So you are saying pictures of scenes degrading and objectifying women as sexual objects can't make women feel degraded and objectified?

Consider that it may be more degrading and objectifying to treat all women as weak, fragile beings who must constantly be sheltered from things like shirts with retro tattoo art on them.

While the rest of us are busy trying to help provide opportunities for more women to get into STEM careers, there's a whole cadre of privileged, middle class noise generators doing a great deal of harm (or at the very least, not helping) with these sexist stereotypes.

They're only scenes degrading and objectifying women as sexual objects if women feel degraded and objectified as sexual objects about the scenes. As a woman made the shirt and gave it to him then it seems to be the case that at least 1 woman does not feel degraded and objectified as a sexual object about it which makes your blanket assertion disingenuous and patently false.

It's appalling that in the science/tech community there is so little understanding for these issues. In a perfectly equal world, yes, such a shirt would be just completely inappropriate instead of demeaning.

But science does have a sexual abuse problem. Some established male scientists do choose their female collaborators according to taste. Sexual violence does have a tendency of being initiated by men against women.

All this "it's not a big deal" talk is a symptom of not understanding this issue, lacking information and empathy. And this lack of empathy does have an impact.

>But science does have a sexual abuse problem. Some established male scientists do choose their female collaborators according to taste. Sexual violence does have a tendency of being initiated by men against women.

I dont think you are wrong about this, but painting individual men with the same broad stroke that is frequently is being applied to women to dehumanize them and discount their achievements isnt the right answer to right the wrongs you are listing.

There are plenty of women's issues that are waiting to be championed that are not what amounts to bikeshedding.

> but painting individual men with the same broad stroke

"Not all men!"

And I'm sure not all women are going to make snap judgements about a whole field based on what one person in the field wears, yet here we are.

No, he is saying this:

'No, his shirt wont keep women away from science. The entire fiasco is not about science, it is LITERALLY the thing that I would want to avoid if I had planned going into this field, and I assume that women also do not want long drawn out discussions about what they are wearing INSTEAD of their impressive scientific achievements.'