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Open Source Boob Project: degrading or celebrating women?
peterdevore
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
While originating in booze filled con shenanigans, I thought it worth discussing the controversy around the Open-Source Boob Project.
Basically, some girls and guys had the idea to make it known with a green or red button whether it was OK to ask to touch their boobs during a con. A lot of people thought this was a bad idea for different reasons and eventually one of the originators thought that as well. While I'm sure most people would agree it should be a personal choice to let other people touch your boobs, does making an event/movement about it encroach on that personal freedom?
It kinda reminded me about the sexual freedom controversy in the sixties, where one of the main complaints was that it fostered a culture of looking down on girls who didn't put out. How is it that a movement for more personal freedom can end up being seen as fostering a culture where there is less respect for the more conservative personal choice?
Is it because we live in a society in which we look down upon diversity in moral choices? Or is it simply inevitable that more freedom results in a more liberal morality? Does freedom of choice not still give you the freedom to restrict yourself?
Basically, some girls and guys had the idea to make it known with a green or red button whether it was OK to ask to touch their boobs during a con. A lot of people thought this was a bad idea for different reasons and eventually one of the originators thought that as well. While I'm sure most people would agree it should be a personal choice to let other people touch your boobs, does making an event/movement about it encroach on that personal freedom?
It kinda reminded me about the sexual freedom controversy in the sixties, where one of the main complaints was that it fostered a culture of looking down on girls who didn't put out. How is it that a movement for more personal freedom can end up being seen as fostering a culture where there is less respect for the more conservative personal choice?
Is it because we live in a society in which we look down upon diversity in moral choices? Or is it simply inevitable that more freedom results in a more liberal morality? Does freedom of choice not still give you the freedom to restrict yourself?
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creepy as fuck indeed.
(i guess i shouldve stated because it looks like thats his boob poking finger)
And of course the guy has to look like 'that guy'.
What the fuck would be the point to this at a sci-fi convention? How does it add anything but the ability of a bunch of virgins to finally know what a female tit feels like?
Seriously, this is furry con (like, the 'bad' furries I mean, not the "good" furries) level bullshit. It makes guys who are into scifi look bad and just pushes people away.
I mean, read this shit:
Creepy fucking shit. Really the dumbest move ever was mentioning it to the general population. If you and your friends want to play doctor together that's fine, but don't expect most people who are only going because they like sci-fi stuff to say 'hey this really ADDS to my con experience in a positive way'.
Oh god this could be epic
(HE WANTS YOUR BOOBIES)
do you want his?
It's pretty appalling.
Seriously, I'm a fan of breast cuppage and all, but if it's freely available, it just cheapens the whole experience.
No, really.
What the fuck is this.
My initial response is that it's a stretch to say that this degrades or celebrates women. I'm not sure on how to gauge the moral intent -- for the touching parties, the blog entry included does explicitly mention that part of the liberating quality was that sexual desire was satisfied by being able to touch, and in touching take away the surrounding mysticism. That being said, I'm still not sure if I'm within rights to say that the start of the project was predicated by a desire to touch more breasts. ...
Either way, though, I can't think of any other way to start making a claim right now, so let's go with "a desire to touch more breasts" as one of the premises. The creation of the envisioned system cannot realistically produce less touchable breasts -- if I want to use the OP's language, then, those people are celebrating breasts. To go from there,
breasts are inextricably attached to people, whom principally will be women. The celebration is not necessarily commensurate between the two. I think that, taken on its own, this is an action without celebratory or denigrating value; at its core, it is a desire to reach an outcome by putting an option on the table.
However!, as the OP [and The Ferret] suggests, using buttons to create that effect could be viewed as creating an environment of expectations because of the fact that the buttons are visible whether the question is asked or not, and more importantly, the buttons are taken in the context of this option not even having existed before.
When people start publicly answering a question of a personal nature that, as far as I can tell, has no parallel meme in the modern world (i.e.., there's no other question of a personal nature we indicate preference on with an adornment), it moves towards an environment where not participating accrues connotations, and possibly also where participating with a "NO" button has connotations.
