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Comment by thomasgerbe | Hacker News Reader

I'm not condoning the comments, but I don't see the big deal about the pic. It's not like they told her to open up her shirt and expose her bra.

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It's simple: the men are engineers and the woman is a pair of tits. That's all. Nothing more. It's blatant objectifying and absurd that in 2011 this is even up for discussion.

Oh, and if she's holding, say, a PhD from Harvard? Then she's a woman with a pair of tits and OMG she's also intelligent. Secondly - she's intelligent.

> It's simple: the men are engineers and the woman is a pair of tits. That's all. Nothing more.

This is your bias. It's a picture from Halloween or a costume party. The woman is dressed as a nurse. The guys are dressed as geeks. Yes, she's supposed to be sexy (she chose to dress as a "sexy" nurse). I'm not sure how that's objectifying. She's an object because guys find her image attractive? What does that make the guys in the image? Not even objects?

This is a prime example of how the Male Gaze* systematically expresses a power imbalance. By using this image as an illustration of Sexy, Sexy becomes the objectified. In this context there has been debate after debate about why women are not comfortable entering male spaces (particularly of late coding environments and google+). While there remains a particular imbalance it is harmful to the cause of trying to rectify this by further objectifying the subject of the imbalance. Now, in Facebook where I have equal male/female participants in my stream I can see far worse than this, but Facebook has managed to grow a balanced community, and the comments on an image like this, if posted by someone I know, would be far more relevant to the person's personality and placed in a context. In this large, open space that is currently Google+, an image like this serves only to remind the minority that they are the minority. I have since uncircled Tom, as the comments posted remind me that my time is wasted in participating in such a dialogue.

* http://google.com/?q=male+gaze

The "male gaze"? Every time I look at a woman I'm objectifying and expressing power imbalance? You've got to be kidding.

If Tom's job were to try to correct the male/female imbalance of Google+, I would agree that the image is inappropriate. But that's not his job. It's neither his job nor his responsibility to curate his posts to try to never offend the easily-offended.

As for why women are reluctant to join Google+, I think it's got very little to do with the fact that it's "male-dominated" and a lot to do with the fact that most of them simply don't care about it. Their friends aren't there. The people who are there are 99% geeks. As it is now, there's simply little value to Google+ fr them.

Why do women perform against their own interests?

Would I read this to mean specifically in this case, why would this woman pose showing off surgically-enhanced breasts, knowing that she is being objectified? If that's what you mean it's not something I can answer (and wouldn't presume) just because I'm also a woman. We all do things against our self-interest for complicated reasons but at the end of the day don't we all just want to find some love and acceptance?

Just out of curiosity, why are you so certain that this woman has breast implants?

What's your opinion?

I have no idea if they're real or not. They could be fake, but there are quite a few women who have cleavage like that, at least with a push-up bra (a smaller number without a push-up bra).

I didn't downvote you because your comment is a sentiment that I think a lot of women have.

I just viewed this as two guys taking a picture with an attractive woman, no different than viewing pictures I see on Facebook of my female friends taking pictures with attractive male athletes (famous and non).

Thanks for your reasonable comment on the topic. I would have felt the same way - to be honest it was the stream of comments that disturbed me more, following the post with nothing to add to the conversation but 'oogle'. If Tom were interested in sparking debate on bringing 'sexy' to g+ then he failed, because he has isolated a significant group of the g+ population with this post.

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