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by Jean-Philipe 3799 days ago
It's the fact that whenever there are sexy people as placeholders, it is always women and never men. That's sexism right there. We just got used to it.
4 comments

At work, our main product is an image manipulation and display software so as you might expect we use a lot of placeholder images when designing the UI/UX flows.

If you peek over our leads shoulder, you'd see she nearly universally uses close up facials of 'sexy' men or whoever happens to be the latest group of fashion models on ANTM.

People use images that appeal to them. They're not going for broad universal appeal.

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Also I find it highly ironic that people in this thread are suggesting we replace fully clothed images of a woman who became famous for doing a children's TV series, with images of Lena Söderberg 1972 playboy centerfold because it is 'traditional'.

If people will take offense to Emma being 'sexy', I'm not sure what they're going to do if you use the full spread of images that the famous "Lena" shot was cut from. After all the point of this image viewer is to show different images, is it not?

More women need to create items that require placeholder images, some of which will choose to use pictures of sexy men.

In that regard, it's uneven representation moreso than sexism.

> It's the fact that whenever there are sexy people as placeholders, it is always women and never men. That's sexism right there. We just got used to it

Always and never are strong terms that I'm not sure of in this context but I understand and agree (to an extend), thank you for explaining :)

As far as whether OP's reaction was justified I guess we'll have to agree to disagree or something...

EDIT: Although I'm not sure that your "solution" to the problem (looking at picture galleries of hot males) is one that works...

(just kidding)

Well, I tried to remember if I ever saw a sexy male in a tech presentation or demo, and I couldn't... but of course, it's not actually "never" and "always".
There are more people of middle and upper class economic status posting on HN, we just got used to it, etc. etc.

The majority of fashion is targeted at women, therefore there are more female models, therefore there are more quality pictures of women out there than men, therefore it makes sense to use it as a test image gallery.

Also, if the code is being used to display test images, this is probably closer to the normal subject matter it'll be used for.

> The majority of fashion is targeted at women

I actually complained once to my favourite label about their very limited choice of fashion for men. They replied that it's because men don't buy very much, which is funny since men don't even have the choice to begin with.

> therefore there are more quality pictures of women out there than men, therefore...

It's a bad reason to use the status quo to justify itself.