I get to think about things a lot. In the past week theferrett wrote about the Open Source Boob Project. I will confess that I am not completely done with all the comments (dude–there are 1300+ of them…) but I’m a fair way into them. And I’m having a lot of thoughts about it. I think I am starting to bore Noah, so I’ll share with lj instead.
I will even cut it because it got long and I don’t want capnkjb to get mad at me. 🙂
First: I’m pretty upset by the number of people who are being nasty to Ferrett and his friends about what they did. There are a lot of insults and put downs and really hostile things going on deriding them all as bad people. I think that sucks.
For those who don’t want to actually wade into the fray over on Ferrett’s journal: spontaneously at a con a group of friends decided to start a fairly open-ended grope-fest. Only a few people outside the group were ever asked to participate and they were asked in what may have been a less than tactful way, but no one seemed upset; moreover people seemed quite thrilled. So at the next con the group of friends had buttons: green for “It’s ok to ask” and red for “It’s not ok to ask.” So to be clear, the buttons were saying that it was ok to ask if someone was interested in being groped (primarily breasts it sounds like, but also chests on guys and asses on both genders) not that it was ok to just walk up and grope them. They didn’t spend a lot of time recruiting so the group was around 40 people who had pretty much known about this pre-con. It was not orgy-like as everyone had their clothing on the whole time and it wasn’t intensely sexual, more about trying to express appreciation. This is the premise as I understand it. Oh, and it’s important to mention that the group was roughly 50%+ female and that females initiated as much or more groping as the men did. [This wasn’t explained well until the comments so it’s something that most people didn’t get from the original post–I did, but I’m like that.]
Then Ferrett came home and wrote about his experiences in his charming and perhaps naive way. He wrote about it from his point of view, a heterosexual guy, and his bias was pretty obvious–as bias tends to be. He has been ripped apart for it. The comments are going off on how horrible and terrible this is and I don’t agree.
I think it is pretty safe to say that I have a larger than normal personal space bubble. 🙂 This can be further clarified as there are times when I am just not ok with touch at all. My optimal default for the world would be that everyone had to ask before touching other people at all. Let me draw attention to the important word here: ask. I think the Open Source Boob Project is pretty darn terrific. Let me tell you why:
I think our society is pretty broken in a lot of ways. I think that men and women are conditioned from boyhood and girlhood to have really terrible ideas around touching one another. I think that people need more chances to learn how to talk honestly about the fact that they would like to touch people and that it doesn’t make them skeezy or gross. I hate how much shame is inherent in our culture. I hate that men are told to be ashamed of asking to touch women, for even wanting to touch women. I hate that women are told to be ashamed of liking being asked, for not liking being asked, for saying yes, for saying no, for…. the list goes on. Many people in the thread were talking about how even asking isn’t appropriate and I disagree with that point of view. It was often trotted out, “But what if she was sexually assaulted in the past and you are triggering her,” well… then it is awesome that she is getting the chance to say no and have that be respected.
I don’t think this project scales to general society. I don’t think it is a good idea to do this sort of thing with strangers on the street. I really don’t. I’m not advocating that. I’m extremely well aware of how unsafe that would be and that there are people who would push things in bad ways. What I like about this, what I think is awesome about this, is that a group of friends can put down some barriers. I think that within small-ish groups of people this kind of thing can be incredibly healthy. I think this is healthy because more touch is an awesome thing. I think this is healthy because more practice saying no is good for everyone. I’m not saying that people should put up with touch they don’t want. I’m not saying that asking should be done in an aggressive or demanding way. No one should be pressured into accepting touch. But I think that just about everyone would do well to learn more about what it feels like to say no.
People tell me pretty frequently (at least when I go out–not so much just now) that they really admire that I am firm about my boundaries and that they wish they could be more like me. Mostly women say this, but men do too sometimes. People: when I say no I go through guilt and shame and sometimes I wander off and shake. It is hard to overcome the societal programming and say no. But I do it because it is good for me. It is good for the people asking to hear it. Learning to say no as much as I do was a hard journey but a necessary one. I’m not saying that everyone will have as hard of a time with it as I do, but I still think it is something people need practice at. I also firmly believe that this process is a lot of the reason I have healed as much as I have from being sexually assaulted. I really believe that saying no pretty frequently empowers me. Empowerment is one of those funny things–no one else can do it for me, I have to do it for myself; so I do by saying no.
