6 ms·

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-dominate

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.
    - eecc 8y ago
      Besides, in a world obsessed with copyright and take-downs would her image have circulated so much today? Would she have become so iconic to enter our collective unconscious? She’s like the Amen Break.
  - legostormtroopr 8y ago
    > 'you will surrender your bodies to work or starve on the street' As opposed to all of the coal miners and bricklayers who work for fun.
    - Walf 8y ago
      If you'd read the entire comment, you'd have seen that those labourers were well and truly included.
- yawaramin 8y ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19182950 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19182950
- yawaramin 8y ago
  The objection that people have is not to Lena Forsen having a modelling career, it's to the culture of non-inclusion created by NSFW images that make women uncomfortable.
- tghw 8y ago
  The issue isn't her agency in choosing to model or not. The issue is that casually having a Playboy around work is in and of itself exclusionary. It taints the history of graphics research because it is so clearly inappropriate, and only in a very broken work culture would it be remotely okay to have that sort of stuff just laying around.
  - walterstucco 8y ago
    Is it? Is having vanity fair around exclusionary then?
lawrenceyan 8y ago
You assume that the women who choose to model in Plaboy do so not out of their own free will and choice. That is somewhat diminutive of these women wouldn’t you say? Who are you to say anything about their character or quality as “objects”? It seems uncharacteristically harsh to just make an assumption like that.
- yawaramin 8y ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19182950 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19182950
  - lawrenceyan 8y ago
    Yes, but don’t you feel like your wording of women who choose to model in Playboy as objects is somewhat demeaning to them?
    - yawaramin 8y ago
      No, because my wording was carefully chosen to reflect the actual attitudes of the people who worked with the image, not my personal feelings about Playboy models. If you'll notice, I included a quote from the article where they literally did not know (and had never cared enough to find out!) that the image was of a real person. It was literally an objectified woman.
      - v64 8y ago
        But human beings generally engage in this kind of objectification, and it's often not malicious. For instance, people elicit similar reactions to meeting athletes for the first time (i.e. only knowing them on TV in a competitive context, and then meeting them in reality and discovering for the first time their non-sport related traits and characteristics that are incongruent with their athletic persona). I don't interpret "oh you're a real person" as saying "oh wow, you're more than a sex object". I think the reaction is more in line with the awe of meeting the flesh and blood subject behind a static photograph (and an alluring photograph at that).
patrickg_zill 8y ago
So all of the women who have been in Playboy have no agency? Maybe they shouldn't be allowed to vote then... ! Is it not also significant that she then was a model and became a "Shirley" at another company also?
- yawaramin 8y ago
  No one said anything about the agency of Playboy models, only about the inappropriateness of using Playboy or other NSFW materials in professional environments making women uncomfortable. In the privacy of your own home, do whatever you like (legally). But don't bring it into the office!
  - v64 8y ago
    So is the hangup that it was published in Playboy? What if the cropped non-nude version of the photograph first appeared in a mainstream publication, and then was appropriated by the imaging community afterward? Does that contextual difference change anything if we're still discussing the same photograph?
    - yawaramin 8y ago
      I don't know–it depends! It's difficult to talk hypotheticals. In the end it's all about the context.
      - feanaro 8y ago
        Why is it difficult? The hypothetical makes all the relevant information available. What information are you using right now when dealing the judgement of "inappropriate" to the current situation?
        yawaramin 8y ago
        Like I said, it's very difficult to talk about hypotheticals because in real life there are always unintended consequences. For example, the model from the cropped image from the mainstream publication may have later spoken out that she was made to feel uncomfortable during the photo shoot. And people may find that objectionable. As long as we keep talking in hypotheticals, we can justify anything!
whatshisface 8y ago
I had no idea about the origin of the picture until people started discussing it, so actually this might result in more people being uncomfortable, not less. Consider this thought experiment: suppose that in some foreign language the word "hello," once had a horrible and offense meaning. However both sides of the past social divide had forgotten its past meaning and now it is used commonly as a greeting. Now, some well-meaning historian comes along and uses this history to convince a member of a marginalized group that every time someone says hello, they are echoing something horrible and offense. Now this person will walk around with a heavy weight of paranoia, having been "woken up" to a reality that is long past. Every time someone says "hello," they will suffer through the experience of someone who is being insulted, and worse will have to then repeatedly convince themselves that no harm was meant (this is brutal if you have ever experienced it). That sounds like a curse to me, I say things like that should stay forgotten.
- yawaramin 8y ago
  Do I really need to consider every blue-sky armchair-philosopher thought experiment? ;-) We can all make up extreme hypotheticals that have like a 0.000001% chance of ever happening in the real world and using that to justify our philosophy. Anyway, just to play along–dude, just say 'Hi'. It's not that hard and you're saving like three letters every time. Your life just got easier!
eecc 8y ago
Frankly I think it’s so overstated that it’s edging toward self-parody. Of course a straight male won’t ever be able to compute the monstrosity of Patriarchy - ironically, it makes me a lesser human - but seriously, I’m not sure all this vitriol helps. Believe me, I’m relieved when I see a normal woman work at software. It raises my hope that we’re not inevitability stuck living in a Mad Men episode. A normal woman, not some edgy, fringe individual, just a plain female, not ugly nor beautiful, loud extrovert of not. Just plain average. And the next thought is how little there still are, and how all this punitive, calvinist moral panic might be focusing so much on castigation and not enough at making it chill for anyone to just pick up this job if they feel it’s their thing. I wonder how many walk away and do something else rather than become a walking flame-bait.
- yawaramin 8y ago
  Do you ever think maybe that most normal women walk away when they see a culture of objectification of women, of men making up all sorts of weird analogies and excuses to keep using Playboy pictures in the workplace, and that you telling them to just 'chill' might not actually fix the problem?
  - eecc 8y ago
    And you’re still arguing along that fault line... and that’s the point really, it’s all about original sin and “gatekeepng”.
  - eecc 8y ago
    Re-reading your reply I noticed you misread my comment: I never said anyone should “just chill” and comply... no. I wrote that it should be “chill for anyone to just pick up this job if they feel it’s their thing”. I’m quite sure there’s a world of difference
    - yawaramin 8y ago
      What exactly do you think is involved in making it “chill for anyone to just pick up this job if they feel it’s their thing”? Like, should anything different be done? Should anything be done at all? Or should we tell anyone who has any criticisms, 'nah we made it chill, so your criticism is actually invalid'?
cotelletta 8y ago
So you're saying women are insecure and easily triggered, offended by sexuality, and need people like you to stand up for them, got it. But seriously, why don't you tell that minority of women who complain about this that it's not about them either? Btw, the article claims that the perception of computing changed from menial labor to a cerebral activity for men. But surely the actual content of the field changed the same way, through 5 decades of exponential acceleration and recursively bootstrapped tools?
- yawaramin 8y ago
  Nope not at all, I'm just saying that it's not appropriate to bring sexuality into the workplace because it makes people (not just women) uncomfortable. I'm also not saying I'm standing up for anyone, but it's always fun to come across this 'they don't need you to stand up for them' as an argument tactic, because that's when I know there are no actual arguments there. The fact that some women spoke up about this doesn't mean that only those women find it objectionable; many may have just decided it wasn't worth the grief (and rightly, given how many replies I got to my original post!) and just moved away.

