Smart Bitches Trashy Books | All of the romance, none of the bullshit.

At one point I had 5 windows open because every article had “ for further clarification go here “ click click click.. Finally in clear terms I found the original description .

The Open-Source Boob Project.

At Penguicon, we had buttons to give away. There were two small buttons, one for each camp: A green button that said, “YES, you may” and a red button that said “NO, you may not.” And anyone who had those buttons on, whether you knew them or not, was someone you could approach and ask:

“Excuse me, but may I touch your breasts?”

I hadn’t heard anything about it till I read the post here today. I think it’s an inappropriate way for adults to behave.  I consider myself pretty liberal, I think there should be topless beaches, that women should be able to breast feed in public and if you want to lay out topless in your own back yard you should be able to without feeling indecent. But an organized grope fest sounds like a seminar on HBO’s Real Sex to give men a boner that they don’t have to work for. 

Buttons are too easy, I say make them work for it!

Well, one of the basic questions for me is whether there would even be an Open Source Book Project if breasts were desexualized and demystified.  I don’t think so.

Here’s the thing that bothers me about this:  women, for all that we say that our bodies are our own and that no means no still feel, by and large, that we have to defend ourselves in a myriad of ways.  We are still fighting the rape, not consent battle in courts all across the country.  We still feel physically unsafe in numerous contexts and scenarios.  We are primarily in the *defensive* rather than *offensive* or *affirmative* position, in other words, vis a vis our bodies and our sense of sexuality and security.  Part of that is related to the taboos this project claims its aiming to dismantle, but a lot of it is related to the very structure of this project—that women are, once again, in a defensive position, reacting, allowing or denying, justifying, explaining.  And that, IMO, reflects very concrete power differentials that are not going to be reversed or mitigated by anything that forces women to maintain a defensive posture, even if it’s no more than wearing a button and saying “no” to an inquiry.

I’d much rather have an Open Source Butt Project, it would be more equitable. I’m not going to go and look at what sounds like a total flamefest, but this sounds like another lame attempt at making women who DON’T want their personal space violated by whichever random male feels like it, feel like prudes. 

And why is it the men who get to choose who they grope?  Here’s an interesting idea.  Whomever you talk to, you HAVE to either pat their ass or their boob (male or female) at the end of the conversation.  I think that would do more to desexualize both those body parts than this one-sided idea.

So question: Those women who wanted nothing to do with the “project” what did they wear?  How did the men relate to women who wore neither a red nor a green button?

Jane said: The breast, though, is out there.  It’s almost invading space of another’s.

I wish I had that problem.

But small as they are, my breasts are my own. By permission only, I should think. I shared them with my children; I share them with my husband. Everyone else has to ask pretty damn nicely…

Oh hey! I just had another thought or rather thought I’d share a personal (maybe too personal) pov.
My husband has been privy to my boobs since he was 16.  In every way sexual and non (ie: feeding our children)
and he assures me that for guys who love them (boobs) there is no way to de sexualize them.  ever. never. ever.

When he got to the part about how being able to freely grope breasts healed his high school trauma, or something, I totally rolled my eyes. The whole thing was icky with the “AND LO WE COULD TOUCH TEH BEWBS AND COMPARE THEM” and “I may not know you but that’s sure a fine rack you got there, I just wanna admire it!” sort of leeringness to it. Icky. He obviously just Doesn’t Get It - the implications that are so great for him aren’t necessarily so for the women involved.

I am all for legal, widespread public toplessness - like men get to do. I really do feel if it were all out there like it is for men, eventually (sooner than you think) everyone would get over this “mystique” of the breast. And then no one would get all squirmy or weird or disapproving over breastfeeding in public. That’d be awesome. As well if we all got to see real breasts, all the time, non-sexually, maybe everyone wouldn’t be so hung up on too big/too small/too droopy/etc. which is very hard to do now when the most breasts you see are photoshopped to pr0n “perfection”. Society in general has very unrealistic expectations of how women are supposed to look in order to be considered attractive - not to mention your worth as a women is wrapped up in this attractiveness, as if you have any control over how your breasts look, aside from plastic surgery… yeah I could go on a while here, I’ll stop now.

btw my captcha is “but26”. snortle.

