Reminds me of the Stanford Bunny:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_bunny
Or, more distantly related, the test photo Lena, which recently fell victim to political correctness:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_bunny
Or, more distantly related, the test photo Lena, which recently fell victim to political correctness:
Regardless, I read some other literature and I do agree that it was probably well past time to update a reference image that wasnt a 1970's 512x512 image. But the non-technical reasoning around it is baffling. Well, not baffling for American culture, but disappointing indeed.
Lena is publicly on board with the movement to stop using her image for research, and it is irrelevant that Playboy has waived their copyrights. The reasons the image is discouraged are to promote professionalism, diversity, and respect in research. The journal Nature says “the Lena image clashes with the extensive efforts to promote women undertaking higher education in science and engineering”. [1] The paper “On alternatives to Lenna says “ Whatever its merits, the Lenna image’s origin is incompatible with our community’s sincere attempts to encourage diversity and respect in Science and Technology”. [2] (And references “ A centerfold does not belong in the classroom”. [3])
It’s more or less the same as hanging pin-ups at work- most people understand why that’s a bad idea, regardless of whether it was acceptable in the past. Imagine if female teachers put up Chippendale’s posters in the classroom, or nurses put them in the hospital, and argued that anyone who complained was just being PC police and unreasonably sensitive. Just because some people might not care doesn’t mean everyone is okay with it, and even if you don’t care about it, it’s still clearly unprofessional.
I’m sure it’s completely unintentional and that you and parent comment don’t mean to sound unsupportive of our social advances of women. I’m sure like most people here you actively support and encourage women to learn and work in STEM fields, and advocate for equality. So please consider more carefully the message that pushing back on the Lenna image sends and how it might reflect on you from other people’s point of view.
[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41565-018-0337-2
[2] https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09500340.2016.1...
[3] https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/a-playboy-centerfold...
Isn’t it more like if female researchers used the cropped head-only photo of a Chippendale’s guy in an image processing paper?
Shifting it to an “interfacing with an authority figure for children” role is not really fair IMO, as I think that is why most would find it distasteful.
Really? Then what male researchers were hanging posters of Lena in classrooms?
I don’t know what you mean by “children” or what you’re reacting to exactly, since I didn’t make any specific claims about children, but where is the line? Do you consider female high school students or college students to be children? (I’m old enough that I do.) The movement to stop using Lena is about having the entire field of computer vision set a better example all around, for young people and adults, for men and women. There is a particular emphasis on what using Lena in research looks like to high school and college women because we have a history of accidentally excluding women from tech, and high school & college are the times when kids really decide what they want to do, right?
I’m reacting to this: “Imagine if female teachers put up Chippendale’s posters in the classroom, or nurses put them in the hospital, and argued that anyone who complained was just being PC police and unreasonably sensitive”
I don’t have a strong position on Lena elimination, I just think that comparing the situation to teachers or nurses hanging up an explicit or sex-related poster is ridiculous. I brought up children because I think the reason why teachers or nurses hanging up posters like that is obviously offensive is that those are professions which have a large and direct day to day exposure in-person to children. Image processing researchers do not share this trait, so the comparison is invalid IMO. If you said the same about, say, mechanics or factory workers, professions without direct exposure to children, I don’t think it would be as obviously offensive.
> we demand the right to keep using a pinup in research
It isn’t itself a pinup, it looks like a still from a regular film and the image itself isn’t explicit at all. I think calling it a “pinup in research” is an exaggeration. The fact that it is actually from Playboy is sort of an in-joke in the field, since I don’t think anyone naively looking at the image would think that (I certainly didn’t when I first saw it).
> we have a history of accidentally excluding women from tech
Do you honestly believe that things like Lena have a significant effect here? I think women’s perception of tech being a place for men is primarily influenced by it being, in fact, full of men. Spending time on matters like this is counterproductive because it makes people working to improve equality in the field seem petty.
> Do you consider female… college students to be children?
Absolutely not, and I find the idea insulting to female college students. Women having children at that age is accepted in our society, so I have no idea how they could themselves be considered children without seriously altering the functional definition of the word child.
Yes, and not because I suspect it, it’s because I happen to have seen women testifying to this fact. Your language for multiple comments continues to insist and insist on downplaying the issue and disregarding the stated wishes of people who are sincerely pointing out a legitimate problem, and the stated reasons that professional journals like Nature have put on record. There are no longer any technical reasons to use Lena in publications, none. And by and large, it is done and over with, nobody uses it anymore. You can nit-pick and argue over the degree of the problem all you want, and rather than proving that people are exaggerating or being unreasonable, whinging about it now mostly makes it seem like you want to preserve and defend this mildly misogyinist symbol & behavior. Insisting that it’s not a problem, when you’re part of the in-group, is exactly how cultural bias persists.
In 1984 in the U.S., almost 40% of CS degrees went to women, after growing year over year for decades. Since then the number dropped to below 20%. Meanwhile in other countries, like India, for example, there have been years where it was over 50%. We have hard evidence that we are somehow limiting equal opportunity and making CS unappealing to women. It’s a fact of history that Lena was and is considered by many people to demonstrate the attitudes that are pushing women out of CS. So what do you want to do about that? If you don’t believe it, then offer a plausible and compelling alternative to what the problem is and how to fix it.
> I find the idea insulting to female college students. […] I have no idea how they could be themselves considered children without seriously altering the functional definition of the word child.
“The legal definition of child generally refers to a minor, otherwise known as a person younger than the age of majority.” (Age of majority is 18 years in the U.S. - typically a freshman in college.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Child
How about instead of arguing about trivia, we just agree to listen to and respect people’s wishes, especially when outsiders point out that the in-joke isn’t particularly clever or tasteful and makes us look like Beavis and Butthead?
