So a buisiness that isn't any of the many that might legitimately have pictures of naked women in their offices or other public spaces where employees have to work, has them.
What makes them a hostile work environment? Hostile or harmful to who, and by what mechanism?
I'll proceed on the assumption that it causes women to feel threatened by the men in the area and/or the owners/managers who installed the posters.
This line of reasoning is essentially the same as blaming women for the rapes they endure because they should have made sure they didn't look attractive to any men, instead of holding men to a standard to be responsible for their actions.
I'm confused what the analogous harm is to you when two adults have consensual sex behind closed doors where you can't see or know about it.
The argument that women will interpret the posters as a message that they are seen as objects is potentially interesting, but then what about all the women who work at modelling agencies and ad agencies and actual sex related businesses?
The argument that women will feel threatened because the posters will cause the men to attack them, or even just low level menace them, is saying that men are helpless reacting animals and are not responsible for their actions, which is the same argument as saying women are responsible for rape by not dressing badly enough.
These theoretical posters are simply and merely inappropriate for facililitating the work being done in most workplaces. They are unwelcome but it's merely because they are a distraction and an annoyance. It doesn't cause any sort of harm that can justify any legal consequences.
There is no argument for making them illegal, and in fact they're already not because there are tons of businesses where such images are central to the business. The same image will be interpreted as porn in one room while it's just the businesses product on the wall at countless clothing manufacturers. So the image itself can not be said to posess any intrinsic harm or evil.
The comment I'm replying to is. They are arguing that prostitution is somehow harmful to them and should be banned. I'll note the analogy of a poster on the wall of ones workplace is pretty poor, unless someone is advocating that prostitutes should be manning the hallways of Google. If you don't want to be exposed to prostitution it's easy to avoid. If you don't want to be exposed to the decoration of your place of work it's a lot harder.
> The argument that women will interpret the posters as a message that they are seen as objects is potentially interesting, but then what about all the women who work at modelling agencies and ad agencies and actual sex related businesses?
You mean the women who signed up for this line of work voluntarily rather than walking into their software engineering job and finding these posters on the wall? I think there's a clear differentiation between the two. Google probably shouldn't decorate it's offices with graphic images of say, people being operated on, I think that'd arguably be just as hostile a work environment. That doesn't mean that every surgeon is being abused.
> So the image itself can not be said to posess any intrinsic harm or evil.
Agreed the harm is not in the inherit to the image. As with many (most?) human interactions, context matters.
The comment I'm replying to is."
Doh, right, sorry.
At one time they said the same thing about exposing any skin at all even at the beach.
Every human, yes including children gasp has a body with body parts, so mere exposure to the sight of them and knowledge of their existance is not harmful. Sight of the act of sex is merely more of the same. Kids on farms see it every day from birth.
At worst it's perhaps distasteful or lacks appropriate decorum in some contexts. I find practically everyone to lack taste or decorum in most WalMarts. It's not a valid argument.
It's only worth about as much legal consequence as defecating in the wrong place. In fact defecating is worth more since it at least carries an actual public health consequence to others beyond "I don't want to see that"
"I don't want to see that" is an utterly invalid demand, since anyone can say that about anyone for any reason. They used to be able to say it about merely being a mixed race couple in public, or hell a lot of people still do say it about gay couples or trans individuals merely existing in the room. It is ever so slowly being recognized that in order to try to claim any kind of say over anyone else like that, you have to show harm, and no one can show any harm from a person merely existing as gay or trans or black or female etc. Anything you can say about how obviously depraved and harmful it would be to see naked people or sex acts in public, used to be said about all kinds of ordinary harmless things. People were imprisoned or killed over nothing but "I don't want to see that" and "I don't like it that that exists" without any actual harm to justify it.
Talking this way about sex work and evidense of sex work being visible in public, is exactly the same.