The only thing I remember after reading this whole post is...Jane groped Candy?! 

I am a waste of carbon.

I’d be interested to know if it did demystify breasts for anyone.  And, in a way, even if it did - would that be a good thing? (I don’t know, I’m not turned on by breasts. But if I was, I can’t imagine wanting to lose that simple pleasure.)
I’d sort of agree with Lijakaca, the beautiful purity of the idea is underminded by men being allowed to choose who they ask to grope. If the men wore badges saying ‘I’m prepared to grope’ and allowed the women to do the asking, it might make more sense. If the man then had to grope them whether their breasts were flat or full, young or elderly, perky, droopy, or leaking milk - that’d be more demystifying.
(Not that I’d advocate that either.)

As far as demystifying breasts goes, I think Jordan Matter’s Uncovered project is much more effective than the male-controlled boobie-groping proposed by the ferrett.

I have the perfect solution to the the Open Source Boob Project.  Really, I do.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FUpRxJJvjtU

;-) Plan23—Perfect!

Gennita, that is freakin’ HILARIOUS!  I laughed, I cried.  Oh my.

You’ve also got an excellent point.

I think that what bothers me about the whole thing is the initial comment that started the whole “project.”

“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.”

Sure, he’s kind enough to be aware of the objectification, and is kind enough to say he doesn’t “yet” know her mind, but that has the same feeling of token sensitivity found in advice articles that claim the best way to get a woman to sleep with you is to make her feel like she’s being listened to rather than actually advocating listening to a woman.  It is reductionist, and they seem to think that access should be granted simply because they are aware enough to remember that women have personalities. 

I do think this could be a really positive experience in the right context, but that context probably doesn’t involve a large group of anonymous people because there are a lot of people with sexual issues and this is not a safe way to address that.  While it’s great that some women are open with their body, recognizing that millions of women are raped and molested before they reach the age of 18, so there’s a pretty good chance there are one or more in any large gathering, and that they have some very legitimate reasons for not wanting to be subjected to being asked to be touched by strangers.  This is in fact a huge cultural issue rooted in some very unequal power dynamics that allow men to feel that an openness with sex that titillates them is as good as an openness about sex that demands discussion and mutual building of safe space prior to a grope-a-thon.

That said I’m all about the Open Source Butt Project, just cause giving women the pass to grope men would level the playing field.

I would be in the “Yes, you can” camp. I have days where I would reeeeeeeeeally love to walk up to some off the buff Marines that I see and grope their biceps and pecs. Those areas are a HUGE turn on for me. I love to look at them and it’s nice to touch a really beautiful part of the male body. I wouldn’t have a problem with a man feeling the same about my boobs. I tend to look at the human body as a work of art, though, so I can see why others wouldn’t be comfortable.

My problem with all of the ranting and fallout in the comments is that there seems to be a group of women who refuse to accept the fact that for some women this isn’t problematic, doesn’t set feminism back three decades and doesn’t denigrate or devalue them.

spamword didnt97. Well, actually, I did get groped a lot in 97. By a really hot ex.

Sorry, I meant all the ranting and fallout in the comments on OTHER sites, not here.

I have ever, ever so many thoughts on this. I’ll try to be concise and coherent here, and not just b/c I’m supposed to be working on something else. I followed this really closely, and I’m still formulating a post in my own LJ about it.

First, a correction. While the original project was all about breasts, in its button-wearing mutation (which was slightly different from the original inception of the project), men could and did wear the buttons, and their asses were up for gropage. This does not mitigate the project for me, for reasons I will explain momentarily.

Second, for all of The Ferrett’s high-minded idealism (which is hard to see through the haze of “BOOBIES,” but it’s there) in his post, this project is really all about getting to touch boobies. That’s it. It’s about getting guys to be able to ask. How do I know this? This comment thread in the original post. I actually love her suggestion--it accomplishes what the project was trying to accomplish, AND it puts women in the empowered position by encouraging them to be the ones to ask.

Which leads me to my third point. After spending the better part of a week reading all the posts that came out of this, obsessing about it, and generally ensuring that my therapist will continue to make a lot of money off of me, I realized why the two sides of the issue just could not hear each other.

