> It's supported by an overwhelming majority of objective evidence[2][3][4][5][6].

Can you summarize the evidence more verbosely? Only 1 of those 5 references could be easily followed (1 broken, 2 for-pay, 1 no link). I couldn't find evidence for your claim in the one working publication and it kind of goes against common sense.

It should be pretty easy to figure out my email address, email me and I can send you the pdfs if you want.

In a nutshell, internalized objectification is a cognitive process (like everything else), and it consumes mental resources. When these cognitions are made accessible by dressing participants in revealing clothing (swimsuits in most of these studies), those participants perform reliably worse on a wide array of cognitive tasks (arithmetic, simple logic, various other tasks that have been previously used in cognitive psychology literature) than participants in less revealing clothing (usually sweaters).

Basically, if a woman is thinking "I look fat in this swimsuit," she is taking mental resources away from every other process.

Common sense is not a reliable indicator of reality. Many things (general relativity, quantum physics, Milgram's obedience experiments, the representativeness heuristic, the conjunction fallacy, etc.) contradict common sense. If you prefer common sense to empirical science you will be reliably wrong on a wide array of things. I would urge you to banish the phrase "common sense" from your mind if possible.

Thanks for linking to the Ada Initiative reply. After reading that, I agree with you (and them) that this talk was likely to result in more sexual objectification and technology-skill-dismissing of the female attendees, in today's society.

It would be better if we lived in the society where you could talk about sex at technical conferences without making the women there feel threatened or objectified because no-one would threaten or objectify them as a result of the talk, but we aren't in that world yet.

Does anyone know if it's normal to keep the title/content of talks TBD until that soon before the talk? That stood out as odd to me.

I agree that this is odd, and I think it is the reason this thing was a problem in the first place. It was decided months ago that she would speak at this conference, according to Violet Blue's blog post. They are both aware of the focus of her work and it makes sense that an organizer of this conference would want to know the specifics her talk in advance. It seems like a mistake for them to have not settled it sooner.

I think it is just that she's procrastinating a lot (which I'm also doing for a conference tomorrow). It wasn't intentional.

She has a few talks on slightly edgy topics which she gives at different venues. The "hackers and suicide" one from CCC was probably more interesting, but that was just delivered 2 months ago to a largely overlapping audience.

I wonder what would have happened if that was the talk to be cancelled? That's a triggery topic regardless of gender.

IMO it should be about cost/benefit.

I'd never put a Bond Girl in my talk (I might have at one point, but now I'm convinced it's slightly offensive); there's no reason. A Lena photo for an image processing talk, maybe, because that's essentially the standard.

However, I'd be fine with a talk about sex, drugs, rape, suicide, etc., if it served a purpose. It has to be in the right venue, and I think BSides actually is a good venue for a lot of those topics (or CCC, or HAL/HIP/etc., or parts of Defcon, or Hope, but not RSA). It should be disclosed up front, and ideally way in advance.

It doesn't make anybody feel singled out though. People affected by suicide and depression are much less visible of a population, and I think they'd be a lot less likely to have negative experiences at the conference as a direct consequence of the talk. If anything, that's a topic that doesn't get enough exposure. Sex does.

Still a dick move.