Men At Lunch [1] is an interesting documentary about the skyscraper photo, and an attempt to identify the men in it.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZEvNYKEnVw

It not a painting, it's a photo.

And it's a GREAT photo, it tells a story, it tells of another time and another place, of a behavior that today it would be considered unacceptable, but probably at the time was considered normal.

It's sad that today we feel compelled to judge everything based on how "offensive" something is according to modern standards, without for a moment stopping thinking about context.

I am worried for my mom, sister and female friends who find learing offensive. I hope, people remove those photos from pizza parlors to not truamatize more women.

please also remind them to remove their sense of humor as well, since these are often offensive and traumatizing.

I don't think rape jokes are acceptable these days. What do you say?

@choot From the 2017 CNN article

// The caption on the photo of Craig walking down the street reflects cultural mores of the era. "Public admiration ... shouldn't fluster you. Ogling the ladies is a popular, harmless and flattering pastime you'll run into in many foreign countries. The gentlemen are usually louder and more demonstrative than American men, but they mean no harm."

It's a far cry from what we tell women these days, but for its time the mere notion of encouraging women to travel alone was progressive. That's what made the photos so special, Craig says. They offered a rare glimpse of two women -- behind and in front of the camera -- challenging the era's gender roles and loving every minute of it.

"I look at it and I'm taken right back and it was wonderful," she says. "I was an art student. I was carefree. I was 23 and the world was my oyster."

//

Sorry you're being downvoted. I just spent 30m poking around. Their story is terrific and remains relevant today.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruth_Orkin

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ninalee_Craig

Craig said in 2014 "At no time was I unhappy or harassed in Europe" and that the photograph is not a symbol of harassment. It's a symbol of a woman having an absolutely wonderful time!" and "Italian men are very appreciative, and it's nice to be appreciated. I wasn't the least bit offended."

I don’t think this is a reasonable assumption. If the participants explicitly stated that the photo isn’t harassment, then it’s unjust for us to assume things about the situation unless we have some information that supports the assumption.

Still, as a woman myself, I feel vividly uncomfortable looking at the image. Her expression does not help, and even if she was smiling or looking happy - this is what you'd do to protect yourself. (A smile under pressure means nothing. You'd even say it was fine during situation itself for the same reason.)

I'm glad she says it was fine, and I notice my perception is coloured by my own experiences. Still, for me, it's a powerful image, and one I wouldn't put up for background decoration.

I’m sorry you feel uncomfortable looking at it. As an agoraphobe, as am I.

Hopefully, with a strong support system, we can both overcome our irrational discomfort from pictures of things that truly present no harm.

Restaurants are really incapable of trying to accommodate all the edge cases for discomfort. Interestingly, I bet seeing these in some way helps.

The thing is, from my experience, this is not always a harmless situation. Seeing this reminds me of those times and makes me think of mitigation strategies to make sure I'm safe. (See that look on her face? My first read of that is 'Don't make eye contact, don't acknowledge them or they'll follow you around the block and into any smaller streets and if you're unlucky back to your house.')

The fact that there's so many groups of seemingly unrelated guys in the picture is good though, they will keep each other in check and if there's trouble some of them will step up to help. If you can be sure there won't be a small subset of them following you one minute later, it could be worse. They seem to be on some sort of break, so you're probably safe from that. The guy with the scooter looks the most problematic, so keep an eye on that one without looking at him.

This is a normal though process for many women. In almost all cases it's perfectly safe, but you need to catch the one where it isn't. Are you telling me this is irrational?

So war photography promotes warfare?

Not by itself, but putting the pictures up in your restaurant might.

When you are good looking, harassment behaviour is called leering. So, this painting promotes leering it seems.

It is not a painting, it is a picture and it does not promote something, it captures an image from an era you obviously know nothing about. If you judge other cultures from your perspective you can easily get to wrong conclusions and talk about it on the Internet.

It also depends on culture i guess.