Ideally speaking, images used in a slide-style presentation should be appropriate to the subject of that presentation. It’s what used to be called common sense.

I guess it depends what the conference is about. I’ve only attended deeply technical conferences (yay ACM!), deeply lefty conferences (yay local anarchist commune!), or Green Party electoral organizing conferences (yay, um… yay!). I would have a hard time challenging anyone’s assumptions on sexuality at any of those. It’s not what the attendees signed up for when the bought their ticket, unless the talk is titled “Sexuality in…” or something along those lines.

While watching a student presentation at the end of a lab course last semester, one of the male students included a slide with a woman in a bikini. She broke into his presentation and politely asked if he felt comfortable adding some male beefcake for her benefit to keep her interested in his talk similar to the image he added for the men in the audience. Since it was obvious to everyone in the room (including the speaker) that the actual content of his talk was not compelling on its own merits and it needed to be juiced up to keep everyone awake and she didn’t want to embarrass him by with her snoring if she fell asleep during his presentation. Needless to say he did not feel comfortable adding a posterior view of an oiled, overly sculpted male wearing a thong bikini into his slidedeck. I believe she used the word “sheepish” to describe the subsequent apology before he felt comfortable continuing.

Now I’m not saying that sort of approach will work in a large conference room setting. She had the benefit of being in a small audience. But if I saw someone make that sort of beefcake challenge at a conference I was attending, I’d feel compelled to buy them a drink to celebrate the showing of chutzpah in the act of stopping a speaker and addressing the appropriateness of the image while its on the screen.

-jef”only includes images in presentation guaranteed to make everyone in the audience uncomfortable”spaleta

Isn’t it easier to say “we’re all here to talk about some technical matter, so lets keep the presentations focused on that”?

Melissa’s comment (on my reading anyway) was about the norms of technical conferences being adopted by related but broader communities, eg BlogHer which includes but is far from limited to technical content. My last paragraph was more in that context: presumably when your content is semi- or not-at-all-technical, you still don’t want “go to town” as the guidelines for presentations and you could end up in a situation where the first feeling about inclusiveness is “if women can show childbirth, men can show porn models, wasn’t that easy? Phew. Discussion over.”

It’s much easier to say “unprofessional content is banned” or “no naked pictures” than it is to try and draw a line between annoyingly exclusionary and usefully challenging or even just usefully informative, …

Isn’t it easier to say “we’re all here to talk about some technical matter, so lets keep the presentations focused on that”? If any subgroup wants to get together in a BoF to talk about a shared interest, go to town, but the general proceedings should limit themselves to the subject matter of the conference.

I’m also curious how you would define “usefully challenging”. I agree that people should have their preconceived notions challenged and explored, but I’m not sure that the general proceedings of a technical conference are the right venue. If participants know that’s what they’re signing up for, fine, but if not, your usefully challenging might be someone else’s exclusionary and offensive.

(Gotta close those parentheses, don’t'cha know.)

Exactly, it is about politics: a politics of representation, and a politics of access — of who gets what jobs, and who got invited onto what panel in the first place, and who is thought of as a “thought leader” (gag) etc etc.

This is part of the reason I spazzed out earlier this year about the Porn talk at TED — it was like, finally, porn is being discussed in a serious context, by a woman even — and yet, the way it was deployed in the TED context was still about getting attention for someone who has little expertise on the material she flashed on the screen. Who knows how long it will be until a real discussion of sexuality makes it to TED? (One promising thing: Mary Roach did a talk on orgasm, too, which was pretty fantastic and quite science-heavy.)

To me, what’s misogynist about the use of porn imagery in a geek context, when we’re not even talking about sex or porn, isn’t the naked bodies — or the commercial apparatus behind the production and publication of porn — it’s that when women actually do want to talk about gender, sexuality, and power (which I do, a lot), it’s as if all the air has been drained out of the room by every non sequitur usage of sex imagery that has come before us. Just one example: when MAKE published a how-to I co-wrote, O’Reilly refused to print the fact that the project was inspired by projects done by sex workers. “It’s a family magazine!” we were told. But Mark Fraunfelder can say in his bio, printed in the magazine, that he’s been an editor at Playboy, of course. It’s a double standard, whether or not you’re the naked girl.