Entry tags:

rant, wank

For the Love of Boobies
Sorry to the Lj people: I know this won’t be under a cut there and it’s rather long-winded (as many of my link-heavy rants tend to be). I think I covered all bases here but I’m always open to additions. Direct rational feedback to the original post at Ij and any shrieks of UR RONG U AWFUL H0R to here, please.

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The first time I kissed zen_of_nihilism good night, he groped me.

He was in the backseat of my car, I was in the driver’s seat, we leaned in, and the hand that’d been somewhere around my waist ended up on my chest. It was mid-winter, I was wearing a heavy coat, and I remember thinking Jeez, either this guy doesn’t know what he just hit or he’s really forward.

I asked him later. He hadn’t known—the coat was thick and I’m not especially well-endowed. But the point is that for whatever reason—maybe his unassuming attitude, maybe whatever I picked up from his body language—I didn’t freak out. It was a boob. I’m attached to them and all, but a hand in the wrong spot for a second or so didn’t destroy our budding little relationship. More than six years later, I’m glad it didn’t.

Some people don’t think of boobs this way.

Once upon a time there was this idea called the Open Source Boob Project (henceforth OSBP, because I like acronyms). Basically, it was a small project at a convention that set out to demystify boobs and other body parts by having people ask each other if they could touch them. For all intents and purposes, this would’ve happened & disappeared if not for Theferret on Lj, who decided to try to explain the experience with a decidedly imperfect (if sometimes nearly poetic) narrative that sets the project up as almost a transcendent experience, as borderline religious, with insight into male insecurities that you don’t often see.

This is how it worked. From the original OBSP post:

"This should be a better world," a friend of mine said. "A more honest one, where sex isn't shameful or degrading. I wish this was the kind of world where say, 'Wow, I'd like to touch your breasts,' and people would understand that it's not a way of reducing you to a set of nipples and ignoring the rest of you, but rather a way of saying that I may not yet know your mind, but your body is beautiful."

We were standing in the hallway of ConFusion, about nine of us, and we all nodded. Then another friend spoke up.

"You can touch my boobs," she said to all of us in the hallway. "It's no big deal."

Now, you have to understand the way she said that, because it's the key to the whole project. The spirit of everything was formed within those nine words - and if she'd said them shyly, as though having her breasts touched by people was something to be endured or afraid of, the Open-Source Boob Project would have died aborning. But she didn't. Her words were loud and clearly audible to anyone who walked by, an offer made to friends and acquaintances alike.

Yet it wasn't a come-on, either. There wasn't that undertow of desperation of come on, touch me, I need you to validate my self-esteem and maybe we'll hook up later tonight. There was no promise of anything but a simple grope.

We all reached out in the hallway, hands and fingers extended, to get a handful. And lo, we touched her breasts - taking turns to put our hands on the creamy tops exposed through the sheer top she wore, cupping our palms to touch the clothed swell underneath, exploring thoroughly but briefly lest we cross the line from 'touching" to "unwanted heavy petting." They were awesome breasts, worthy of being touched.

And life seemed so much simpler.

Now, is this narrative word-perfect and not overly focused on Theferret’s getting to touch boobies? No. Was “Open-Source Boob Project” a good name on any number of levels? No, especially in relation to the gender diversity and the varying parts that could be touched. Did other group members intend for this to hit the wilds of the internets, to be picked apart and picketed by the digitalized masses? Hell no. Was his use of the word “worthy” not worrisome in the least bit? Definitely not—though the overall impression I got was that everyone of any gender was worthy of this interaction, and that no matter the clunky setup the entire deal was as innocent and well-intentioned as it could be. That overall impression—well, that and three days of wank-wading, link-following, and beer-drinking—is possibly why I’m not amongst those trying to nail Theferret to a gasoline-soaked cross.

The group was equal opportunity—being for both guys and girls, including both boobs and butts. It was also notably cross-gender.

The original group was pretty firmly mixed: three women, four men. The originators of the Project were women, who asked first, and received first, with the men asking afterwards. In fact, it started out as women exploring each other.
(I should note that the men were also touched, but frankly, feeling my man-boobs and Ferrett-butt is a thrill few people appreciate. And rightfully so! Though other, more attractive males apparently got a lot more interest, both at the first and the second con.)
~Theferret, “Clarification”

Blazepoet at Lj later expounded upon how there were more men touched, kissed, and so forth than Theferret immediately let on.
At the first con, members of the group asked random people if they could touch them. At the second con the button policy was instated. If you did not have a button, you were not asked. Period.

