The computer graphics industry got started at the university of Utah

I’m not claiming the intent was ever to discourage women, I’m only trying to help you understand that is still what happened despite no ill intent. You’re right that the cropped Lena image used in vision papers is no longer porn after cropping, and there’s no nudity. But it is still suggestive (you can tell she’s posing and not wearing a top), and the image comes with a story, and it comes with internet links to the uncropped nude.

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!

I'd trust your instincts there. 9 times out of 10, it's not horseshoe theory, it's fundies in disguise. Fascism is syncretic. Christian fascists are more than capable of co-opting the vernacular of social justice for their radical agenda. These are the people who cancelled Dungeons and Dragons and Harry Potter, for god's sake.

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.

I used CDRS while at Caterpillar in 1997 and purchased it in the same year not knowing it was slated for the graveyard. I made it my mission to be the expert ... luckily STYLE became the cool new thing in 2001 and I was able to be expert in that right away.

Bart Brejcha Design Engine