Re: Mass bug filing about non free lena image.
Adam Borowski <kilobyte@angband.pl> writes:
> On Wed, Aug 12, 2015 at 04:28:37PM -0400, Jack Hill wrote:
>> Even if the image were free it is still disparaging to women. From the
>> lintian message [0]: "Moreover, Lenna photo has been pointed to as an
>> example of sexism in the sciences, reinforcing gender stereotypes."
> What exactly is sexist in an image of a woman's face and shoulder?
It's pretty typical of a pattern in the software industry for developers
to reach for a picture of a beautiful woman when grabbing some picture
that they're going to be staring at a lot. That in and of itself isn't
particularly sexist (IMO), except that it's part of a pattern where the
eye candy is *always* a beautiful woman because the programmers in
question are *always* men, and no one bothers to think that this makes
things kind of awkward for women who might reasonably identify with the
eye candy and wonder if that's how their colleagues are viewing them.
All of that is still probably not a huge deal if it were just some stock
clip-art image of a clothed woman. A bit eyeroll-inducing, but there are
a lot of things like that. However, the image is actually cropped porn,
and regardless of one's opinion of porn in general, that *really* plays
into that stereotype, and makes it rather hard to read the intention any
other way than "programmers love looking at naked women." Which feels a
bit exclusionary.
This is, obviously, not the most burning problem of inequality or social
treatment of women that exists in the software industry. Not by a long
shot. But if you're familiar with the whole story, it's, shall we say,
emblematic and typical of a not particularly attractive or defensable
attitude towards women as objects to stare at, which our industry is
particularly bad about.
If you're *not* familiar with the whole story and don't know it's a
Playboy centerfold, I doubt most people would give it a second thought, so
I'm quite sure many projects use it in complete and understandable
ignorance. It's unfortunately one of those things that looks worse the
more of the background you know.
All that being said, I personally am a bit dubious that it's worth the
effort to remove this. Of course, I'm also someone who thinks we should
ignore the conflict between the OpenSSL license and the GPL on the grounds
that it's so widely ignored as to come close to estoppel, and
realistically no one is going to sue. I think this picture falls into the
same category. The bit of institutionalized sexism that it represents is
irritating, but I don't think that by itself makes it a great place to
spend our effort (particularly our *discussion* effort, which is probably
going to have the higher social cost than developer effort), and I think
the chances of Playboy ever caring about uses of this picture at this
point is so low as to be ignorable.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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