Those buttons were given out by one woman only, who only gave them to people she could vouch for or who had been vouched… Because she had to trust that the people involved would be cool with it. If you didn’t wear a button and didn’t ask what was going on, nobody ever asked to touch you. The default was thoroughly opt-in.
And more so, nobody went around proselytizing. We didn’t ask anyone to join. If you wanted to know because you’d heard about it, then we’d talk about it. (I myself told a handful of people in the course of the con if I thought they’d find it interesting, but I don’t think a single person I spoke to actually signed up – though two of them opted to touch me.)
~Theferret, “Clarification”

The red buttons were given out upon request, if someone heard about the project and was so mortified by the entire idea that they wanted to take themselves out of the pool completely. They were not slapped onto random unappreciative wenches by a roving band of mouth-breathing hormone-driven grabby-pawed male nerds.

So, you ask. If it was such an opt-in program, why did you have red buttons? It was actually our attempt to make people feel more comfortable. We knew that some people wouldn’t even want to have the embarrassment of dealing with it more than once – so even though the default was “Don’t ask,” we wanted to let people to have a very clear way of saying that they thought the project was Not For Them. For these folks, even being asked if they’d heard of it would be so embarrassing that we wanted to give them an out to avoid Those sorts of conversations.
(Which was fine. If you said you didn’t like it, we didn’t try to talk you into it… Though we listened to what you had to say about it.)
~Theferret, “Clarification”

Also, wearing a green pin meant you were open to being asked—not that you thought it was okay for anyone to march up and cop a feel. The goings-on were also so low-key that some people attending the convention didn’t even know a thing about it—so the people who for some reason believed the entire place degenerated into a sweaty R-rated grope-orgy are mistaken.

Did I miss anything?

Mmkay. Onward.


So a handful of self-proclaimed nerds set out to break down those big no-touch far-distance walls so exemplary in American society, gave their movement a name involving a part of a woman’s anatomy over which our society tends to obsess (Y helo thar, Janet Jackson), and one of their number tried to share his experience with the internet—and of course, shrieking screaming OMGWTFYOUAREASSAULTINGME wank erupted. People are hideously, wildly insulted by the entire idea. Imagine: A guy or girl coming up to you and asking permission to touch you! And being openly honest about their intentions! And you’d be able to say yes or no without any kind of reprisal, like thrown beer bottles or catcalls or accusations of “Bitch!” or “Lesbian!” or—OMG!—“Democrat!”

(Did I ever mention that I once had someone call me a Democrat—as an insult—for turning him down? I would that we could all be Democrats, dear chunky drunk frat boy.)

I read through the angry, outraged replies and I thought of a bunch of different things. I thought of my fiancé and how, if I’d grabbed him by the face and put him through the car window for his honest mistake, we probably wouldn’t be together and I would’ve missed out on the love of my life. I thought of two different guys on two different occasions who approached me, one to tell me I was beautiful and one to ask for a kiss, and which of their intentions & genuineness I worried about the most. I thought about a Sharon Kihara drum solo where she danced, strong-armed and broad-hipped and confident, and the two male drummers watched her with open appreciation of her body and it was all right. And I tried to make it all synthesize into something I could understand.

And fucking damnit, it didn’t work.

A good number of the people freaking out about the OSBP are going on about objectification. Once again: It’s a mixed-gender group that’s asking permission—and by asking permission they’re having to acknowledge the other individual as a human, with their own will and reasoning. This isn’t put forth as a bunch of beer-gutted middle-aged misogynists fapping over some coked-out starlet whose only talent is being moderately attractive and forgetting to wear underwear. That first quote sums it up, and I’ll repeat it because it bears repeating: "This should be a better world," a friend of mine said. "A more honest one, where sex isn't shameful or degrading. I wish this was the kind of world where say, 'Wow, I'd like to touch your breasts,' and people would understand that it's not a way of reducing you to a set of nipples and ignoring the rest of you, but rather a way of saying that I may not yet know your mind, but your body is beautiful." That’s not objectification—it’s cross-gender idealism.

There’s also a surprising number of people demanding to know what right someone else has to ask permission to touch them, or threatening violence against anyone who’d have the gall to ask in the first place. What, now? We can’t ask to touch someone? We need permission to ask to touch someone? And the question alone deserves a physical assault? Are you fucking kidding me?

