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What’s wrong with female beauty? It’s not like it’s porn or a nude image. I’m not even a straight male but I can still appreciate female beauty and I don’t thin

What’s wrong with female beauty? It’s not like it’s porn or a nude image. I’m not even a straight male but I can still appreciate female beauty and I don’t think it’s sexist. The photo is more artistic than anything. I wonder if the same people who complain about this photo lodge similar complaints when they visit art museums that have female nudity in oil paintings or nude female sculptures? I know nudity and even a slight sexual undertone in anything upsets some people, but I don’t understand why. I think it says something more about the person than our culture. Sexuality is a core part of the human experience and to deny it is to remove that part of our humanity.

Pharmakon 8y ago
Personally I’m not bothered, and while the image isn’t pornographic, it is from Playboy which does make it at least porn adjacent. I see it’s use less as a matter of offensiveness or some headfuck of “intersectionality” and more as just immature and unprofessional. Sexuality is great, it’s everywhere, and I think it has literally nothing to do with this issue. I can understand not wanting a Playboy model to be the standard image in a professional setting, especially a setting that is overwhelmingly full of guys.
- qubex 8y ago
  I’m a nudist (meaning I have no problem being naked or seeing people without clothes on when it is comfortable, publicly or privately). What on earth is wrong with a nude photograph? What does it say about humankind that we deny our baseline state?
  - Pharmakon 8y ago
    Fair play to you on the nudism. My question would be whether you’d show up starkers at work? If not, then I’m not sure how it applies.
    - qubex 8y ago
      No I wouldn’t. Firstly because shocking unexpected people is streaking and/or (in some jurisdictions at least) some kind of offence. Secondly because I’m willing to see people undressed doesn’t mean it’s universal (everybody has there preferences, prejudices, and ingrained values). Thirdly because I’m the managing director and enthusiastic or not or not one of my duties is to set the tone for the workplace by example not by demanding that others do what I tell them to but by leading by example, and that includes conservative dress. Then again I’m in Italy where somewhat different social norms apply: people ask each other out on dates after they meet in the workplace and even if it’s unappreciated nobody dreams of kicking up a stink for sexual harassment because they consider it a normal form of human interaction. It’s also normal to compliment people on their looks and choice of attire. Both genders do it. Nobody gets offended. It’s more like “yeah, I put a ton of effort into choosing and matching this outfit this morning, and nobody noticed?! WTF??”
- crankylinuxuser 8y ago
  I would have expected something more algorithmic out of experimentation, to easily compare compression errors and otherwise interesting issues. Nope. They chose porn from Playboy. And this trend continues on to today with "brogrammers". No wonder why women feel inferior in tech.
  - Dylan16807 8y ago
    > I would have expected something more algorithmic out of experimentation Faces are a great test case. They represent a large fraction of the images we need to compress, and humans are very good at picking out issues with faces.
  - wyoh 8y ago
    They chose Playboy because it was one of the rare publication to have high quality pictures. Stop listening to feminist propaganda and you'll be OK.
  - pferde 8y ago
    That is how you end up with results which perform great in artificial benchmarks, but fall hard on their face in real world use. They were working on a compression algorithm that would be used primarily on real photos that people take. ...although I have no idea why I'm bothering to reply to someone for whom Playboy pictures is "porn".
- olalonde 8y ago
