Welcome to the Harlan Ellison Memorial Personal Boundaries Club

[james_davis_nicoll]

Sad male fan capitalizes on way to be even more creepy to female fans.

As seen on a wide variety of LJ accounts. I have to say there's a clear consensus on the idea of treating women's bodies as public commons and it's not heading in the direction of commutarian touching. Who could have predicted that outcome?

Comments

[daedala.livejournal.com]

I have often considered going to that con.

I won't, now. That's vile.

[winterknight.livejournal.com]

In fairness to the general population of the con, it does seem to have been a cluster of 40 or so people out of 1000. Unfortunately, since many people seem to think it was a brilliant idea they will be taking to other cons, you may be out of luck when it comes to avoiding it. It really is vile.

[mayakda.livejournal.com]

I read the whole thing thinking it was some kind of satire, then the comments made me realize it wasn't.

[arielstarshadow.livejournal.com]

Actually, please be sure you read the responses.

As it turns out, there were a number of women participating in this, and there are as many positive responses and there are negative.

[noveldevice.livejournal.com]

Good for them. Don't touch my breasts.

[the-nita.livejournal.com]

James, I've enough fan friends & acquaintances to know that expecting everyone at a con to have social clues is like asking for the sun in my hands. That someone was enough of a nob to ask doesn't surprise me. That there were enough women of a suitable mindset for their project doesn't surprise me either.

If they're going to respect their stated boundaries (buttons, ribbons, whatever, and if you're not wearing one, no one bugs you), meh. Morons abound - getting your nickers in a twist over it seems rather too much like work.

Now, if they don't respect that - dude - you get what you deserve.

[antikythera.livejournal.com]

This doesn't scare me away from going to conventions. I wouldn't participate, I wouldn't wear a button. If someone asked, I would tell them that I was not wearing a button and that they should not ask. If someone groped without asking, I would have them pinned to a wall before they could register any pleasure from the gropage.

Having said that, I think I'm a rarity.

Socially clueless people abound at conventions. So do shy people and introverted people. Shy, introverted women are not going to take well to being asked if they can be felt up by socially clueless male strangers who didn't notice the lack of a button. This is going to turn conventions into an extremely uncomfortable space for many women.

I think I would avoid on principle any convention that allowed this outside of dedicated room parties, and that was not expressly an adult/alternative-lifestyles convention where most of the attendees know what to expect and how to behave.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

I wonder if this would be a good place to discuss the subtle difference between the sort of free love where consenting adults pursue relationships regardless of society's restrictive conventions and the sort of free love where women should make themselves available to any passing man [1] regardless of how they feel about him.

1: I know, there should be a reversed version of that but for some reason I never come across proposals that men should make themselves available to any passing woman regardless of how they feel about him.

Say, that's kind of hetrosexist. Assume the existance of two more statements to fill the gaps.

[watervole.livejournal.com]

Actually, reading the thread, it's clear that some men were wearing badges as well.

[maruad.livejournal.com]

I guess I am the shy type. I would be very uncomfortable with people I know (let alone strangers) coming up to me and asking to touch my boobs... and I'm a guy! My first thought would be creepy... my second would it is time to lose weight.

[thesaucernews.livejournal.com]

Isn't this what RealDolls are supposed to be for? Wait a few years and Honda will squeeze an Asimo robot into one and you won't even have to count them as luggage.

[winterknight.livejournal.com]

I'm tired of the assertion that this is opt-in, because it's NOT. Not fundamentally. Everyone is participating because everyone there has a body. I can't opt out of my boobs. I can't opt out of people making a value judgment about me when they see I'm not wearing a button, even if I never knew about it when I got there. Having your breasts touched is optional -- WHAT A NOVEL IDEA. Being ranked as 'unwilling to play along' is not optional. I wear a red button every day, basically, and not only am I not PROUD of it, I'm really fucking tired of having to put it on and living in a world full of the colour-blind.

[daedala.livejournal.com]

YES. That.

[brownkitty.livejournal.com]

I think this is the most self-deceptive statement of "I'm not trying to treat you like a piece of meat." that I've ever seen.

[lauriemann.livejournal.com]

It's one thing to shake hands or even hug a fellow fan. But offering up body parts to randoms? If the story really is true, the guy wasn't the only one with major boundary issues. The women were a little out of it as well.

[tavella.livejournal.com]

The subset of female fans that are badly malsocialized may be smaller than the male version, but it's not non-existent.

[shsilver.livejournal.com]

One issue I haven't seen anyone mention is...

