Hanging on a wall at the Metropolitan Museum of Art is a painting of a pubescent girl. Shes leaning back in a wicker chair, eyes closed, arms clasped above her head. Her knees are splayed open and her red skirt is flipped up to reveal a pair of white underwear. The 20th-century work by the French artist Balthus depicts the artists neighbor, Thrse Blanchard, according to the Mets description . She modeled for a total of 11 Balthus paintings between 1936 and 1939, starting when she was 11 years old.

On Nov. 30, a New Yorker named Mia Merrill penned a petition on Care2 demanding the museum either remove Thrse Dreaming from view or amend the wall text to acknowledge the potentially disturbing nature of the work. Given the current climate around sexual assault and allegations that become more public each day, she wrote in her petition, in showcasing this work for the masses without providing any type of clarification, The Met is, perhaps unintentionally, supporting voyeurism and the objectification of children.

The petition garnered more than 11,000 signatures over the last two weeks, almost reaching its goal of 12,000. Yet Merrills appeal was met with derision from some members of the art world, who described the petition as a witch hunt .

One vocal opponent was New York magazine art critic Jerry Saltz. Um if you take [Thrse Dreaming] out, he wrote on Instagram , you pretty much have to remove ALL art from wings of India, Africa, Asia, Oceania, Greece, Rome, Renaissance, Rococo, and Impressionism, German Expressionism, Klimnt, Munch, and all Picasso & Matisse. He topped off the sentiment with the hashtag #ArtWorldTaliban .

Condescension aside, Saltz has a point. Any widespread effort to expunge this kind of imagery from the annals of art history would result in more than a few empty picture frames in major museums around the world. The nude has been a staple of European oil painting since 16th-century depictions of Adam and Eve. Within this genre, as critic John Berger wrote, women were the principal, ever-recurring subject .

The fact that women often appear unclothed in paintings is not, in itself, cause for alarm. The problem is the imbalance of power behind many of those paintings, a dynamic that positions woman as the eternal object of beauty and man as the genius creator and authority of it. As Berger said: This nakedness is not... an expression of her own feelings; it is a sign of her submission to the owners feelings or demands. (The owner of both woman and painting.)