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

[watervole.livejournal.com]

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

[noveldevice.livejournal.com]

See this comment (http://james-nicoll.livejournal.com/1229281.html?thread=18693089#t18693089), where kate_schaefer puts the problem rather succinctly, if I may cherry-pick:

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.

That is the problem and the whole of the problem. When a man puts on a button inviting that he be groped, he is getting something. Part of what he's getting is an assumed moral authority to pressure the women around him to also put on a button inviting themselves to be groped: see, women, he says, I have adopted an outward symbol of my willingness to compromise the integrity of my body, which is more inviolate than yours. Therefore if you do not play along, you are a frigid ugly lesbian with small breasts who is also fat and hairy.

[jbsegal.livejournal.com]

Hetero-normative assumptions much?
My reading of the comments to the original post last night - cursory at best - says that there were certainly m->f, f->f and f->m touching happening. I'm guessing there was m->m, too, but I don't know.

Yeah, yeah, I know, hot-bi-babe action assumes the man is getting something too...

Feh.

I've received spontaneous mail from female friends pointing me at the post and saying they liked the idea.

[noveldevice.livejournal.com]

The dominant culture is hetero-normative, and so are dominant cultural assumptions and assumptions about intrinsic power. Not nice, not normal, not even typical, thankfully. But I think that we have to be aware of what stuff looks like, even if we decide to go ahead and do it anyway. :)

There are people on my f-list, and on my f-of-f-list, who really like the idea--men and women both. And if women want to participate, that's fine, but the whole thing really bothers me for a lot of reasons, one of which is that as a large-breasted redheaded nineteen-year-old in the SCA thirteen years ago I really have had enough of people touching me, telling other people they'd touched me, urging other people to touch me themselves, and this really reminds me of some parts of the SCA culture that I strongly disliked.

[micheinnz.livejournal.com]

Men do not have the history of objectification that women do, if there's a guy who has ever suffered the kind of sexual harassment many attractive women do, I'll shit a brick,

Well get the lube ready because I know of more than one instance where men have been molested and even raped for daring to be attractive and out in public. It does happen. It may not be as common an experience for men as it is for women, but it _does happen_.

[montrealais.livejournal.com]

How would they have reacted if a man had groped them?