Look, it's not about the Lenna image in particular (even though it was the inspiration for this thread): given the cropping and the long history, I think there are much bigger issues for the community to worry about.
But it sounds like you're addressing the broader issues just like I was: you suggest that you might not want to work with someone who was "uptight about that sort of thing". All I can offer is this: I've heard multiple stories from female engineers at tech conferences who have had trouble getting attendees to talk to them because everyone assumed they were just there as some sort of booth babe. It can't be good for their companies to have an engineer's time wasted in that way, and it's certainly not good for the women's careers if they're unable to network as effectively as their male peers. I won't try to claim that I can nail down a specific causal chain, but it seems pretty clear that a culture that routinely uses women purely as attention-getting devices or for visual enjoyment would naturally tend to undermine women who work in technical roles in this way. And when you drive away or devalue half of the potential talent pool just because a few guys don't see it as a problem, that's a bad thing.
[Oh, and a side note to whoever is downvoting out there: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3782124 I'm open to the suggestion that my comments in this thread have "provided no substance or insight", but I'd love to know why. If you just happen to disagree with my point (or anyone else's), that's not what the Hacker News downvote button is for.]
Use of booth babes is a somewhat different case. I personally don't like that practice, but it seems likely to me that women on tech conferences are assumed to be booth babes because it is so often true (apparently - I haven't studied that). That is, the likelihood of a woman to be at a tech conference an not be a booth babe might be low, so that the expectation is otherwise. That sucks, of course, but the only way I can see to change that is more tech women attending conferences. Or maybe some obvious signs of non-booth-babeness.
Also, did those women really not manage to talk to anyone? That seems odd, given that booth babes are probably also supposed to make people talk to them, and are considered an effective means for that?
But it sounds like you're addressing the broader issues just like I was: you suggest that you might not want to work with someone who was "uptight about that sort of thing". All I can offer is this: I've heard multiple stories from female engineers at tech conferences who have had trouble getting attendees to talk to them because everyone assumed they were just there as some sort of booth babe. It can't be good for their companies to have an engineer's time wasted in that way, and it's certainly not good for the women's careers if they're unable to network as effectively as their male peers. I won't try to claim that I can nail down a specific causal chain, but it seems pretty clear that a culture that routinely uses women purely as attention-getting devices or for visual enjoyment would naturally tend to undermine women who work in technical roles in this way. And when you drive away or devalue half of the potential talent pool just because a few guys don't see it as a problem, that's a bad thing.
[Oh, and a side note to whoever is downvoting out there: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3782124 I'm open to the suggestion that my comments in this thread have "provided no substance or insight", but I'd love to know why. If you just happen to disagree with my point (or anyone else's), that's not what the Hacker News downvote button is for.]