The feminist side, which was predominantly female, lives in a world where men already feel entitled to ask to touch our bodies--or not even to ask. Most of us have been propositioned, groped, or worse at some point in our lives. That’s just a basic fact of life in modern society. Now, someone proposes that at cons, a place where female geeks already have to fight to be seen as more than just OMG WALKING BOOBS, this sort of behavior should be made even more explicit. Cue massive wave of panic.

On the other hand, the pro-project group, which was largely made up of geeky men (and some women), could not understand why women were so upset. And why? Because they do NOT live in a world where they feel entitled to ask. The majority of them are nice guys, or think they are, and asking to touch someone’s chest is really Not On. Plus, they feel disenfranchised. In their minds (and I read many posts on this), women have the power in a relationship. Women reject them. Women have the goods, and might be willing to share, but these guys don’t live in a world where they can ask. Enter the Project. Angel choirs; WE CAN ASK! WE CAN TOUCH! BOOBIEZ!!!!

Neither side can hear the other because there’s this fundamental disconnect in terms of the worlds we inhabit.

Two more things, and then I swear I’ll shut up. First, the assumption that a woman in costume at a con is there to attract male attention is really fucking offensive. Candy wonderfully detailed the differences in the kinds of compliments that are acceptable and those that are not, but a con is a particularly important environment for those differences to emphasised. People like to dress up at cons! It’s part of the culture. And if I want to be Aeryn Sun for a day, then you’d better get it through your fat fanboy head that I’m not wearing leather pants to please *you*. On a day-to-day basis, I don’t mind being told that my outfit looks good, or even that it looks good on me. I DO mind the assumption (which, by the way, The Ferrett outright argued in an earlier post) that I dress the way I do to attract anyone’s attention. Maybe if I’m going out clubbing, but even then, I dress so that *I* feel sexy. Not so that someone else can find me sexy.

Second, the utter failure on so many people’s parts to comprehend the idea of social pressure to conform, *especially* at geek-friendly events, where the desire to be accepted is even stronger, is just EPIC FAIL. Maybe I just have issues (I do), but the fact that people just blithely announce that “oh, but anyone can say no!” without a clear recognition of all the ways that the whole project puts an expectation on women to say yes (and on men to be willing to be grabby), just really frustrates me.

Anyway. I’ve written half of that LJ entry here already. My confimration word is stop76, which is clearly a sign.

OH, holy shit.

I’m so sorry. I did NOT realize how long that was going to be.

The whole thing just screams “Loser!” to me. Yeah, I’d be much more in favor of an Open Source BUTT project than one that focuses entirely on women and appeals to the lowest common denominator. Their rationalizations are pure bullshit, and it’s SO typical that people who don’t agree with their position are painted as a bunch of prudes. Couldn’t they have come up with something even slightly more original?

When I go to cons, I deliberately dress down, even like someone’s MOM, because I don’t like being gawked at. I’m there to have fun, buy stuff, play roleplaying games, and hang out with friends, not to have my tits or ass photographed by weirdos. At some cons, you can barely get through the hallways because of all the guys taking T&A;pix.

I was all up in this when it hit. And his wife Zoethe has said elsewhere that this was (to her view) mostly started by the women. And that she and the other women involved thought it was freeing of their sexuality, bla bla bla. Most important thing she said, and I wish she’d said it in the outset, was to call BS on the whole ‘worthy’ section and creepy tone he chose to write it up in. Look, I’m strongly opposed in a public space, could care less in a private one and really think this just blew up in their faces overall. The women involved are saying all the attention is hurting them, so I hope it dies down soon.

Alla that said, I wish he’d just jump into the swinger pond already and get over it. The tightrope walking of the wanna swings always leads to drama and mess and lack of understanding why people who don’t wanna find your Healthful Exploration personally or politically problematic. And they don’t get peer pressure as a negative because they’re hoping peers will pressure them into what they already want but can’t ask for. Older than old to me and so over it. So. But along comes the next wave of “Dare we?’s” and so it goes.