  I guess most people using it have no idea it's a picture from Playboy, nor a nude picture, nor a controversial picture. I used it a lot myself when I was working on content based image retrieval simply because all the literature was using it. It never even occurred to me I was being controversial or sexist. Now that I'm aware of the picture's history, I agree that it was a poor choice back then but I disagree that using it today is somehow an endorsement of sexism. Using it today only means you are using the standard image processing image.
  - bcOpus 8y ago
    Not the person you’re replying to, and fuck me if I’m wading into the question of sexism, but professionalism and maturity are things. We get paid the big bucks now, we’re not snotty kids in our parent’s garage; a whole world of acceptable professional behavior goes along with that.
choochootrain 8y ago
i think it's more about the culture which allowed that image (even in its cropped form) to proliferate as it did: > About six months later, a copy of the [Playboy] issue turned up at the University of Southern California’s Signal and Image Processing Institute, where Alexander Sawchuk and his team happened to be looking for a new photograph i think we've come far enough to agree that having playboy issues in your research lab is no longer acceptable so why continue to implicitly endorse that? find a new picture if you want. it's not like this is the optimal image for testing anyways...
underwater 8y ago
Because it makes a significant portion of the population feel objectified? This is literally what happened to "Lenna" - the image didn't celebrate or honour her as a person. It was an image protraying an unrealistic "beautiful thing". People didn't even know her real name, or what she's achieved as a real person. It's perfectly reasonable and rational for women to say this makes it harder for them to be perceived as being equals.
- BurningCycles 8y ago
  So when my two sisters were plastering their walls with very good looking males to which they masturbated, it was making it harder for me as a male to be percieved as being equal ? Or the fanservice aimed at females in current-day shows like Riverdale where these hot guys throw off their shirts at the hint of an opportunity ? This idea that it is somehow wrong to appreciate and find pleasure in the physical appearance of people is something I find very hard to understand. Are we going to ban makeup ?
  - xanipher 8y ago
    This is not about personal "pleasure in the physical appearance", but about the culture where using Playboy photos in a professional cobtext doesn't raise any eyebrows.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
  - underwater 8y ago
    Fair question. I would say the primary difference is that in most workplaces men are seen as being competent, and being male is not a disadvantage or put you in a minority. There are undoubtedly professions where stereotypes about men would be harmful. For example if a man wants to become a flight attendant, nurse, or a school teacher. Also consider examples outside of work, like dating. The tall, handsome, muscular guy is more likely to be perceived as desirable even though those traits don't necessarily correlate with what makes a good boyfriend. A man in search of a partner might feel objectified if his potential partner had posters of good-looking men up on her wall.
jahewson 8y ago
No, it is a nude image. They just cropped out her face. Google it. I have no idea why the article didn’t actually point that out? Once you understand that the piece makes sense.
- iamleppert 8y ago
  I mean the test image itself shows no nudity. It's a woman's face. Regardless of the source, I do think it shows respect and discretion that they cropped out the nude part. It shows that they at least thought a nude image would be unprofessional in a professional setting. Personally, I found the story of her life interesting and uplifting (especially about her days at Kodak). If they had selected a landscape or airforce test pattern, we wouldn't have this wonderful story or be getting to read about this woman's life. It's a human connection and history of a time that may have been operating under different social norms. It's a unique part of the culture and a personal story and it saddens me that some people are able to find negativity in it, just because of the source, and I find it very disrespectful to Lena herself -- there's nothing wrong with how she lived her life or what she did to earn her current minor celebrity.
