I don't know about GP's view, but to me this does seem like a criticism:
"Women have a long history of being depicted as technical objects in computing... gendered assumptions about the characters of Alice and Bob have been read into their fictional lives. Images of Alice, Bob, and Eve depict the three as in love triangles, with Alice and Eve alternately portrayed as disrupting one another’s blissful domestic life with Bob. Visual depictions of Alice, Bob, Eve, and others used in university classrooms and elsewhere have replicated and reified the gendered assumptions read onto Alice and Bob and their cryptographic family, making it clear that Bob is the subject of communications with others, who serve as objects, and are often secondary players to his experience of information exchange. Thus, while Rivest, Shamir, and Adleman used the names “Alice” and “Bob” for a sender and receiver as a writing tool, others have adapted Alice and Bob, in predictable, culturally-specific ways that have important consequences for subsequent, gendered experiences of cryptology."
The previous paragraph criticized Ivan Sutherland for so much as drawing a girl's face with sketchpad, so in context this does seem
to be critical of RSA.