Minors attend cons. Many posted on how these young girls explore their sexuality in ‘safe space’. Allow me to call BS on THAT one with frothing crazy eyed rage. Appropriately enough, my spamword is “members21” Indeed.

Touching a breast is a sexual thing. Downplay it all you want in coy terms, but no matter how you say it, it’s sexual. (Talking adults here, obviously; this doesn’t count a baby’s touch during breast feeding.) It’s sexual. Period. Just like I would not be okay with a stranger saying to me, “Excuse me, I’d like to tongue-kiss you,” I most certainly would not be okay with a stranger asking to cop a feel. And I sure as hell wouldn’t want to be the one on the defense, either, by being forced to say “no.” “Empowerment,” my ass. It’s not empowerment. It’s sexual harassment. It’s not okay.

My first thought when I first learned of OSBP was that it would mostly be people that no one would otherwise want to grope or be groped by. The second was that only a man would come up with something like this and the be surprised/hurt/offended/etc by most women’s rejection of said idea (and him!) and the inevitable fallout.

It’s a shame OSBP tarnished the reputation of a venerable Convention. Ultimately, the most unsavory part of this affair for me is learning of Teh FERRET, his views awomen and his wife’s support of his “ideas.”

Emotionally, I can’t understand why people would get so upset.  Part of this is because I’m rather comfortable with my body, part of it is because I’m an idealist, and part of it is probably my removal from the situation.

Logically, I can understand why people would get upset either way, because people do that.  People have other life experiences which change they way the perceive their reality.  I can intellectually understand, even if my initial reaction to people getting upset is bafflement.

I do have to say that I sometimes resent that people who are less comfortable with their bodies (rightly or wrongly) for being the ones that we have to protect, so that we err on the side of caution.  While being in Europe I saw many a woman breast-feeding quite openly in public, and some women who would sunbathing topless in their backyard.  It makes me sad sometimes that I am made to feel like my love for being nude is wrong… but I can accept that it will come with time.  And really, I have a nature that really doesn’t get that upset about that sort of thing… I accept that more than likely, in a few generations or so, women being topless will be a non issue.

*shrugs*

Not really well articulated, but my thoughts regardless.

Confirm word? Church68

How do these words get chosen?

Those 2 posts that make you want to smack his head are the ones I linked to in comments on Scalzi’s blog.  I was getting pretty tired of people acting like theferrett just misspoke and didn’t mean to be a jerk, but then I realized *I* had been linked to some of his “greatest hits” for the last 3-4 years, but most others who heard about the “project” didn’t have the same experience.  That’s why I shared them. 

I should have gone back to Scalzi’s blog to find out what happened after I posted those links, though.  Oops.

As far as the project goes, I’m just numb to it anymore.  All it does is make me sad.

This whole idea is pitiful. Snarkhunter, you did a great wrap up; I agree with you that there are two groups not hearing each other, talking past each other, etc.

And there are subsets of the groups that aren’t listening, either.

I am comfortable with my body. I know it well. I am not interested in the rest of the world knowing it well.

I think it is insensitive of people who don’t mind a stranger copping a feel to make light of the standards or feelings of people who do.

Emotionally, I can’t understand why people would get so upset.  Part of this is because I’m rather comfortable with my body, part of it is because I’m an idealist, and part of it is probably my removal from the situation.

I’m comfortable with my body. I’m comfortable with being sexual. I’m not comfortable with strangers asking to touch me sexually.

I do have to say that I sometimes resent that people who are less comfortable with their bodies (rightly or wrongly) for being the ones that we have to protect, so that we err on the side of caution.  While being in Europe I saw many a woman breast-feeding quite openly in public, and some women who would sunbathing topless in their backyard.  It makes me sad sometimes that I am made to feel like my love for being nude is wrong… but I can accept that it will come with time.

Being nude, or topless, or breast feeding, in public is absolutely not the same thing as having a stranger touch your breasts.

The boob Project was an incredibly badly thought out idea on participants’ part.  Incredibly.

