Hmmm. I'd love to see some data around this. (I don't mean this as snakily as it sounds, surveying some folks about this would make a good blog post, it's sort of an interesting lesson either way).
I appear to be the only one who thinks it looks like an "A". The loop reminds me of something an airplane would do in the air. I can see the sexual resemblance, but only if I concentrate hard enough on it, then it just goes back to being an "A".
"Looks like a vulva" would be a more accurate description. /pedantry off
On the other hand, the oldest surviving human art on at least two continents is crude drawings (cruder than the Airbnb logo) of vulvae, so the artistic impulse in this cases is about as old as humankind. (I will be no more willing to rent a room through Airbnb than I was before after seeing today's discussion, and I wasn't very willing before, knowing someone whose reservation was cancelled at the last minute.)
Except, the proportions make Automation's look like a clothespin, and AirBNB's like.... well, a vagina now that someone has pointed it out to me, but that definitely wasn't my first impression.
Yeah, OK, why do we? I agree. It's silly. Does the rest of America agree? No.
Given that this is part of AirBnb transforming to a consumer brand you'd think they'd pay more attention to what their target consumers think. They're a business, after all.
Actually, brand perception usually works in the reverse order of the uphtread description, where negative reaction to branding prevents consideration of the other qualities of the product rather than be considered as a factor of discussion after consideration of those qualities.
I think you might be projecting with the "demonizing," but it seems obvious that it would serve to limit your audience. You can look at an obvious extreme example for plenty of thought-experiments: do porn companies use sexualized iconography?
Since nobody else on HN has mentioned it, all of twitter thinks the new logo looks like a vagina. It's hard to unsee.