I enjoy bringing my daughters to cons. They enjoy going to cons. However, this sort of behavior would make me very uncomfortable about having my daughter at the con as it models behavior which I feel is inappropriate for young children to see.* If the con had announced ahead of time that this sort of thing was going on, I could make an informed decision about whether or not to bring them**, but this wasn't the case at this year's convention.

*I'm not thrilled with the teenage girls being led around certain cons on leashes either.

**Or whether or not I should attend.

[the-nita.livejournal.com]

I've gone to one con with my son (who's still reasonably young). I don't need boob projects to know already that until he's old enough to really differentiate between consentual and not, play and not, and able to make reasoned informed decisions on his own, I won't be taking him to cons...

[luna-the-cat.livejournal.com]

Yuck. Yuck. Yuck. Yuck.

I'd been missing US cons. Not no more. This is bringing back the memories I'd suppressed.

[netmouse.livejournal.com]

You had memories of women being encouraged to make social acceptable decisions to encourage someone to *ask* about touching a part of their body that most of society says we women are not allowed to let people touch, and then to make our own decision as to whether or not we wanted to permit that touch from that person?

[pats-quinade.livejournal.com]

See, I was having trouble coming up with a humor post for Friday, and this takes care of that for me. Thanks!

[supermouse.livejournal.com]

Ew. I've read right down the comments on that post and it still reads like 'women are breast carriers, here's another way to shame them into putting up the goods for us straight men'.

DO NOT WANT.

I don't care that they have little opt-in buttons. I don't want to be somewhere that has the buttons.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

Now, now. I'm sure if a gay man wanted to touch one of the male participant's breasts, there wouldn't be a problem because that would be inconsistant with the movement's basic assumptions.

I will point out that science depends on testing hypotheses.

[kate-schaefer.livejournal.com]

More than 30 years ago, Candice Massey and I sat in a hallway at some midestern convention (Autoclave? Midwescon? Marcon? It was a long time ago) and discussed the tendency of certain male fen to grope women around them. Casually, without permission. There weren't a lot of guys who did that, even then, but they weren't generally subject to any kind of widespread community disapproval. It was a thing men did; it was a thing women put up with.

We didn't like it, and we weren't going to put up with it. We were going to do something about it.

What we did about it was to grope the butts of every man who went by us. We told people we were looking for the best male butt at the convention. We agreed that it belonged to the rather bony teenaged Gary Farber.

In retrospect (and I'm talking retrospect of a few hours after we did it as well as years later), this table-turning was not the most well-thought-out feminist project with which I've ever been associated. It surprised quite a few men, but the only ones who objected to being objectified, as far as I can remember, were men I knew to be feminists themselves. Some of the serial gropers we were parodying came through the hallway extra times to be re-groped. A parody which falls that flat isn't successful as a political action.

The problem with our plan was, and is, that when a man gropes a woman, the man is the one who is assumed to be getting something, and when a woman gropes a man, the man is the one who is assumed to be getting something. The power dynamics of the exchange are different when it takes place between people who know each other because they have a personal relationship; when it takes place between people who do not know each other, or who do not know each other well, the power structures of the surrounding culture are the ones that prevail.

And yet. And yet. When human beings are in their teens and twenties, there is such a powerful desire to touch and be touched, an overwhelming yearning for physical contact, an impatience with social barriers and restrictions. That desire itself is, I think, utterly innocent, utterly biological, and I do think that people need to continue to try to find ways to express that desire without perpetuating that idea that women's bodies are, as James put it, public commons. Balancing liberties is always tricky.

[tavella.livejournal.com]

The more successful equivalent would be to get a bunch of guys (whether gay, bi, or just helpful straight), to go around asking the perpetrators of this fun little game if they could grope their balls.

Let's just say, I suspect that for most of them, attitudes towards "open source bodies" would change abruptly.

[andrewducker]

Seen the followup?

[movingfinger.livejournal.com]

I am embarrassed to admit that I just had to stop reading at the part where he explains he didn't want to speak for the women.

[movingfinger.livejournal.com]

When did groping, and anxiety, revulsion, discussions, expectations about groping, become perceived as common at cons?

I'm including in that all the huggy, cuddly, backrubby, stroky stuff too.

In the '60s? Were there enough female fen around and were male fen aggressive enough? In the early '70s?

And, more importantly, why is this behavior now considered normal for a con?