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.
  - eecc 8y ago
    Besides, in a world obsessed with copyright and take-downs would her image have circulated so much today? Would she have become so iconic to enter our collective unconscious? She’s like the Amen Break.
- legostormtroopr 8y ago
  > 'you will surrender your bodies to work or starve on the street' As opposed to all of the coal miners and bricklayers who work for fun.
  - Walf 8y ago
    If you'd read the entire comment, you'd have seen that those labourers were well and truly included.
yawaramin 8y ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19182950 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19182950
yawaramin 8y ago
The objection that people have is not to Lena Forsen having a modelling career, it's to the culture of non-inclusion created by NSFW images that make women uncomfortable.
tghw 8y ago
The issue isn't her agency in choosing to model or not. The issue is that casually having a Playboy around work is in and of itself exclusionary. It taints the history of graphics research because it is so clearly inappropriate, and only in a very broken work culture would it be remotely okay to have that sort of stuff just laying around.
- walterstucco 8y ago
  Is it? Is having vanity fair around exclusionary then?

lawrenceyan 8y ago

You assume that the women who choose to model in Plaboy do so not out of their own free will and choice. That is somewhat diminutive of these women wouldn’t you say? Who are you to say anything about their character or quality as “objects”? It seems uncharacteristically harsh to just make an assumption like that.

yawaramin 8y ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19182950 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19182950
- lawrenceyan 8y ago
  Yes, but don’t you feel like your wording of women who choose to model in Playboy as objects is somewhat demeaning to them?
  - yawaramin 8y ago
    No, because my wording was carefully chosen to reflect the actual attitudes of the people who worked with the image, not my personal feelings about Playboy models. If you'll notice, I included a quote from the article where they literally did not know (and had never cared enough to find out!) that the image was of a real person. It was literally an objectified woman.
    - v64 8y ago
      But human beings generally engage in this kind of objectification, and it's often not malicious. For instance, people elicit similar reactions to meeting athletes for the first time (i.e. only knowing them on TV in a competitive context, and then meeting them in reality and discovering for the first time their non-sport related traits and characteristics that are incongruent with their athletic persona). I don't interpret "oh you're a real person" as saying "oh wow, you're more than a sex object". I think the reaction is more in line with the awe of meeting the flesh and blood subject behind a static photograph (and an alluring photograph at that).

