Fannish bodies in the public domain

[alias_sqbr]

Something which has been making the rounds of my flist today is The Open Source Boob Project (a rather inaccurate title, it puts me in mind of a do-it-yourself Real Doll made of duct tape :) )

I don't have a lot to say on the idea itself¹ (except: Note! Comments are back up!), but it's opened up a lot of interesting discussion about the touchy feely culture at cons, and how it can be both very liberating and unpleasantly sleazy.

The thing with me is, I don't like people touching me. Not just sleazy guys, or strangers, I feel uncomfortable being touched under most circumstances by most people, and even sometimes get weird about Cam if I'm in a neurotic mood. I realised this in my teens, when I was at a very touchy feely girls school, so I quickly established myself as Not Interested in being hugged/given back rubs etc in an environment where it was pretty clear that most if not all the people offering were just expressing platonic affection² and at worst would just be a little sad when I said no.
When I got to uni, and joined fandom, I unselfconsciously used the same "polite but firm refusal" thing when people tried to hug me/touch me, and eventually was left alone (physically) by all but the particularly idiotic/inconsiderate sleazes³ EDIT: on further thought, I remember having to be repeatedly, unhumourously violent, especially to stop people tickling me.

So a lot of the whole touching thing that happens in fandom just goes over my head, and outside my experience, and I don't feel qualified to judge it very much. My philosophy is that if something makes people happy they should be free to do it, and when other people touching skeeves me out I tend to assume it's just me being neurotic. (I couldn't get very far into that ferret piece before closing the tab because ..guh! The idea of someone asking me if they could touch my boobs! Ngggg! Admittedly, they wouldn't ask me anyway if they knew me at all) EDIT: Note that I do NOT think women should have to continuously and explicitly abstain from all physical contact in order to avoid unwanted attentions. If nothing else, it doesn't even work all the time, doesn't prevent overt sexual harassment, and you get a lot of people being/acting emotionally hurt by it.

But still...I often get this persistent vibe that there is a weird manipulative/sleazy subtext to some of the "innocent" affectionate touching, and some of the comments and discussion coming out of this capture it exactly. i_ate_my_crusts's post is a good example, and her experience parallels my own with non-touching sleaziness (ie realising that certain guys would chat to me with a great deal of enthusiasm, but only when no other more attractive girl was in the room)

I was discussing it with Cam, and he said that even as a heterosexual man in a relationship he's noticed specific and general sleaziness, and it it annoys him because (a) It's not very nice for women and (b) It makes women more likely to view all con-going men (including him) as weird sleazes to be avoided and mistrusted (My paraphrase of his opinion, may be a bit off)

So, I dunno. ithiliana has a nice summary of several posts on the Boob thing here, if you're interested.

(1)EDIT: Wait, yes I do.

So, I have yet to hear a complaint about the Project from anyone who participated or witnessed it (Edit: now I have. Note the passive aggressive blame-the-victim excuses from a Project organiser), and am willing to admit that maybe it was a positive experience for all involved. Also some commenters have misunderstood/overassumed⁴, and some are being unnecessarily rude.

But I think even it's creators agree now that they got lucky, and it's way too dangerous and problematic an idea to do again.
Also, whatever actually happened, Ferret's description of it, and subsequent replies to comments, was pretty skeezy. As several people have pointed out, he's like a guy in the 70s going "There's this great thing called the sexual revolution which means lots of women will have obligation free sex with me! Isn't that great? Ladies, come be liberated!"

I think the two ideas that stick out to me are that
(a) It's pretty skeevy to tell women that the only way to be "free and open" is to let people touch their boobs (and yes I found that subtext quite explicit, somewhere there's a comment where only letting one person touch your boobs is basically described as narrowminded and kinda mean)
(b) While it's true that a lot of women need and enjoy an affirmation of their attractiveness, it's hardly groundbreaking to encourage women to allow themselves to be passive recipients of (male) attention, and Ferret's description of male/female dynamics here is just...really? You think the issue is that men are taught to be ashamed of their desires??

Finally, I just feel like saying that I've read Ferrett's lj (and now defunct webcomic) intermittently and found it often quite interesting and amusing, and am sure I will again, but always got that is-it-just-me-slightly-sleazy vibe from it.
(2)For me, anyway. Unless they hid it very well, in which case I'm probably happier not knowing :)
(3)The smarter sleazes correctly surmised that anyone who wasn't willing to hug them was unlikely to sleep with them either.
(4) Specifically: it was not a group of men asking any woman who wasn't wearing a red badge if they could grope them, it was a group of men and women passing out buttons to any man or woman who asked (having heard about them through word of mouth), and then asking to grope the ones who wore green buttons. At least in theory. I agree that the first scenario is an almost inevitable consequence of the second once it gets popular, and that at the beginning, before they got buttons, they were asking random passers-by.

Comments

[leahcim.livejournal.com]

Hmm. In his clarification post he also wrote:

As it turns out, the first woman we asked was someone who one of the originators knew, making it a little more okay to ask, and her boyfriend was standing right next to her when we asked.

Though just in case you thought I was saying that you were wrong:

Admittedly, some of the folks we asked later we did not know – but again, it’s not like we asked everyone in sight.

Which I must have missed reading the first time around. I'm wondering if I am giving them too much benefit of the doubt, but I don't think propositioning strangers was a high priority here.

On the positive side, I'm sure I'm not only one who has found the ensuing discussion enlightening.