I also think that it’s an awesome thing that people are being given the chance to ask in a much less threatening environment. Asking for what you want is terrifying. I hate going to dance events now because when I stopped going for a while people stopped asking me to dance. There are around five people who ask me now and only one person who makes a point of it with real enthusiasm. (No really Anthony, I love you.) So the last time I went I kind of wall-flowered. Many of the times I asked other people I was turned down because they had “promised the dance to someone else.” I don’t suspect they were lying, but it was bloody hard on my ego. Admitting you want something is hard. Admitting that you want access to someone else’s body, even in a relatively minor way (touching breasts through clothing isn’t *that* intimate in the overall scale of intimacy) is near overwhelming. Even if you really do want to do it because wow, they are just so beautiful and you want to show them that you appreciate that.
There are pitfalls here. Many many pitfalls. Much older men flocking to really young girls. All the men going after the prettiest girl in the room and ignoring every other woman. I don’t know what the answer to this is. I think that encouraging people to appreciate the beauty of more people is a good step. For me the most important part of all of this is actively asking. Asking is so important and is so little a part of our culture. I don’t get mad if people ask me to touch my belly. I get mad if they reach out and do it without my permission. Some days I let people who ask, some days I don’t. Sometimes I hug people who ask, sometimes I don’t. Sometimes I will cheerfully let someone touch my breasts if they ask, sometimes I won’t. The question is not in and of itself offensive if it is done neutrally without aggression. If someone tells you no it’s never ok to say, “Why not?” That’s the problem. Not the question.
This is well-written.
Also, you opened a bold tag and closed it italic at the word “ask”, so the whole thing is bold in my browser 🙂
Never mind. You fixed it. Thanks!
I fixed it within a minute. Shouldn’t you be working? 😛
excellent thoughts and writing.
People *should* ask
rather than doing and asking forgiveness
or pleading ignorance/innocence –
especially with a pregnant belly.
It took me a while at parties to be ok with consenting adults doing what they were going to do – but I got over myself and let them consent to each other. Lots of people haven’t had to confront a situation like a play party, so I think they react to theferrett out of their own (limited) experience… like I might have 10 years ago.
thanks. i’ve been hearing vague mentions of the open source boob project, but this is the first time i’ve bothered to try to understand it. it’s complicated. personally, i think that asking should always, always be ok. i’ve yet to hear any argument for why it should not be, and i think not being able to be upfront about it just makes things a lot harder and more messed up. in theory the button sounds like a good idea (i got this free button that i absolutely loved from burning man; it said “negotiate sex”– suggesting that it was both fine and great, but also mandatory, to negotiate. unfortunately, i lost it) but on the other hand, as described in the article, the buttons pretty much indicated not just willingness to talk, but basically willingness to be groped, albeit with the ability to refuse in what the description seemed to suggest would be rare exceptions. having everyone visibly wearing these signs of availability, rather than personally discussing their preferences in each situation, seems like it could put uncomfortable social pressure on others, especially when combined with the sort of common geek attitude that being sexually available/nonexclusive/egalitarian is the “right” way to be. does that make sense? it’s an interesting situation, and i’m glad people are talking about it so much.
There have actually been a huge number of people who think it isn’t ok to ask. They believe that asking is already a violation. And my understanding is that given that it was within a fairly limited group of people there weren’t that many no’s but that people did say no when they wanted to. I think that is more about the limited size of the group than pressure to say yes no matter what.
I got the impression, perhaps erroneously, that people actually did have more of a conversation than just “Is it ok to touch?” “Ok” then do whatever. Maybe that is just my naive belief that in this kind of situation people will talk about boundaries. I’m totally boundary girl. 🙂
I understand and agree with your point that there is a lot of pressure to be open and nonexclusive. I think that is wrong, but I’m not sure what the alternative is. I don’t think that trying to restrict things artificially worked either. 🙂
The argument advanced for asking itself being a violation is a radical feminist one. It holds as its central proposition that our society is one which is so replete with patriarchy and misogyny that a male asking a woman is essentially equivalent to a master asking a slave something. He has all the power of the utterly male-dominated society behind him, and he brings that enormous pressure to bear on the woman. The woman being asked isn’t just responding to the man in question, she is responding to the empowered half of the entire society in which she lives, and she is deciding whether to say, “Yes, I will submit to your Y chromosome,” or “No, I am defiant to the status quo.”
