Why is the fact that it's from a nude shot considered demeaning? Because it's from a porno magazine? So what? I could kind of understand if it was a segment of an image from a hardcore scene but the full photo is actually quite tasteful.

If I ever get the opportunity, I'll use a crop from a nude male photo to prove my point. I would bet a year's salary that there would be no backlash.

There are far bigger issues in the world to be indignant about than this. We have people dying of thirst and hunger when we technically have enough resources to feed every person on the planet yet there are individuals full of anger regarding trivialities like this where everything is consensual, nobody was hurt and nothing bad happened.

I believe that the correct term for this is "theatre of the absurd".

Not the photo that's actually used. Every photo is cropped, and a lot of great photos were cropped after they were taken. So it is with the photo of her used in the computer graphics world.

Just to make it clearer: There's a valid reason a photo of a human being showing some skin is used. Humans know, at a very deep level, what skin is supposed to look like. If the colors of skin are somewhat wrong, we'll know. We'll also know if the shape of the face is somewhat wrong, for example, which makes it easier to see other kinds of errors or infelicitous compression artifacts. All of this is further helped by using the same image in a wide variety of contexts over a long period of time.