The person in the picture asked that people stop using it, a few years ago, but female CS students have been complaining about it forever. The “ideological statement” they are making is fuck your feelings, especially if you’re female. So yes, it is inherently offensive.

“Being confronted with the Lenna image made me very aware that I was one of the only women in the room.”

I wrote the first two PNG image decoders for Java. The first was done as part of an IP swap between Sun Microsystems and NCSA. That was a straight wrapper of the C library. The second was a pure Java implementation I wrote on my own time the following Christmas when I was stuck overseas.

When I wrote the first, Lenna was part of the corpus I was handed to prove I had it working. I felt weird about it at the time, and my sexual politics were decent but not great. What’s their excuse? It didn’t really help me with getting the implementation right either. It was a picture of a curved road and thatched roofs in a village somewhere in the British Isles that helped me fix a memory corruption error that held up calling it done. And the color test patterns hosted on the libpng homepage helped me get the rest.

I wrote those right around when the first official complaints were being lodged, 28 years ago. https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8100841