Under those circumstances, radical feminists hold that just being male and asking constitutes duress, and negates the consent that might be given in response to asking. Male-initiated sexual contact is thus made molestation by definition, and male-initiated sex is by definition rape.
I think this twaddle denigrates the experiences of people in this world who have actually been molested or raped, and every time it gets spouted off at me, I have to restrain myself from simply walking out of the room.
thanks for explaining that, since i didn’t really feel like reading a thousand comments to get to it. i guess i can sort of see that argument (although i agree that conflating societal coercion with actual rape is nutty), but as a radical feminist who hates initiating (ironically enough, partly because of experiences with oppressive patriarchal culture), i don’t think i would like the alternative much.
although, i guess an argument of this type does sort of better explain my concern with any social pressure to walk around wearing buttons displaying your consent status…to me, that kind of removes the experiential human element of making a series of unique decisions, and makes the whole question of consent more of a political issue than it would otherwise be.
y’know…
this whole thing is sort of odd to me.
in all my life
i never asked if i could touch.
nor
was i ever told not to touch.
i guess i simply waited until it was obvious
one way, or the other.
maybe there were some missed opportunities.
but at least i never pissed off any owners
of things i wanted to touch.
or made anyone feel unsafe.
Thanks for the post, this was very well stated. I agree with your comments on learning that you can in fact say no, and see it respected. I’d add that it’s also good to have experience with hearing no, and that no is not the end of the world, it’s just no.
Some of the responses are unbelievable. This is a sad, sad thing.
I had an Incident in high school that taught me how to say “no” and while I never want to go through something like that again, I’m glad I did. I’d waffled and been polite and tried to be a “nice” girl a “good” girl but it didn’t work. ’cause being “nice” and being “good” doesn’t convey “I’m not interested. please leave me alone.” For that matter, saying “I’m interested, please leave me alone” didn’t work either, but I was able to stick to my guns and say “No” and learn how to not engage because “No” was my final answer and the subject was not open to further discussion and I really am a better person for it.
I can say “no” and not be a bad person. I don’t have to be mean or cold or bitchy or rude. I can just say “no.” And that’s my right.
Thank you for that very well-written analysis. I’ve been reading bits and pieces and finding various bits triggering alll kinds of internal upset. But I haven’t been able to wrap my head around it in a way that I could get written out and identify the triggers.
This helped settle it a bit.
Not only is it good to learn to say no, it’s insulting to assume that rational adults are somehow incapable of doing so. The insinuation in a number of posts that there was something off or wrong about the folks involved, really started to piss me off. There were posts that very much gave me the impression that people thought the women involved were desperate or messed up in some fashion to even begin to be OK with the experiment, rather than normal human beings who decided this was an interesting project.
I consider myself an intelligent, and relatively geeky female (ie, similar to the women involved there). Very few things piss me off more than the implication I’m too (stupid, emotional, uninformed, brainwashed) to make up my own damn mind and say yes, no, or maybe. I may not always be good at picking the answer that’s going to be best for me, but that’s called ‘learning’. It’s stupid to think I’ll get better at it if the rules are arranged so that the supposedly correct answer is already chosen for me, or if I never even hear the questions at all. And it’s insulting to think a grown woman needs that variety of protection. So, projecting that particular aspect of my own experience out to the women involved there, and I was getting rather wound up over some of the comments.
OK, now I can quit spending mental cycles on that and get back to the writing I’m supposed to be doing. Thanks for all the thinking and typing there. 🙂
like you,
my personal space runs well beyond
the ends of my outstretched hands.
and there are times when i can’t stand to anyone come near me.
it gives the me creeps.
and i’m militant about it.
one of the reasons i’ve studied martial arts
it to keep unwelcome hands from getting close.
anybody that sticks an unwlecome finger in my face
or pokes me in the chest
is gonna end up
with a broken wrist,
face-down on the floor,
or both.
on the other hand
i can be very huggy
and love to feel a friend in my arms.
it all depends.
on me, mostly.