officials have found it necessary to spread this filth even beyond our own solar system?" On some of the committee’s site visits, various parties objected to Internet images of classical Greek statues of the human body and Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man.

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 23rd, 2005 at 3:18 pm and is filed under Content Regulation, Humour. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.