I have written a bunch of posts about it everywhere, so I’m not going to repeat all that.  In a nutshell, if these guys have issues with breasts, it is neither my job, nor my duty, to demystify it for them.  I don’t want to be asked by a total stranger whether I want my breasts touched, simply because I have no clue if that stranger is going to take off quietly after being told no or if I will have to scream for security.  I don’t want to be asked repeatedly.  I am not a “body” evaluated by the size of my boobs.  I’m a writer.  If I want to be a body, I will go to a con where sexual behavior is part of the program.

When I attend a convention, it is a business venture for me.  I expect to sign books, fan girl over writers, and meet my buddies.  I don’t want to see people groping each other in the hallways.  I don’t want to be pressured, called a prude if I do decline and I don’t want to be called a slut if I don’t decline.  This is a lose/lose situation for me.  Epic Fail on all counts.

If I know that this sort of event is on the program, then I won’t attend.  Neither will a lot of other female authors. 

We struggle hard enough as is to be evaluated on the basis of our writing rather than our looks, but no, these guys are determined to drag us back to the fact that our boobies are special.

And the idea of trying to continue and expand it was a catastrophic blunder, because this sort of thing will inevitably attract perverts - and has already, and it will inevitably result in a sexual assault if permitted to continue. 

So, to sum up, this crew wrecked Penguicon.  It is now permanently off a lot of female writers’ lists and will remain so.  Just the controversy alone is enough to scare some people away.

Was there a better way for them to fill up boobs?  And let’s not mince words, I know what he said they were doing but when it came down to it, he boasted about groping 15 sets of breasts.  He didn’t say, “I met 15 lovely women.” He said he touched several pairs of boobs.  Was there a better way?  Yes.  Reserve a room.  Put a big sign on the door.  Have a table blocking the entrance and have the entrants explain what this is all about.  You don’t want your breasts touched?  don’t enter the room.  Simple.  Better yet, do it away from the con grounds.  Start a swingers club.

Snarkhunter, I love your comment—great insights, well-expressed.  And that comment-thread you linked to was (a) genius and (b) beautifully illustrative.

I did NOT realize how long that was going to be.

I thought it was great—a fabulously balanced examination of both sides, and FWIW, I think you’re absolutely right.

I do have to say that I sometimes resent that people who are less comfortable with their bodies (rightly or wrongly) for being the ones that we have to protect, so that we err on the side of caution.

But being comfortable with your body doesn’t equate to being touched when you don’t want to, right?  I mean, that’s not an invitation to sexual harassment or rape or intimacy that you do not explicitly want. 

Which, I think, is the point that some are trying to make.  That this isn’t simply about *individual* women being comfortable enough to be touched in a certain way by strangers; in some ways it’s not even about women’s bodies, per se, or at least not their personal comfort level.  I think one objection comes from the assumption of power isn’t the woman’s—that the choice to say yes or no is illusory because there is an expectation that they should comply or be seen as sexually dysfunctional, somehow.  When it may just be that they don’t want to be put in a position where they have any burden at all to refuse or accept the touch of a stranger. 

It’s sort of like the objection some people have to breast feeding but in reverse.  A lot of women have to fight to be able to breast feed in public because of cultural assumptions about what is and isn’t proper.  In the same way that they shouldn’t have to fight these attitudes to breastfeed in public, women also shouldn’t have to resist an expectation that their bodies are available to be touched in public.  I know a number of women who are comfortable in their skin but would never want to be in a position where they had to think about being casually touched on their breasts by strangers.

Now, if the touching were unisex, I don’t think the dynamics would be the same at all because the expectations—and therefore the power—would be distributed across the genders equally.

(Man. I sure did spend a lot of time carrying on Internet debates on all sorts of forums back in the day. As opposed to focusing most of my energies on this particular forum, heh.)

The amount of real work I have to do is directly proportional to how involved I am in these kinds of debates.  When I’m intensely working on a big project, I have to take a ton of breaks to avoid cranial explosion disorder, and strangely, these discussions are always less intense than my work projects, lol.

re. the outsider’s sense of entitlement:  at some point there is, with certain people or groups who have been or perceive that they have been exiled, a huddling along the margins and a hugging of the boundary between inside and outside.  And holding fast to the border, they can be both victim and victimizer without feeling wholly responsible for either role.  I think some of the arguments in favor of the gropicon display this kind of dual sensibility.