patrickg_zill 8y ago

So all of the women who have been in Playboy have no agency? Maybe they shouldn't be allowed to vote then... ! Is it not also significant that she then was a model and became a "Shirley" at another company also?

yawaramin 8y ago
No one said anything about the agency of Playboy models, only about the inappropriateness of using Playboy or other NSFW materials in professional environments making women uncomfortable. In the privacy of your own home, do whatever you like (legally). But don't bring it into the office!
- v64 8y ago
  So is the hangup that it was published in Playboy? What if the cropped non-nude version of the photograph first appeared in a mainstream publication, and then was appropriated by the imaging community afterward? Does that contextual difference change anything if we're still discussing the same photograph?
  - yawaramin 8y ago
    I don't know–it depends! It's difficult to talk hypotheticals. In the end it's all about the context.
    - feanaro 8y ago
      Why is it difficult? The hypothetical makes all the relevant information available. What information are you using right now when dealing the judgement of "inappropriate" to the current situation?
      - yawaramin 8y ago
        Like I said, it's very difficult to talk about hypotheticals because in real life there are always unintended consequences. For example, the model from the cropped image from the mainstream publication may have later spoken out that she was made to feel uncomfortable during the photo shoot. And people may find that objectionable. As long as we keep talking in hypotheticals, we can justify anything!

whatshisface 8y ago

I had no idea about the origin of the picture until people started discussing it, so actually this might result in more people being uncomfortable, not less. Consider this thought experiment: suppose that in some foreign language the word "hello," once had a horrible and offense meaning. However both sides of the past social divide had forgotten its past meaning and now it is used commonly as a greeting. Now, some well-meaning historian comes along and uses this history to convince a member of a marginalized group that every time someone says hello, they are echoing something horrible and offense. Now this person will walk around with a heavy weight of paranoia, having been "woken up" to a reality that is long past. Every time someone says "hello," they will suffer through the experience of someone who is being insulted, and worse will have to then repeatedly convince themselves that no harm was meant (this is brutal if you have ever experienced it). That sounds like a curse to me, I say things like that should stay forgotten.

yawaramin 8y ago
Do I really need to consider every blue-sky armchair-philosopher thought experiment? ;-) We can all make up extreme hypotheticals that have like a 0.000001% chance of ever happening in the real world and using that to justify our philosophy. Anyway, just to play along–dude, just say 'Hi'. It's not that hard and you're saving like three letters every time. Your life just got easier!

eecc 8y ago

Frankly I think it’s so overstated that it’s edging toward self-parody. Of course a straight male won’t ever be able to compute the monstrosity of Patriarchy - ironically, it makes me a lesser human - but seriously, I’m not sure all this vitriol helps. Believe me, I’m relieved when I see a normal woman work at software. It raises my hope that we’re not inevitability stuck living in a Mad Men episode. A normal woman, not some edgy, fringe individual, just a plain female, not ugly nor beautiful, loud extrovert of not. Just plain average. And the next thought is how little there still are, and how all this punitive, calvinist moral panic might be focusing so much on castigation and not enough at making it chill for anyone to just pick up this job if they feel it’s their thing. I wonder how many walk away and do something else rather than become a walking flame-bait.

yawaramin 8y ago
Do you ever think maybe that most normal women walk away when they see a culture of objectification of women, of men making up all sorts of weird analogies and excuses to keep using Playboy pictures in the workplace, and that you telling them to just 'chill' might not actually fix the problem?
- eecc 8y ago
  And you’re still arguing along that fault line... and that’s the point really, it’s all about original sin and “gatekeepng”.
- eecc 8y ago
  Re-reading your reply I noticed you misread my comment: I never said anyone should “just chill” and comply... no. I wrote that it should be “chill for anyone to just pick up this job if they feel it’s their thing”. I’m quite sure there’s a world of difference
  - yawaramin 8y ago
    What exactly do you think is involved in making it “chill for anyone to just pick up this job if they feel it’s their thing”? Like, should anything different be done? Should anything be done at all? Or should we tell anyone who has any criticisms, 'nah we made it chill, so your criticism is actually invalid'?

cotelletta 8y ago

So you're saying women are insecure and easily triggered, offended by sexuality, and need people like you to stand up for them, got it. But seriously, why don't you tell that minority of women who complain about this that it's not about them either? Btw, the article claims that the perception of computing changed from menial labor to a cerebral activity for men. But surely the actual content of the field changed the same way, through 5 decades of exponential acceleration and recursively bootstrapped tools?

yawaramin 8y ago
Nope not at all, I'm just saying that it's not appropriate to bring sexuality into the workplace because it makes people (not just women) uncomfortable. I'm also not saying I'm standing up for anyone, but it's always fun to come across this 'they don't need you to stand up for them' as an argument tactic, because that's when I know there are no actual arguments there. The fact that some women spoke up about this doesn't mean that only those women find it objectionable; many may have just decided it wasn't worth the grief (and rightly, given how many replies I got to my original post!) and just moved away.