- Buge 8y ago
  >No, it is a nude image. I have no idea why the article didn’t actually point that out? The article essentially said it: >In 1972, at the age of 21, she appeared as Miss November, wearing nothing but a feathered sun hat, boots, stockings, and a pink boa.
- taneq 8y ago
  Heh, I had that as my desktop background for a while back in university. By modern standards it's fairly tasteful and inoffensive - I saw a poster publicly displayed outside a lingerie shop yesterday which was more provocative.
yawaramin 8y ago
Because it's not about you. It's about the women who see the image, understand its history, and see it as another reminder of how tech is not just male-dominated but thoughtlessly so (having Playboy issues lying around in the research lab) and where women are literally reduced to objects. From the article: > “As silly as it sounds, they were surprised she was a real person,” he told me. Women notice stuff like that, I guess.
- v64 8y ago
  I think it's important to keep in mind that Lena Forsen (and the other models of Playboy) made the decision to be photographed nude and to have those photos published as a creative expression. To portray the exhibition as exploitative robs them of their agency and demeans their decision.
  - crankylinuxuser 8y ago
    As long as a "gun" is held to our collective heads stating 'you will surrender your bodies to work or starve on the street', there is no such thing as making a voluntary decision like what you say. Look no further than the article: > “I didn’t really know what that was,” she told me. “But my husband, he thought it was kind of cool, and it was money, and I didn’t have a lot of money.” And what did she get? > After her centerfold photos were published, Lena, green card in hand, got a divorce and a new boyfriend. Even faced with lack of money for food and rent, still got a divorce out of it. Which in '71 , was still considered an abomination. Don't get me wrong. Men also trade their bodies for the same existential threat; being deprived of food and shelter. But instead of being valued for beauty, we're valued for our utility. And too, our bodies break and rot under harsher conditions. Only ones who automate and make others' lives meaningless get further than the rest - which I think adequately explains IT in a nutshell. Frankly, its only time until we're also due the same fate.
    - v64 8y ago
      I disagree with the characterization that it's comparable to a gun to the head. In Lena's case, she was offered a way to make money, she considered the decision, took it, then used the money she made to start an independent life for herself. She declines Hugh Hefner's offer because that crosses a line for her. How does any of this suggest the desperation of starvation? At the end of the day, her perspective matters the most: > Lena doesn’t harbor any resentment toward Sawchuk and his imitators for how they appropriated her image; the only note of regret she expressed was that she wasn’t better compensated. In her view, the photograph is an immense accomplishment that just happened to take on a life of its own. “I’m really proud of that picture,” she said. She's proud of it. Don't deprive her of that.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
jancsika 8y ago
> What’s wrong with female beauty? It's a facile concept that is extremely difficult to decouple from a whole set of nasty, narrow social expectations for women that have nothing to do with aesthetics. If you want to get a sense of just how nasty, do the social experiment of discussing one of the many subculture of biological males who present convincingly as female. It's hard to analyze the resulting physical unease and non-sequiturs as anything other than a confusion of aesthetics with... everything else, really.
blub 8y ago
Americans are stuck up sexually, that's the gist of it. There's also a clear trend in the US to get outraged at all sorts of injustices of the past, some real, some percieved. It's shocking to me to see that white men - the very people who had a massive contribution to building America into what it is today - are given so much crap from pretty much everyone else.