Candy, I’m really glad you linked to the Nice Guy (tm) definitions, because I was thinking of that even as I used the very loaded phrase “nice guy.” (FWIW, I believe The Ferrett falls very clearly under the category of “Nice Guy” as articulated by Heartless bitches, in large part because, for all of his self-awareness, he frequently refuses to hear rebuttals, especially from women.) Some of the guys who weren’t totally on board or who thought this could be a good project really might just be “nice guys” (without the caps) who just didn’t think it through or whatever, or who reconsidered once they heard the other side or the whole scope of the idea. I sort of feel like Scalzi’s post fell under that (mostly b/c of his whole “teaching nerd boys about girls” shtick).

One of the things that really, really bothered me about all of this, and that continues to bother me, is the perception by geek guys that all girls are 1) beautiful and 2) feel desirable/sex/empowered. The way this project was described online, it was clear they only went for the attractive girls. There’s very little understanding among the geek guys who feel so marginalized that geek girls are just as marginalized--not only by mainstream society, but by the geek guys they look to for inclusion. Then you wind up with all of these girls doing whatever it takes to be included, and the guys still feeling resentful because the “hot” girls they feel they “deserve” aren’t paying attention.

As I said, my thoughts here,and my comment above in particular, are the result of a week’s work of obsessive reading and dwelling on this whole “project.” And I really mean obsessive. For some reason, this whole thing has captured my attention in ways I didn’t expect, and I’m still figuring out why.

Oh, and thanks. To everyone. Glad to know I didn’t sound like a long-winded crackpot. (Is there any other kind?)

(Last comment, I swear, because my dissertation is screaming at me.)

I did not mean to imply in my geek girls vs boys comment that the women who participated in this are “damaged"--that was a disturbing trend in some of the more virulent anti- reponses. And I’m all for this project taking place...as long as it does so in a room, as Ilona Andrews suggests. I’m just saying that, expanded to include all cons everywhere, this *would* snowball where girls with little self-confidence were offering themselves sexually in order to feel included, and not because they feel empowered and awesome and comfortable. (More so than they already do. ::sigh::)

Hm, exclusion.  I used to participate in the local Women’s Take Back the Night march (demonstrating our right to be able to walk alone down the street after dark unmolested).  A male friend was deeply offended by the concept, because he felt that HE was being excluded from this event, and he’s a feminist, so why exclude him?  One year, he and his son walked along with the group of women, on the other side of the street, to both support us (his wife and daughters were also participating) and respect the women-only theme.  Or something.

A couple of years later, the organizers apparently felt he had a point, and so it became a Family Take Back the Night march, and included men, as well as the traditional women and children.  At which point I stopped participating, because I thought it completely defeated the purpose of the march.

Not sure of my point, here.  Yes, I see the point of the outraged commenters.  Even if the purpose of the exercise was to make things mo’better for equality of the sexes, acting as if it were true when it’s not, is kind of up there with ignoring affirmative-action-type projects on the theory that if everybody’s equal then we shouldn’t have special treatment for identifiable minorities (hiring quotas, whatever you want to call them).

You can’t decree equality.  You can’t declare that everybody is equal and act as if they really are, because they’re NOT.  Bad things happen when you do that.

Yet, my initial response to the project was, cool!  I felt sort of wistful, like it would be a good thing to have clear social boundaries in a given situation, because I’m dumb about boundaries.  However, I’m starting to get the sense that my reaction was not to the project or the reaction to the project, but to my own (mis-)interpretation of it.

how would you feel if you wore the button and nobody asked you for a grope--or if you are, you’re approached only by the people who seem to asking EVERYBODY for a grope?

Bad.  I’m an overweight woman with LARGE breasts and serious doubts about my attractiveness.  My boobs tend to get attention anyway.  Having girded myself to allow people to ask to touch, and then have nobody ask, would mess my head up.  I’d doubtlessly go squirrelly wondering just how repulsive I really am, and it would go downhill from there.