In that sense, I don't find this celebrating or degrading of women, but I find it systemically exploitative. The system creates, by the pure virtue of existing, a peer pressure effect that is unneeded; the question that people who 'take advantage' of these buttons ask could be asked to anyone. If someone complains and it's ruled valid that asking her, politely, to touch her breasts, constitutes sexual harassment, ...
I am also of the opinion that it would be considered precedent for it being harassment to ask or offer someone a button, be it a "YES" or "NO" button. Consequently, the system is more harmful than good because those who experienced the imperative premise (the desire to touch more breasts) already had options present to them that correctly distributed risk/reward -- this, however, has a peer-pressure element comparable to carpet-bombing a demographic.
TL;DR -- I can't judge the objective celebratory/degrading nature of the system, but it is very easy both logically and practically to see that it is inherently an exploitative and harmful system.
Hey guys, she has a green button!
GET HER
No it's totally cool we are just basking in the beauty of your body, even though we don't know your name.
Now, can I put my sweaty hand on your chesticles?
Well more congoers, a special kind of terrible.
Also this sounds like those 'hugging badges' taken to a new even creepier level. Though I wouldn't say this is aimed at women, pretty much all congoers are walking around with massive tits.
If people want to get together and touch each other I'm fine with it. This just seems like boob touching being shoe-horned into a totally unrelated social activity by a bunch of creepy ass people.
There's no way to remove any negative connotation or stereotypical view from this. Even if you attempted to look at it as purely "scientific" (in a closet-dwelling pale-ass virgin sort of way) participation itself carries with it so many avenues for abuse.
It's largely one sided, and gender focused in the objects of the study/premise of the argument.
On the surface, it seems harmless, which is why it seems "Ok" to those that don't take it down every possible avenue of motive, or lack thereof. It could be playing on girls that have felt unattractive, or worse. You cannot remove from it the giant swath of so many bad things.
Plus,
You cannot distill the ick from this, no matter how hard this ferret person can try.
You really hit the nail on the top of the mountain sir.
I wonder how many guys wore the red badge for THAT.
This is why I don't do Cons. Oh, the shenanigans you witness just having booked the same hotel as a con.
Then she calls the reverend sharpton and his legal team.
GG
For one, jesus christ not everything nerds do needs to reference another thing nerds do.
Also, it's not open source! If it were open source I'd be able to compile my own set at home and play with those!
If the intent were "touch boobs" or "have boobs touched" that would be fine.
Read the write-up of this on Feministing, rather than the (admittedly) very creepy excerpt above.
The guy that started this "project" has a severe social disconnect and seems to have this very smug sense of entitlement, superiority, and empowerment.
If anything, I think this is far less about sex and far more about control, the ability to socially engineer a convention full of women to let men go around groping them, like it's some kind of fucking game and he both made the game and won the game after forcing everyone to play it.
I'd like to smash this guy in the face.
Systemically, I can say that it's terribly rancid because it creates a situation where blame is implicitly being imparted in large amount to the victim (the victim also being women who don't wear pins, who wear "NO" pins, and entire other swaths of demographics) instead of to the party who should be taking initiative. When you have a personal imperative, the risk should fall entirely onto you --
hence why my stance is, and is going to remain for the time foreseeable, "if they want to ask women to touch their breasts, I think they're perfectly welcome to ask women individually until a judge establishes it is de jure harassment."
It may be because I am predisposed to beautiful and am a giant, judging asshole.
Or, I simply enjoy the puritan value of keeping it and "them" in the collective pants and sweaters.
I don't want to be sandblasted with sex all the time, As a society, we'd never get anything done, and be annoyed half the time because people would abuse the license to put on exhibitions all over.
(I'm imagine a world filled with constant groping and fondling) <--At some point, my god the herpes would kill us all.
Red badges indeed
you CAN
it just requires a lot of food and lack of exercise, and even then the end result is sub-par
So what you're saying is someone got Binary Blobs stuck on your open source Chest.
My gut sides with your own assumption, if only because the imperative to move away from asking individually and towards a systemic approach can really only be one of control and shifting the risk half of the risk/reward dynamic. The systemic element is the dangerous thing here -- not so much what these men and women did, but the fact that they attempted to make it widespread and made personal information available (via the pins, or lack thereof) out of context when it is so personal that letting it exist out of context is absolutely not permissible.