"A Utah school district has removed the Bible from some schools' shelves" (2023) https://www.npr.org/2023/06/02/1179906120/utah-bible-book-ch...
Persons from Utah, are even there good examples of healthy very-heteronormative marriages in the aforementioned now unmentionable text?
The Lena image was clearly artistic. If you want to call it, additionally, "soft-core porn", then you would have to do the same with this statue:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphrodite_of_Knidos
The article contains some sexual context. And then you have no basis of treating David differently, except if you arbitrarily discriminate against one sex but not the other.
> BTW I’m with you against silly bans, I’m a proponent of free speech.
That's nonsense, you did nothing except defending the arguments about alleged sexism.
> In this case nobody banned anything
Completely false. There are journals which ban it, see Wikipedia article. Additionally there is now an indirect ban due to the campaign succeeding in creating a strong negative association, which makes using the image so costly that it isn't a live possibility anymore: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/give-up-seventy-percen...
a group so broad that they then refuse to publish perfectly valid scientific research papers, if you do not comply with what is for sure not a ban, but merely a request from organisations holding institutional power.
It’s a small discomfort, nothing earth-shattering. I wouldn’t have made it very far in CS if I couldn’t handle it. But, it adds to the pile of other small discomforts of being a woman in CS/tech. And that pile is large and cumulatively results in a tense experience.
I’m more bothered by these responses than anything, bending-over-backwards to justify the necessity of the image. Come on, guys. Switching the image is a gesture, and a nice one. It’s not that hard to be considerate to your female colleagues. But, in many cases - most even, you don’t have to be if you don’t want to.
I read several different articles from several different points of time, some obviously sympathetic of removing the image and some cynical. So I understand both sides of the fence. My goal wasn't to provide a summary so much as my overall impression.
> So please consider more carefully the message that pushing back on the Lenna image sends and how it might reflect on you from other people’s point of view.
The whole problem I have with this is that I never bothered looking up Lena until this comment chain, but I've seen her picture used several times in my computer graphics classes (went to college in the late 2000's, so just before the "2nd wave" of controversy).
I never knew, I don't think any one else in my class knew, and nobody questioned it nor thought it derogatory. And to be honest, the later context of this doesn't change my mind either. It is not an obviously pornographic image, the purpose of the image in its current use was not titilation.
I board on the cynical side precisely because of that; intent. And I don't think the intent here was ever to discourage nor shame women to work in STEM. Even in the 70's I simply think that some college students needed a good test image, and an on hand magazine clipping of a very high resolution photo (for its time) was the "good enough" solution as opposed to scouring stores for the perfect reference image that would stand the tests of time. Similar to other computer graphics story in that a husband/wife sitting down for tea resulted in the Utah Teapot.
The problem with the Lena image is not just or even primarily the image itself, it’s as much about where the image came from and what it represents. The source is Playboy, which as you well know, published nude women for the purpose of men’s entertainment. Insisting that nothing at all is wrong with the cropped image just because you can’t see breasts normalizes the behavior, it tells people you’re okay with the men’s entertainment part and they should be too, provided we crop the nudity. This isn’t about people being offended by nudity, or about being wildly inappropriate, this is about subtle social attitudes that aren’t conducive to men and women working together on science. It’s about being just a little inappropriate, but enough that we now recognize it’s not really 100% okay, and it reflects poorly on the field of computer graphics if we can’t adapt.
I do appreciate your reasonable tone BTW, I’m happy to continue discussing if we’re having a productive talk. I’m not trying to shame anyone either, or to discount the history of CG, I just happened to know more about the Lena saga, because I’ve read a lot about it over the years, and I believe the women who’ve mentioned use of Lena is now cringey, and I agree with the reasons for journals discontinuing it’s use. I don’t agree with the cynical view that the movement to stop using Lena is either Puritanism like one comment here said, nor just silly political correctness in a pejorative sense.
There’s a legitimate concern about using Playboy-sourced images regardless of crop, and there’s a legitimate concern about the attitude that if you don’t want Playboy-sourced images that mostly crop out the nudity, then it means you’re being a religious nut or a left-wing radical. The problem is relatively minor, but real. So let’s just move on from Lena and get back to talking about computer vision and other cool graphics!
It amazes me how much this stuff rhymes with Christian fundamentalism, almost like they’re slowly reinventing it.
An excerpt from Umberto Eco's essay Ur-Fascism:
""" The first feature of Ur-Fascism is the cult of tradition...
This new culture had to be syncretistic. Syncretism is not only, as the dictionary says, “the combination of different forms of belief or practice”; such a combination must tolerate contradictions. Each of the original messages contains a silver of wisdom, and whenever they seem to say different or incompatible things it is only because all are alluding, allegorically, to the same primeval truth.
As a consequence, there can be no advancement of learning. Truth has been already spelled out once and for all, and we can only keep interpreting its obscure message.
One has only to look at the syllabus of every fascist movement to find the major traditionalist thinkers. The Nazi gnosis was nourished by traditionalist, syncretistic, occult elements. The most influential theoretical source of the theories of the new Italian right, Julius Evola, merged the Holy Grail with The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, alchemy with the Holy Roman and Germanic Empire. The very fact that the Italian right, in order to show its open-mindedness, recently broadened its syllabus to include works by De Maistre, Guenon, and Gramsci, is a blatant proof of syncretism.
If you browse in the shelves that, in American bookstores, are labeled as New Age, you can find there even Saint Augustine who, as far as I know, was not a fascist. But combining Saint Augustine and Stonehenge — that is a symptom of Ur-Fascism. """
If Italian fascists could copy material from Gramsci (a famous contemporary communist), then fundies are more than capable of using feminist language in their quest to undo the 1960s sexual revolution.