I guess one of the problems with art is that we can all have our different interpretations. The big, burly guy in that painting doesn't look like an idealized version of a man he looks like a truck driver. Go to any truck stop in the United States in the 70s and 80s and you would have eventually run into someone who looked just like him. Dude looks like Grizzly Adams.
Who was at the time basically a real-life adventurer.
The sexiest vocation!
I oppose chainmail bikinis not because they're indecent but because they're painfully dumb. That's no armour, and as clothing material it is terrible; no one would do that. By all means, have barbarians running around sky-clad or wearing war paint only, but no chainmail bikinis. And no breastplates with boob windows either, that's even worse!
I didn't read the entire thread here, but this section got me thinking about Baldur's Gate 3 and how much easier it is to be representative in a video game than TTRPG book. BG3 character creation includes options for most of what you mentioned (plus other genatalia-related categories...), and I really noticed the importance of such inclusive options when my daughter was making her character - she had never heard of vitiligo before, but after googling it and finding imagery of RL people with vitiligo she thought it looked cool and wanted to make her purple-skinned tiefling have white vitiligo patches.
Context is very important for me. If I'm watching a movie about Arthurian knights, it's going to be quite jarring to see Morgan le Fay rocking a chainmail bikini. For Red Sonja? I'm fine with it. Silly? Oh, yeah. I used to be of the mind that chainmail bikinis had no place in D&D. Like you, I just thought they were kind of dumb and didn't belong. But there have been some changes over the last few years. We're supposed to accept that a 35 pound halfling is just as strong as a 280 pound goliath. That's both silly and dumb. So why not chainmail bikinis?
To be fair, someone had to go through a lot of effort to allow those options for us players, so kudos to Larian for giving us those options. There have been some oddities in games between how male and female player characters are depicted. There were jokes about World of Warcraft male orcs and trolls looking monstrous with the women looking more conventionally attractive. Perhaps my favorite was Star Wars the Old Republic which gave players four body types to choose from: slight build, medium build, large (muscular) build, and fat. See below for the fat body type for men and women in the game. Dude looks like a potato and lady smuggler there looks like what the kids today might call thicc. Girl got it goin' on.
