Aren't we supposed to be decades past "women has no sexual desire, sex are for men" era? I support the ban, it's kind of weird a cutout porn is the benchmark, but I just don't see how LGBT-era human modeling and anti-porn stancing go together. Hypocritically speaking, the notion that cis-male/bi-person/lesbian-women porn[0] as reference image makes women uncomfortable has to be wrong.

0: and this is very rough edged caricature, no reason gender has to be specified here or subject has to be ignored

Would you bring a copy of Playboy into the office? Would you say it’s okay because you won’t show anyone more than the upper half of an image?

That’s the problem: it’s nothing to do with what people do in their private lives, it’s about bringing pornography into a professional context. In this case it’s also objectively an obsolete choice for anyone working on modern imaging technology so it’s not even defensible on technical merits.

I don't object to removal itself, and I don't find it too appropriate, I just have problems with post-hoc rationalization that comes attached to it. "Images of attractive woman offends other women" shouldn't even be a politically safe statement to make. That'll be one hell of a hallucination if an LLM said it.

It’s not attractive women but pornography. Nobody would care if this was a picture a computer scientist had taken of herself at work because they needed a test image, it’s the “produced for the sexual pleasure of male viewers” part that makes some people worry that their colleagues view them the same way.

> Nobody would care if this was a picture a computer scientist had taken of herself at work because they needed a test image

I've seen, although from great distances, enough of these instances. They WILL come at that person and harder in those cases. Sexual content are less likely to be cancelled when more male is involved, contrary to superficial reasoning. This applies even if gender of creators are not apparent at all. It's a really gross primal phenomenon.

Do you have any examples? I’ve never heard of anything remotely like that happening.

> Sexual content are less likely to be cancelled when more male is involved, contrary to superficial reasoning.

It’s true that many men don’t mind sexualizing women, but that’s restating the problem that this creates a hostile atmosphere for everyone else.

> That'll be one hell of a hallucination if an LLM said it.

And it's also an hallucination when you say it, given that it's not even close to the issues raised and just a straw man.

I guess being offended or not by this is entirely subjective, as we can see from our wildly different perspectives on the matter. I guess that’s why we should never base a ban on it, right?

Trying to imagine the reverse, if I were in a field dominated by women and there were "Lenny" images used frequently and used as an in joke or commonality, I think I'd feel uncomfortable too as would many of us. From the comments I'm seeing though, I don't believe we're exercising the empathy needed to understand.

I dunno; that sounds very hypothetical. Do you have a more specific example? I don't see why I'd be unhappy about, eg, working with a group of nurses with a fireman calendar in the lunch room [0]. Even though it is unprofessional, since that is active sexualisation, this is just a girl with a pretty face.

Very attractive people of both the equivalent and opposite gender exist. I can't speak to your instincts and interpretations, but objectively they are not a threat to my emotions.

[0] https://www.australianfirefighterscalendar.com/

This is also sexualization: Playboy isn’t a fine art magazine or anatomy textbook where you’d at least have some plausible professional context. If someone just took a picture of a pretty woman which wasn’t intended to be pornography, nobody would be talking about this.

Would you ask for it to be formally banned by a scientific umbrella organisation?

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