Humans are a social species. We tend to interact with each other. Sometimes the kind of interaction we’re exposed to isn’t the kind of interaction we really appreciate. Different strokes, different folks, and sometimes a big pile of societal FUBAR for color. But to freak out and/or attack someone because they even approached you let alone was honest about their intentions and simply asked to be allowed to put their hands on you? No. Fuck no. That’s beyond egocentric. That isn’t about self-defense or empowerment or protecting women. That isn’t even about being anti-social. The speakers here are people demanding that all the power in social/sexual interactions be in their hands: They would choose when to be approached, who to be approached by, what that person could and couldn’t say, what they were allowed to do, so on—and would claim the right to use corporal punishment on people who stepped outside these boundaries.

But see, I remember that feminism is supposed to be about equality, and the above doesn’t illustrate equality in the least bit. Will it make someone feel safe? Potentially. Will it trample in the complete opposite direction that we idealists are working for? Definitely.

Don’t believe it’s a step in the opposite direction? Switch the genders. Imagine a world where women weren’t allowed to approach men they found attractive. They wouldn’t be allowed to speak to them, or to even look at them for fear of offense. If they did without prior approval, the man would be well within his rights to verbally or physically assault them. The man would also get to decide which woman he found worthy of his attentions, and from there he would control every aspect of the relationship: where they went to dinner, what was said to whom, what levels of compliments and affection were appropriate, and whose clothes came off first.

Doesn’t look so pretty like that, does it?

“But men have done (x y z) awful things for years!”

That doesn’t make reverse discrimination right, or empowering. It means you’re just as bad as the victimizers you’re preaching against.

“But they’re asking something I find inappropriate!”

In the first convention’s instance, perhaps, someone who didn’t want to hear that kind of question may have been its recipient anyway. The second con was opt-in only. But if you’ve got so many problems with the variances of human interaction that you’re gonna attack someone or make an internet martyr (if not an hero) of yourself because someone said something that tweaks the wrong nerve, you need to get to a fucking therapist. There is no button of any color that will grant you immunity from having people ask or say things you find offensive. There is no button of any color that will prevent you from running into people whose idea of socially acceptable doesn’t synch up with yours. And if you’re gonna throw down with all the justified frothing you can create because of this, you’d better have a damned good reason for it. Even stupid people are allowed to speak to you. Don’t tell me you’re too fucking good to ever be forced to deal with them.

There are some notable, good reasons for the OSBP to stop where it’s stopped. Legal issues & liabilities with the convention, for example. The potential for inclusion of perverts who’d ruin the spirit of things for everyone, as well. But for the OSBP being the end of the world and ultimate destruction of feminism as we know it? I still don’t see it.

People touched each other. They asked permission and put their hands on each other. Not just guys touching girls. Not just girls touching guys. Not some poor, passive, doe-eyed female with tits indirectly proportional to her self-esteem getting gang-groped by a bunch of dirty, panting old men because the word “No” was never taught to her by the vast patriarchal conspiracy. It was consensual adults making the conscious decision for themselves whether they wanted to touch or be touched. And though other members of the project have tried and tried again to get that across, this point has been missed by a good number of the ranters.

“But they’re taking the power away from the person being touched and putting it in the hands of the people touching!”

See: Mixed genders of participants. Yes, Theferret was overtly focused on touching boobs. He’s also a heterosexual male. Was his interest supposed to be in the guys who touched him? Would that somehow make things better, “cleaner,” more palatable?

If so, why?

Also: This is gonna come as a whopper to some people, but sometimes, if you dress up and walk down the street and the first guy you meet trips over the neighbor’s garbage because he’s so busy staring? It can feel good. It can feel empowering. It can feel empowering to have some random stranger try to cop a feel as well, only to have you grab their wrist and twist it so far around they squeal like a proverbial stuck pig. There is nothing wrong with being desired in the same way that there is nothing wrong with being strong or physically capable. The potential for wrongdoing is there for both cases, of course, but it’s in all things. The difference is how much control you—as a reasoning, rational being—bring to each situation.

“But hearing a question like that/seeing someone touch someone else may trigger someone!”

Anything may trigger someone. Looking at someone the wrong way may trigger them. A friend of mine once said something in the wrong tone of voice which sent her coworker into a corner bawling because of his (massive) unresolved childhood problems. Does this mean my friend should stop speaking? Should everyone in the entire world be packed in Styrofoam and kept far away from each other for fear of one offending the other? Of course not! That’s fucking crazy.