Just the fact that each of us is analyzing how we’d do in a man’s-choice grope situation shows how rotten this idea is. I mean, women hate themselves enough already. Now we have to hate ourselves because 1) We don’t want to be groped, or 2) We want to be groped but nobody wants to grope us, or 3) The hot guys don’t want to grope us, only the geeky guys, or 4) we’re thinking of some other negative outcome and comparing this “project” to all the rotten, miserable experiences we’ve had in our lives that we’ve tried hard to rise above. My god, rate my breasts? Screw you. No--I won’t screw you.  Sigh. This is depressing.

My main issue with the OSBP is that once permission was given to some men to touch some of the time, there would be men who would show up who would refuse to understand that that permission didn’t include all women all of the time.

I sometimes feel like I have a Jekyll/ Hyde personality when it comes to these situations.

On the one hand, I feel that nudity is a normal thing, especially when dealing with breast feeding, or sunbathing. Heck, that whole Miley Cyrus thing doesn’t bother me a bit. Nudity is a natural state of being, and I am ok with that.  I also believe that sexuality can fall in the same category. I am not bothered by other’s public displays, nor in movies or the theater.

On the other hand, I have a huge issue with personal space, physical and emotional. I am hugely creeped out by strangers touching me, beyond a handshake or maybe a friendly hug. I am even more creeped out by what people say… went to visit my hubby at work the other day and over heard his co-worker say something along the lines of “dude, your wife is hot”. Now, this is a nice enough guy but I was majorly creeped out by it.

If that creeps me out, I don’t even want to imagine what my response would be if someone other than my hubby walked up and wanted to touch my boob. I understand the thought behind the idea, but I agree with Candy and Snarkhunter… maybe it is believed to be one thing, and they just don’t get it.

- Kismet (who *earned* the nickname Ice Princess and college)

- in college -

My finger just can’t type today

I think that my biggest twitch with this whole thing is this comment here

“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.”

My boobs are not why my body is beautiful. Nor is my face. Nor my figure. Or my height, weight, hair/eye color. It is a blending of all of these things.

Different men find different parts of the woman body attractive. If they really wanted to make this about admiring a woman’s beauty, it should have been the Open Source Body Project. Instead of asking to just touch boobs, the project should have been about asking to touch hair, or arms, or stomach.

Isolating this project to just boobs does reduce the woman to “just a set of nipples” because that is the part that is being focused on.

Of course, I’m not saying that it would make it any better a proposition, but it would have made more sense.

Yeah, that should have read “female body” instead of woman body…

That’s what I get for changing my thoughts mid-sentence.

You know, I think you could make an argument that the best way to de-mystify the female body is by making the male body LESS, not MORE potentially aggressive.  Could that be done by making the groping something that happens to the men, thereby placing the women in a position of power and allowing them to possess that privilege?  I dunno, but it seems to me that any way you slice this, it really just does come down to a bunch of guys wanting unmitigated permission and access to major boobage.  And therefore it will never accomplish even a secondary effect of enabling mutual understanding between these men and women, promoting feminist principles of equal empowerment, or neutralizing the female body. 

Although it is an enterprising and inexpensive alternative to hiring, you know, professional gropers (sorry, couldn’t resist that one ;D )

I’ve read Ferret’s post and updated post and contextual post and through John Scalzi’s post a Whatever and through a lot of the comments on both and then I found these WONDERFUL Swiftian responses (I want to post them before I forget):

The Open-Source Knuckle Sandwich Project: http://hahathor.livejournal.com/120502.html

and

Misia’s Modest Proposal:
http://misia.livejournal.com/1055120.html

Enjoy! You should also read the responses to their posts.

Now to read all ya’lls

*sigh* i formulated most of my response and then i went to classes before i could post and now everybody said it much better than me. can i just combine you all and say ditto? :)

well, here was one point i wanted to mention from my original (and long, you all were spared) post, in regard to Jane’s (devil’s advocate) quote:

The breast, though, is out there.  It’s almost invading space of another’s. In the way that it is created, it virtually asks, as much as an inanimate object can, to be touched.