Pharmakon 8y ago

Personally I’m not bothered, and while the image isn’t pornographic, it is from Playboy which does make it at least porn adjacent. I see it’s use less as a matter of offensiveness or some headfuck of “intersectionality” and more as just immature and unprofessional. Sexuality is great, it’s everywhere, and I think it has literally nothing to do with this issue. I can understand not wanting a Playboy model to be the standard image in a professional setting, especially a setting that is overwhelmingly full of guys.

qubex 8y ago
I’m a nudist (meaning I have no problem being naked or seeing people without clothes on when it is comfortable, publicly or privately). What on earth is wrong with a nude photograph? What does it say about humankind that we deny our baseline state?
- Pharmakon 8y ago
  Fair play to you on the nudism. My question would be whether you’d show up starkers at work? If not, then I’m not sure how it applies.
  - qubex 8y ago
    No I wouldn’t. Firstly because shocking unexpected people is streaking and/or (in some jurisdictions at least) some kind of offence. Secondly because I’m willing to see people undressed doesn’t mean it’s universal (everybody has there preferences, prejudices, and ingrained values). Thirdly because I’m the managing director and enthusiastic or not or not one of my duties is to set the tone for the workplace by example not by demanding that others do what I tell them to but by leading by example, and that includes conservative dress. Then again I’m in Italy where somewhat different social norms apply: people ask each other out on dates after they meet in the workplace and even if it’s unappreciated nobody dreams of kicking up a stink for sexual harassment because they consider it a normal form of human interaction. It’s also normal to compliment people on their looks and choice of attire. Both genders do it. Nobody gets offended. It’s more like “yeah, I put a ton of effort into choosing and matching this outfit this morning, and nobody noticed?! WTF??”
crankylinuxuser 8y ago
I would have expected something more algorithmic out of experimentation, to easily compare compression errors and otherwise interesting issues. Nope. They chose porn from Playboy. And this trend continues on to today with "brogrammers". No wonder why women feel inferior in tech.
- Dylan16807 8y ago
  > I would have expected something more algorithmic out of experimentation Faces are a great test case. They represent a large fraction of the images we need to compress, and humans are very good at picking out issues with faces.
- wyoh 8y ago
  They chose Playboy because it was one of the rare publication to have high quality pictures. Stop listening to feminist propaganda and you'll be OK.
- pferde 8y ago
  That is how you end up with results which perform great in artificial benchmarks, but fall hard on their face in real world use. They were working on a compression algorithm that would be used primarily on real photos that people take. ...although I have no idea why I'm bothering to reply to someone for whom Playboy pictures is "porn".
olalonde 8y ago
I guess most people using it have no idea it's a picture from Playboy, nor a nude picture, nor a controversial picture. I used it a lot myself when I was working on content based image retrieval simply because all the literature was using it. It never even occurred to me I was being controversial or sexist. Now that I'm aware of the picture's history, I agree that it was a poor choice back then but I disagree that using it today is somehow an endorsement of sexism. Using it today only means you are using the standard image processing image.
- bcOpus 8y ago
  Not the person you’re replying to, and fuck me if I’m wading into the question of sexism, but professionalism and maturity are things. We get paid the big bucks now, we’re not snotty kids in our parent’s garage; a whole world of acceptable professional behavior goes along with that.

choochootrain 8y ago

i think it's more about the culture which allowed that image (even in its cropped form) to proliferate as it did: > About six months later, a copy of the [Playboy] issue turned up at the University of Southern California’s Signal and Image Processing Institute, where Alexander Sawchuk and his team happened to be looking for a new photograph i think we've come far enough to agree that having playboy issues in your research lab is no longer acceptable so why continue to implicitly endorse that? find a new picture if you want. it's not like this is the optimal image for testing anyways...

underwater 8y ago

Because it makes a significant portion of the population feel objectified? This is literally what happened to "Lenna" - the image didn't celebrate or honour her as a person. It was an image protraying an unrealistic "beautiful thing". People didn't even know her real name, or what she's achieved as a real person. It's perfectly reasonable and rational for women to say this makes it harder for them to be perceived as being equals.

BurningCycles 8y ago
So when my two sisters were plastering their walls with very good looking males to which they masturbated, it was making it harder for me as a male to be percieved as being equal ? Or the fanservice aimed at females in current-day shows like Riverdale where these hot guys throw off their shirts at the hint of an opportunity ? This idea that it is somehow wrong to appreciate and find pleasure in the physical appearance of people is something I find very hard to understand. Are we going to ban makeup ?
- xanipher 8y ago
  This is not about personal "pleasure in the physical appearance", but about the culture where using Playboy photos in a professional cobtext doesn't raise any eyebrows.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
- underwater 8y ago
  Fair question. I would say the primary difference is that in most workplaces men are seen as being competent, and being male is not a disadvantage or put you in a minority. There are undoubtedly professions where stereotypes about men would be harmful. For example if a man wants to become a flight attendant, nurse, or a school teacher. Also consider examples outside of work, like dating. The tall, handsome, muscular guy is more likely to be perceived as desirable even though those traits don't necessarily correlate with what makes a good boyfriend. A man in search of a partner might feel objectified if his potential partner had posters of good-looking men up on her wall.

jahewson 8y ago

No, it is a nude image. They just cropped out her face. Google it. I have no idea why the article didn’t actually point that out? Once you understand that the piece makes sense.