[kate-schaefer.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure what's the equivalent in power terms. Still, no matter what male body part, the best thing to do after asking men about groping their bodies would be not to grope their bodies. The point of such an exercise is to get people to think, not to embarrass, sexualize, or objectify them. That is, revenge may be momentarily satisfying, but it doesn't change the world, while reframing the way people think about their experiences can change the world.

Eventually.

[tanac.livejournal.com]

The lovely misia has posted a rejoinder:

Open Source Swift Kick to the Balls Project (OSSKBP)

[luna-the-cat.livejournal.com]

I was telling my husband about this whole thing during the car ride home from work. And oddly enough, this was precisely the suggestion HE came up with, too.

[greytweed.livejournal.com]

This is the best title for the "project" I've seen so far.

[jojomojo.livejournal.com]

Where do you get the idea that theferrett invented this? It was invented by a woman.

You might want to read his followup -

http://theferrett.livejournal.com/1088382.html

I know theferrett personally and consider him a friend, so I object to him being called a 'sad male fan'. I know some of the people who wore the buttons personally, and I object to some other people in these threads telling them they are bad people, or messed up, or betraying womanhood, for doing what they want to with their own bodies (which did not, incidentally, include offering them up as public commons to any creep who wanted to touch them).

This wasn't some icky plot he came up with so he could grope people. I'd expand further, but, well, I'm not sure there's much point. Anything I could say is either in that post, or in the comments of the women (and men) who participated and wore the buttons.

[daedala.livejournal.com]

He certainly seems to be the epitome of the "sad male fan." At every opportunity for demonstrating otherwise, he keeps digging in deeper.

A woman may have invented it at the con, but he certainly has set himself as the standardbearer for bringing this to the unhealthy, prudish congoing world.

[netmouse.livejournal.com]

yeah, because he *totally* asked before he groped her up on stage. No wait, he didn't.

[netmouse.livejournal.com]

I have a button that says "Sorry, no." ---that sort of thing mixed with a sword or something usually encourages people to keep their distance. well, no, I shouldn't say that. I've not had to wear a sword.

[netmouse.livejournal.com]

In recent years it's seemed like flame wars have gotten less likely in the internet circles where I roam, so it's been startling to see this event, what my friend sheryl67 (one of the women who invented the project) has called the "Open Source Stoning Project".

I think part of it is due to people's tendency to follow the lead of authority figures, such as James here, who continues to characterize it as "Sad male fan capitalizes on way to be even more creepy to female fans" - a lead-in judgment that colors how everyone reads it. (And that baffles me, really. I do hope James does not believe that every male fan who wants to touch pretty women is "sad" and "creepy" because otherwise I feel sorry for him and the very sad and creepy world in which he lives.)

It's also just about how untrue statements travel the internet *much* faster than the truth. We found that out in a BIG way when we changed Minicon 20 years ago. Word got out that we were excluding media fen (not true) and once everyone was pissed, they stayed pissed. The corrections will never catch up with the misrepresentations, and when the OSBP project is misrepresented it reminds people of so many icky associations they are quick to slam on it.

The news media in this country have not done anything to teach people to check the facts before judging things based on one or two reports. The ferrett really did post an initial description that was clearly not something most people could relate to, and did a poor job of explaining, and he has very much recanted the *way* in which he first wrote about it. Because once the storm was up and rolling, there was no way to call it back.

[mari-redstar.livejournal.com]

Question, which I have not seen addressed: what if someone with a yes-ask-me button says no? No, I'm in a hurry, I don't feel like it, I don't like the look of you for some reason, I just don't want to- people have been saying "But they asked politely!" but I haven't seen much "and they were polite when rejected, too!" It's just- I've met a lot of people who thought asking politely entitled them to a 'yes' on whatever the question was. So if I have a ask-me sign, and somebody asks and I say no, are they going to say "Thanks anyway," or are they going to say "Why not? Just for a moment! What's wrong with me, huh? Why are you wearing the button if you don't want people asking?" I'm sure many of the askers were polite and not pushy and so forth, but that's a whole con full of people. I honestly don't mind the scenario as presented theoretically, but there are some very obvious bad directions it could be going, you know?

[ambitious-wench.livejournal.com]

Oooh, yes, I have to agree; Being the Discordian I am, I'd wear an "Ask me" button, say no to everyone, and when I'd get the "Why did you wear the button then?" jerk, I'd look him square in the eye and say "So I could say no. I've never had the chance to say no before because all the guys that grabbed my tits didn't bother to ask."

Either that or I'd push pins out of a padded bra and wear it over my clothes with a big button that says "YES!! Oh, GODS, YES!!!"