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

[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.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

Equating women's breasts with men's balls might undermine the 1990s effort in Ontario to allow women the same range of attire options as men (Both men and women in Ontario may now opt to go out nude from the waist up).

Granted, our climate makes this mostly theoretical but it removed one precedent for treating men and women differently.

[tavella.livejournal.com]

Hmm. Fair enough. Assgroping might be a better equivalent.

[jbsegal.livejournal.com]

... and was an accepted part of this exercise already, from what I read.

Certainly my - admittedly cursory - reading of the comments last night saw m->f, f->f, and f->m groping happening, and I'm totally willing to assume that there was similar m->m, too.

[tormentedartist.livejournal.com]

Wow I think that was really well put. Thank you for posting that. The last paragraph was the non creepy version of what I think the Ferrett was trying to get across and failing.