Hacker News Reader

Comment by m_st | Hacker News Reader

So we're lucky it's not a picture of David by Michelangelo? Would this also be NSFW?

I get your point. But this is yesteryear thinking, no?

And what is the risk of someone opening an article "The Theft of a Magritte" during - you know - actual work time? ;-)

When someone quickly walks by your desk, unless they happen to be a really big surrealist connoisseur, their first thought will not be 'oh, they're looking up Magritte's Olympia, how lovely'. The first thought of a casual co-worker would be 'oh, they're looking at nudity'. Yes, you can subsequently explain the issue during your meeting with HR, at which point you'll still be told to not view things that can be misinterpreted.

This is only true for the US.

Tbf, a reasonable proportion of this site's readers must be in the US. In fact, given the assumptions made to that effect that I see on here fairly often, it must be a pretty high proportion.

Truly curious, is there no concept of sexual harassment in Europe? Maybe Europeans are less pervy than Americans, like how they don’t have alcoholism or fat people?

The difference is the 'can be misinterpreted' part. It's an oil painting

> Truly curious, is there no concept of sexual harassment in Europe?

Even in the US, nude art is not per se sexual harassment. Most workplaces will ban (non-work-related) nude art as part of an effort to create a massive buffer space around potential liability (among other reasons that don’t rely on it necessarily being sexual harassment), in part because the US has an unusually pro-initiation-of-litigation legal system (for instance, having a very high bar beyond merely losing before the loser of litigation is ordered to pay the winners legal fees.)

(There’s a weird sort of positive feedback loop where, despite distance from the law, people subjected to sexual harassment trainings in which employers, etc., imply that everything within the wide buffer space around liability that they are trying to create is “harassment” drives, if not the law, the public understanding of harassment, leading to pressure to expand the effective workplace definition further to create a buffer space around not only actual liability but the things people are likely to understand as harassment.)

Well, as Magritte painted comparably few nudes, my prior would not be to assume it's NSFW.

That being said, I'd hope we could collectively evolve away from general prudishness when it comes to nudity, especially in a context like paintings.

Funny that you say "evolve". For many of us, showing that off in the office would result in a considerable loss of fitness...

Yes, Magritte’s portrait of his wife is definitely more overtly erotic than Michelangelo's David. I think you could make that case for most of the surrealists in general!

What’s erotic about it? Her nipples? The David depicts nipples and genitals and yet isn’t considered erotic.

The most obvious difference is color. White marble is "clearly" "art". Flesh-colored paint is closer to "real", so might be ambiguous if you're sensitive to that sort of thing.

Either that, or it's the lusty way she is regarding the conch shell. Hey, people are into stranger things!

I don’t think flesh colored paint is the obvious difference driving the comments for a NSFW tag or else HN would consider the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel “erotic” and equally deserving of the label. I think the obvious difference is the gender of the person whose nipples are depicted and the different standards to which women are held.

Women are indeed held to different standards. For example, a woman viewing this image at work is unlikely to get in trouble for it. A man's motivations for looking at it are more likely to be questioned and judged, which is why they have to be more careful about any content that could be considered NSFW.

The same goes for Michelangelo's David. Because there is a default assumption of heterosexuality (and gay men are not considered a threat by a protected group), David is not going to arouse suspicion, no matter who is viewing it. Female nudes are a different matter, not because nudity in art is judged differently by the subject's gender, but because the viewer is judged differently because of their gender.

Agreed: there is clearly a double-standard regarding subject torso nudity in the US, but I don't think that's the difference in the example under discussion (Olympia vs David).

For the NSFW issue (i.e. coworker glanced and reacted badly to what you were viewing), this is just a matter of realism, plus a high sensitivity to what might offend other people and women in particular.

But I also don't think it's entirely about the "different standards to which women are held", which I perceive you to mean female-as-subject. In some ways it's more about male-as-viewer:

As sibling comment points out, when a male views a nude female, it is frequently assumed to be lecherous, or at the very least have prurient motivations.

When a female views a nude male (or female), it is assumed to be incidental, art, or accident.

This is also a double-standard, but honestly it cuts both ways.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com