I am curious if you knew about the Lena photo and history. It seems likely this remark by the professor was inappropriate, but given that context, provided by joshvm https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11888153, I think that muddies the water.

Oh, never mind. I see now that you did know. Excuse my derpy question.

Gross.

I understand your sentiment. I did not mean to glorify objectification of women with this story. Just something mildly funny that happened almost two decades ago, in a country without a strong tradition of feminism, to a 17-year old me who did not know any better then.

How can an virtual object (a photo of a woman seen on a monitor) be objectified? The model meant that photo to be used as an object (looked at). If she wanted people to understand her personality more, she would have just written a book.

These are the kinds of things, specifically, that gross me out about this story:

(from http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Sexualized_environment)

* In geek contexts, they are usually a way for heterosexual men to bond over their common attraction to women. This is othering for anyone who is not a heterosexual man, including, obviously, women, and contributes to their invisibility in the field. This sensation of exclusion is very visceral when in a small minority, as women can be in geek settings.

* There is a long tradition of sexual images, suggestions and approaches being used to shame, scare, harrass or brutalise women. This is common enough that most women will have had personal experience of it. Therefore many women are unable to sensibly assume good faith on the part of unknown men seeking to make a situation sexual and feel mentally uncomfortable at best and physically intimidated often.

* While in many areas this restriction is loosening, women are stigmatised as well as celebrated for being too sexual. This traps women into a double bind when responding to sexualized environments, because even by getting the joke they may reveal themselves as too sexual.

Keep in mind the commenter received extra points for this.

  This is othering for anyone who is not a heterosexual man

I disagree. Women look at other women as well. It's very natural to feel excluded when groups of people over something you don't get excited about, whatever the subject. If, for example, people can contain their excitement about Magic cards when I'm around, I'm fine.

  There is a long tradition of sexual images, suggestions and approaches being used to shame, scare, harrass or brutalise women. 

Yeah, so a picture of a professional model is something completely different. You are dragging this point into the discussion but it doesn't add anything.

  ...they may reveal themselves as too sexual.

Just bring it back to basics. Men have dicks they want to use, women want to be admired. If people could just respect eachother while taking these basic needs into account, everyone would be fine.

--

I am happy that people here in the Netherlands are so much more tolerant when it comes down to things like sexuality, public intimicy and nudity. It seems to me that in the US people get offended very easily and want to limit another persons freedom of expression just so that they can be offended a little bit less.

Forget abstractions for a second; there are people whom this makes uncomfortable (we know because they said so), and the cost of that is much higher than the very small benefit of using one image over another as a test image. Simple cost/benefit analysis says to use something else.

Obviously in certain circumstances only - few of us here would censor Charlie Hebdo.

We only care about discomfort that we think is reasonable, or more accurately, not a lie designed to control the actions of others.

In this case, most people agree that sexualizing the workplace is a strong negative and are in agreement with you. But as a general rule, you'd have much less support.

General rules aren't good for very much other than arguing with people on hacker news.

   I totally did not intend to put it to the floppy disk...

So he didn't mean to turn it in. But what he does in his own time, isn't that his business?

Your analysis also tells us that you should not look at porn in your own free time, as the potential cost is much higher because it makes 2 parties uncomfortable, if caught.

And he received extra points for it.

Bear in mind that computer vision has used a cropped image of Lena Söderberg (i.e. the infamous Lena image) for decades now. If you believe the anecdote, the image was not chosen as an in-joke or as a way of sexualising women. The researchers needed a high quality image of a human face (hence they cropped out her body) and they were tired of stock images. Someone in the lab had a playboy magazine and history was made. Most people have no idea that the full version of the image even exists.

The image is so famous that Lena herself was invited as a guest to ICIP 2015 and chaired the best paper award. I think she also gave a talk. I dare say she doesn't have a problem with it.

That's all true, but that doesn't make it less squicky.

That's true, since the use of this cropped image was completely non-squicky to start with. You can hardly get less squicky than zero!

There is no such thing as objectively squicky. I find it squicky.

> This is othering for anyone who is not a heterosexual man

Except, you know, for bisexual men and women, lesbians, heterosexual trans-men, and so on. A lot of people could theoretically bond with one-another over a shared attraction to a given gender. (Not making any point to the spirit of your argument; just poking at the letter of it in hope that you refine it.)

> A lot of people could theoretically bond with one-another over a shared attraction to a given gender.

OK? That's not what's happening here.

The point you were making wasn't about what was or wasn't happening here, though; it was about what such statements "usually [serve to do] ... in geek contexts." Geek contexts involve a lot of the types of people I mentioned. (For example, according to a recent survey of LessWrong members, there are actually more transwomen than ciswomen in that community.)

The full quote:

> In geek contexts, they are usually a way for heterosexual men to bond over their common attraction to women. This is othering for anyone who is not a heterosexual man, including, obviously, women, and contributes to their invisibility in the field.

There's nothing here suggesting that that shared sexuality can't be used as a bonding mechanism among other groups. Just that in "geek contexts" it's usually intended as a bonding mechanism between straight men, and that this is othering to people who aren't straight men.

Do you have an alternative unbiased source?