someone needs to tell him it's Sexual Assault Awareness Month.

[fickle]

Heard of the Open Source Boobie Project?

If you haven't, you should probably know straight off the bat that the name's a misnomer. Open Source has nothing to do with this because breasts are not publicly shareable bits of property. Breasts belong to the person they are attached to. They do not belong to anyone else -- not the doctor, not the plastic surgeon, not the boyfriend/girlfriend/significant other of the moment and not the hungry baby. My breasts, my uterus, my vagina, my body.

And if you try to act otherwise, I will most likely oppose your viewpoint either firmly or violently depending on your level of stupidity.

That said, what exactly am I so snarly about this? Multiple reasons.

1. For a moment, everything that was awkward about high school would fade away and you could just say what was on your mind. It was as though parts of me were being healed whenever I did it, and I touched at least fifteen sets of boobs at Penguicon. It never got old, surprisingly. Women are not responsible for your sexual healing. If you had a hard time picking up girls in high school or getting to touch their breasts, dressing up wanting to touch a lot of breasts at a con as 'sexual healing' does not make it look less sleazy. Like someone else said, my breasts do not have magical healing powers.
   
   
2. Like brown_betty said, "apparently there is a deeply felt conviction among some subset of men that the problem with today's society is that they do not have enough access to women's bodies."
   
   Of all the things that are wrong with society, I really don't think that's one of them.
   
   
3. We went around the con, asking those who we thought might be amenable - you didn't just ask anyone, but rather the ones who'd dressed to impress - and generally, people responded.
   
   Right. How exactly is this person defining 'dress to impress'? And apart from that, dressing in skimpy clothing doesn't necessarily mean you want to do anything. There's a motto I remember hearing a lot as a teenager "Being sexy doesn't mean you have to be sexual", and I think that applies perfectly here. Looking good, baring skin -- none of that is a signal that it's okay to ask to touch private areas. For me, that's skating down the dangerous slope of 'girls who wear short skirts are asking to be raped'.
   
   
4. They understood how this worked instinctively, and it worked.
   
   Instinctively, they knew a request to have their breasts felt was not a sleazy come-on but instead, part of a sexist project to revolutionize culture by having women's breasts become public space? Women's bodies don't need to become even more a part of the 'public space' than they already are! And I really don't think that my first reaction to someone asking to touch my breasts would be to think that they're holding a social revolution, so I'm very curious as to where these mind-reading girls are coming from.
   
   
5. By the end of the evening, women were coming up to us. "My breasts," they asked shyly, having heard about the project. "Are they... are they good enough to be touched?" And lo, we showed them how beautiful their bodies were without turning it into something tawdry.
   
   This part especially disturbs me. Women do NOT need their bodies to be validated by men. They have enough body issues already without thinking that there is some sort of standard that they need to pass -- a standard that is judged by random men -- in order to have breasts that are 'good enough'.
   
   
6. "I may not yet know your mind, but your body is beautiful." How is this revolutionary? This is what's happening right now. You make your initial assumptions about a person's attractiveness based on how they look. Guys stare at girls' breasts all the time; this is just taking it to another extreme of having them actually touch the breasts in question instead of just leering. They're hardly overthrowing the system; they're just opening it up for even more discomfort and possible harassment on the part of the women.

More reactions, many much more articulate, can be found here.

Comments

[fickle-goddess.livejournal.com]

I think what a lot of people are getting bugged about is the inherent male privilege of the statement, and like you said, how he's phrasing it as a religious epiphany.

He wrote over 1,200 words of how much pleasure he got out of touching women's breasts and now he wants us to believe that somehow, this is really good and liberating for women and it makes their self-esteem higher to have random guys decide their breasts are good enough to grope!

As for the girls who were involved, not all of them entirely knew what was going on. For example, novapsyche wore a green ribbon (http://novapsyche.livejournal.com/1996568.html) but she says that if she'd read his journal post, she wouldn't have because the way he put is quite different to how it was explained to her.

And pfft. I think that Logilo's suggestion (http://theferrett.livejournal.com/1087686.html?thread=54912966#t54912966) was a better one. Read that thread and the comments coming from it. It's hilarious trying to watch Ferrett argue that no, really, it won't be satisfying if he's being the passive one instead of the active hunter of boobs.