iamleppert 8y ago
I mean the test image itself shows no nudity. It's a woman's face. Regardless of the source, I do think it shows respect and discretion that they cropped out the nude part. It shows that they at least thought a nude image would be unprofessional in a professional setting. Personally, I found the story of her life interesting and uplifting (especially about her days at Kodak). If they had selected a landscape or airforce test pattern, we wouldn't have this wonderful story or be getting to read about this woman's life. It's a human connection and history of a time that may have been operating under different social norms. It's a unique part of the culture and a personal story and it saddens me that some people are able to find negativity in it, just because of the source, and I find it very disrespectful to Lena herself -- there's nothing wrong with how she lived her life or what she did to earn her current minor celebrity.
Buge 8y ago
>No, it is a nude image. I have no idea why the article didn’t actually point that out? The article essentially said it: >In 1972, at the age of 21, she appeared as Miss November, wearing nothing but a feathered sun hat, boots, stockings, and a pink boa.
taneq 8y ago
Heh, I had that as my desktop background for a while back in university. By modern standards it's fairly tasteful and inoffensive - I saw a poster publicly displayed outside a lingerie shop yesterday which was more provocative.

yawaramin 8y ago

Because it's not about you. It's about the women who see the image, understand its history, and see it as another reminder of how tech is not just male-dominated but thoughtlessly so (having Playboy issues lying around in the research lab) and where women are literally reduced to objects. From the article: > “As silly as it sounds, they were surprised she was a real person,” he told me. Women notice stuff like that, I guess.

v64 8y ago
I think it's important to keep in mind that Lena Forsen (and the other models of Playboy) made the decision to be photographed nude and to have those photos published as a creative expression. To portray the exhibition as exploitative robs them of their agency and demeans their decision.
- crankylinuxuser 8y ago
  As long as a "gun" is held to our collective heads stating 'you will surrender your bodies to work or starve on the street', there is no such thing as making a voluntary decision like what you say. Look no further than the article: > “I didn’t really know what that was,” she told me. “But my husband, he thought it was kind of cool, and it was money, and I didn’t have a lot of money.” And what did she get? > After her centerfold photos were published, Lena, green card in hand, got a divorce and a new boyfriend. Even faced with lack of money for food and rent, still got a divorce out of it. Which in '71 , was still considered an abomination. Don't get me wrong. Men also trade their bodies for the same existential threat; being deprived of food and shelter. But instead of being valued for beauty, we're valued for our utility. And too, our bodies break and rot under harsher conditions. Only ones who automate and make others' lives meaningless get further than the rest - which I think adequately explains IT in a nutshell. Frankly, its only time until we're also due the same fate.
  - v64 8y ago
    I disagree with the characterization that it's comparable to a gun to the head. In Lena's case, she was offered a way to make money, she considered the decision, took it, then used the money she made to start an independent life for herself. She declines Hugh Hefner's offer because that crosses a line for her. How does any of this suggest the desperation of starvation? At the end of the day, her perspective matters the most: > Lena doesn’t harbor any resentment toward Sawchuk and his imitators for how they appropriated her image; the only note of regret she expressed was that she wasn’t better compensated. In her view, the photograph is an immense accomplishment that just happened to take on a life of its own. “I’m really proud of that picture,” she said. She's proud of it. Don't deprive her of that.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

jancsika 8y ago

> What’s wrong with female beauty? It's a facile concept that is extremely difficult to decouple from a whole set of nasty, narrow social expectations for women that have nothing to do with aesthetics. If you want to get a sense of just how nasty, do the social experiment of discussing one of the many subculture of biological males who present convincingly as female. It's hard to analyze the resulting physical unease and non-sequiturs as anything other than a confusion of aesthetics with... everything else, really.

blub 8y ago

Americans are stuck up sexually, that's the gist of it. There's also a clear trend in the US to get outraged at all sorts of injustices of the past, some real, some percieved. It's shocking to me to see that white men - the very people who had a massive contribution to building America into what it is today - are given so much crap from pretty much everyone else.