No, they are not. They are an extension of my body. If someone is that close to me, my boobs are not invading their space, that person is invading mine (unless s/he was invited into it). The idea that a group of strangers feel the right to come to me and ask to feel a body part (especially a sexualized body part), makes me extremely uncomfortable and, most likely (since it is a sexualized body part), fearful. (There is a huge amount of sexualized violence in this society, and having one or a GROUP of strangers, especially males, come up ask about my breasts would make me very afraid of what would happen if I said yes or no. I do not know these people. I do not know what is going through their minds. If I say no will they go away, or push this further?). The way I understand this, people are approached about this project to decide to wear a red/green button, so no matter what I will be approached simply because I am there and have boobs.

Suze: yeah, that does strike me as missing the point of Take Back the Night. one of the ones i went to had men in the grouping at the end (when you share your individual story) and i know (talks i had with ladies afterwards) a lot of women who wanted to share didn’t go up because there were men there, and others were less graphic. no longer safe space.

robin: i personally wouldn’t feel comfortable asking to grope men either. that seems sleazy/objectifying (like the boob project) to them rather than “empowering” for either one of us.

now to look at knuckle sandwich link…

ok, the nice guy links and Rebecca’s links are excellent. thank you.

snarkhunter, you articulated in one comment what I took several comments and most of a day to attempt to say on a couple of other blogs.  Sadly, I don’t think I ever did quite achieve fully making my point - it seemed to be ever elusive and out of reach.  There’s a U2 lyric I haven’t been able to stop thinking about in relation to this situation “the mysterious distance between a man and a woman”.  I think that within this “mysterious distance” there’s a territory where we can achieve a certain level of communication between the sexes, but I don’t know that we can achieve a true understanding of the other point of view.  Because of the different assumptions of entitlements and restrictions that every single person brings to every single situation, one side never can truly understand the other. 

In the midst of this, I had a discussion with a man about the fact that even if men might think a male’s chest is equivalent in meaning to a woman’s, in reality - from the woman’s point of view - this is not the case.  I finally came to the conclusion that there is no body part of equivalent meaning on the male body.  This inequality may very well be a result of our cultural conditioning and woe unto our Puritan roots, but whatever the reason behind this fact, it remains a fact that needs to be recognized and respected.  Understanding how deep the divide is between the different meanings that men and women assign to the same region on the body was both an “a-ha!” and a “well, duh!” kind of moment and was a real jumping off point for me intellectually. 

But even with that jumping off, and even with the time that’s passed since I first started thinking about this, I still haven’t come to any definitive reaction or conclusion.  I don’t know that I *can* come to such a place; I see good points coming from several disparate places.  I ‘get’ that some women would be threatened by an OSBM situation, that some would be amused, that some would have no problem participating and would have no negative reaction to it, that some would find the whole thing juvenile and treat it with disdain or disbelief, and so on, and I think each of these reactions is perfectly valid.  I also ‘get’ that some men truly don’t believe they have any power to wield over women and thus are utterly mystified by the notion that many women feel they do have such power.  It took my husband awhile to learn that he can be the nicest guy in the world, but the mere fact that he’s a man means many women would feel fear were they suddenly thrown into some ‘dark parking lot, late at night’ scenario together.  He’s learned over the course of time to do what he can to ensure he doesn’t unwittingly put some woman in a situation where she would feel fear; I imagine it has also to take other men lots of time (with lots of help from women) for that same light bulb to go off. 

And now I’ve upheld tradition with my supersized comment (would you like fries with that?) ...my work here is done.

Um, people, say what you will about what boobs are or are not--mature human females are the only animal that has breasts when not actively lactating. They have them (according to Desmond Morris and others experts in anthopology) because humans walk on two legs, not four. For most mammals, the direct female sexual signal is the backside--which for most mammals is right at the males’ eye level. Because walking around bent at the waist was not doing anything good for early man’s lower back, women were forced to evolve a more or less eye level sexual signal on our chests to take the place of buttocks.

In other words, boobs are a butt you wear on your chest. You wear them to signal to males that you are sexually mature and therefore potential mate material.

Despite their primary function of lactation, boobs are sexual.

And no matter to what lofty goals they attribute their cause, I suspect none of those geeks running the OSBP would have it any other way.

Oh, and the OSKSP? I laughed so hard, I had an asthma attack.

Snarkhunter, thanks, that was really interesting.