Women Airbrushed from Furniture Catalogue

Becket Adams shares some of the offending photos showing how "women have been airbrushed" out of a furniture catalogue designed for circulation in Saudi Arabia...

http://www.theblaze.com/stories/ikea-airbrushes-women-out-of-saudi-version-of-catalog-see-the-comparisons/

I'm sharing this because two very obvious points that should have been made in the comments, if not in the article itself, seem to have been overlooked:

1. It's not all the women who've been airbrushed out of the pictures; it's the women whose clothes didn't conform to Saudi cultural rules. While all the women are comfortably, sensibly dressed by Euro-American standards, one woman who disappeared was sitting at an angle that showed a little too much curve, and another's visible shirttail called attention to the wrong level of her figure...these models just seem to have been pushing the envelope of how Saudi parents want their daughters to dress.

Would the howls of discrimination have been equally passionate if the photos had displayed topless, unshaven French models, who were then airbrushed out of the U.S. edition?

2. Although even radical Muslims seem to tolerate black-and-white photos of politicians' faces, the cultural norm actually frowns on any "images" of living people and animals. One of the old rules that Islam, Judaism, and Christianity share is a prohibition of "graven images." Only the most radical Christians have ever applied this rule to flat pictures of people that were not intended to be worshipped. Muslims supposedly tolerate flat pictures that don't completely represent a living creature when and because they "have no shadows."

When I look at the first two pictures on Becket Adams' post, what leaps out at me is that the "no shadows" rule has been inconsistently followed. In the first photo, a woman whose shirt is short by Muslim standards has been removed, while a man and children whose shadows are visible have been left in the picture. In the second photo, men and children whose shadows were visible have been removed too.

Now, a third point: 3. I personally find it annoying when photographs that are supposed to show the object (or project) advertised distract attention to the models and their faces. If a catalogue is advertising furniture, I want to see furniture, not people.

I think Ikea would be well advised to remove all the models, and all the clutter of dishes and jackets and other things not sold in Ikea stores, and show everybody around the world good clear pictures of what they're actually selling.