And of course, there’s the ubiquitous comparisons of the button system to rape (Hi, you just shit on people who’ve actually been raped. DIAF please.); the people swearing that they’ll never go to a con again because of the goings-on described here (Lock the doors, pull the blinds, turn off the tv and throw out the computer, buddy—the outside world’s only gonna show you worse things than this.); the accusations of childishness and lack of social intelligence (“Childish” being the best insult to apply to everything and anything, apparently.); and the earnest statement/warning that being approached let alone touched by another person makes you that much more of an attractive victim to any potentially watching predators. Because “You might as well paste a sign across your forehead that says VICTIM. (...) And this little experiment? Just gave (any potential predator) an opening with every single woman at that Con, period.” isn’t flat-out laying the blame of any potential assault of any congoer on any woman who could have participated in the project. Way to fucking go there.

That last poster’s disguising her blame and finger-pointing as “protecting,” then couching her statements in supposed expertise is far, far worse than a lot of the other misinformed ranting. You wanna talk about the OSBP as perpetuating assault? You’re right, it did—when Theferret brought it into the open and the shrieking masses started to pour in. What went on from there quickly degenerated into an assault based on gender: Against all the men involved by calling them all predatory rapist monsters and against all the women by telling them they’re incapable of making decisions for themselves concerning their own bodies; by telling them they are in turn monsters and predators and aiding predators with their participation; by blaming them for anyone who might ever get attacked by someone who might’ve gone to that con and by telling them they’re incapable of "proper" (read: socially acceptable) reason.

But why stop there? Why not go on to attack Theferret’s sexuality and marriage and poorly-worded idealism? Why not make a sloppy, directionless wanna-be satire called the Open Source Kick to the Balls project—or cheer it on for hundreds of comments, because equating someone asking to touch another person’s body to a woman randomly administering kicks to the balls (while mauling Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal) really makes sense! Why not go on to outright sexually harass Theferret’s wife over in his Lj? After all, truth and justice are on your side, because being attracted to someone without knowing them is wrong, wrong, wrong but pulling shit like this is a-okay.

As stated by dr_pipe: “funny how, in order to taunt people who enjoyed the project, you have to present behaviors which are much worse. It's like the actual behaviors under discussion wouldn't serve to offend, so you're bringing in ringers that actually don't have anything to do with the topic at hand.”

Now, I like myself. I don’t believe I have any problem with my sexuality. I also don’t think I would want strangers to touch me. This doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with me, but it also doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with the people who don’t mind or enjoy that touching. The wanksplosion here seems to come from people who a) think it’s awful that other people are behaving this way; b) have misread what happened; or c) are second and third wave feminists clashing, hard. But like Theferret says in one of the comments: “Women have been taught to hate their bodies if they're not perfect. Men have been taught that it's skeezy and awful to express attraction except in the direst of circumstances. That's a pretty vicious circle.”

And it is. And from that we have a culture of women who hate themselves for not matching up to an airbrushed impossible ideal, and tons and tons of men who don’t know how to approach a woman without sounding crude—or without being disbelieved because the women think they’re disingenuous, either for worry that the guy’s going to pull something or because of media-fostered self-disgust. And then we have however many vociferous individuals responding to Theferret’s post by demanding that people censor their sexuality or personal choices because someone (read: they) may be offended, calling the women who participated in the project rapebait or rape accomplices or whores, and refusing to listen to anyone who even tries to imply that the entire deal was anything other than some monstrous objectifying sexist pile of rudely grabbing awfulness.

I hope no one wonders why I’m not on their side.

I don’t think the project will continue, and it’s perfectly all right that it’s run its course—before it attracts the kind of people the group clearly didn’t want to deal with, or before someone gets too bent out of shape and starts throwing about lawsuits. (Because the American way is to throw a lawsuit at everything that upsets us.) But overall, am I offended by the entire project? No. It’s human beings making the active decision whether or not to allow someone to lay hands on their bodies. It’s like the dating process in hyperdrive, in a way. There is contact and there is pleasure in contact, enjoyment in being touched and touching. If there’s not, you stop the contact or stop the contact from occurring to begin with. If you have problems saying no, pick up some self-help books (I highly recommend De Becker’s The Gift of Fear, which helps emphasize getting the fuck out of a situation if you have a bad gut feeling & focuses on not worrying about being “polite.”) or get to a therapist. This isn’t a convention-specific recommendation—this is simple stuff we as humans, not just as men and women, all need to live by.