U sir, are full of win very early in the morning, for me at least...
http://feministing.com/archives/009066.html#more
WARNING: may contain feminism.
Now with text!
"It was exciting, of course. I won't deny it was sexual. But it was a miraculous sexuality that didn't feel dirty, but clean.
Emboldened, we started asking other people. And lo, in the rarified atmosphere of the con, few were offended and many agreed. And they also felt that strange charge. 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. They understood how this worked instinctively, and it worked.
Did you catch that? "The ones who'd dressed to impress"? Almost as if they were "asking for it"? That because they were wearing a tight shirt, their breasts were practically public property, anyway?
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."
Because what could be more intoxicating than the approval of a room full of tech dudes?
We talked about this. It was an Open-Source Project, making breasts available to select folks. (Like any good project, you need access control, because there are loutish men and women who just Don't Get It.) And we wanted a signal to let people know that they were okay with being asked politely, so we turned it into a project: The Open-Source Boob Project.
For those of you not technologically inclined, "open-source" software means the code is available for anyone to use. All-access. Everyone has a right to it. Just like women's bodies! (Get it? They're so clever!)
Oh, but it doesn't stop there...
Apparently Ferrett and friends were so blown away by their ability to demand access to women's bodies that they decided to make buttons to distribute at an upcoming software and science fiction convention:
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?"
And if you weren't a total lout - the women retained their right to say no, of course - they would push their chests out, and you would be allowed into the sanctity of it. That exchange of happiness where one person are told with gropes and touches that they are desirable and the other is someone who's allowed to desire.
Understandably, this puke-worthy "project" was instantly denounced by many, many others in the open-source software and science fiction community. The Ferrett issued a sputtering "clarification" that was just as bad as the original post. (It included the defense that because women were among the gropers, it couldn't be that sexist, right? Nevermind the fact that only women were the gropees.)
And then, showing an incredibly amount of sense for a mid-sized rodent mustelid who had just advocated a public groping project, he issued an apology:
If I’ve contributed to the idea that women are not safe, then I’ve failed with a capital “F,” regardless of the underlying reality. And if people think that all cons are filled with horrific swarms of gropers, well, then I’ve also failed.
Yes. FAIL. But rather than dwell on the Ferrett's many failures, I choose instead to heartily endorse the "Open Source Swift Kick to the Balls Project." (Men, of course, would indicate their preference for ball-kicking by wearing a button. They would have the right to say no, so it's not like this is sexist or violent or anything!)
The software world is not exactly one I'm familiar with, so thanks to readers Zing and Jennifer for the heads up. And if you are into tech stuff and science fiction, check out WisCon ("world's leading feminist science fiction convention"). I'm gonna go out on a limb and guess that you will not be asked to wear a button indicating whether you'd like to be groped.
Bolded parts from Ferret's blog.
It's pretty disgusting all around, in my opinion.
Also, Oboro, I cannot access Feministing from work, sorry. Such blogs are banned here.
EDIT: NP Drez, Kagera covered for you. And now I'm off! :^:
EDIT 2: Sorry Kagera, misattributed the link. :G
she calls him "a mid-sized rodent mustelid"
LOL
I think it adds a feminist perspective to the article.
Mainly being how they targeted women 'dressed to impress' and how women who came to them asked if they were 'attractive' enough to get fondled.
I mean come on, it's obvious at least some of these women were in it for validation, not 'free expression'.
Advancing it into a public declaration of "I would like to be groped publicly" seems like it's damaging, and from the femenisting article:
At that point, with those words, you should understand that you're treading on dangerous emotional grounds, and the project should likely be canned immediately.
That's exactly why its ewwwww, I mean the place and time in which this happened just speaks volumes about the inside of this dude's head. Its not attractive. I also feel really sorry for the girls who felt needy enough to play into it. Talk about lack of self-respect
exactly.
That dude's comments are fucking disturbing and this is coming form a horny as hell geek myself. He actually uses the term "sanctity" when referring to groping a stranger? Guy sounds like someone who failed out of date rapist school.