You can indeed, though it’s rather extreme. If it’s offensive you should flag it for @Lovehoney_Brenna to deal with. 
If you really do want to, erm, tailor content in a more bespoke fashion, there are a couple of ways:
The less-lethal approach is Muting topics using the Watching/Tracking/Normal/Muted options at the bottom of each. Muting will hide that topic from you completely. If you want to fish it back out again you can do that in Preferences/Categories, under the Show link next to the Muted category.
You can also Mute users too from their profile page (Normal/Mute/Ignore). Mute will effectively silence any notifications they generate, and Ignore will hide their topics and replies (so pretty nuclear).
ETA: Ignore is only available at TL2.
And there’s a bit more info on the Watching, etc options in Category and Topic Notifications?