Open Source Boob Project

In LiveJournal Land, an interesting hoopla has erupted around The Open-Source Boob Project. The story starts at ConFusion in Ann Arbor, an annual sci-fi, fantasy, anime, gaming, comics, etc., convention. If you’ve ever shown up at a con wearing a set of boobs, you know that the gender and personal space dynamics can get a bit—well, touchy. It’s not that there aren’t female geeks (and if you don’t read her already, check out Karen Healey for awesome feminist analysis of comics and geekdom), but the majority of cons are still sausagefests and not always female-friendly.



This year’s ConFusion took the creepy vibe that women often feel at cons to a whole new level, however.

“This should be a better world,” a friend of mine said. “A more honest one, where sex isn’t shameful or degrading. I wish this was the kind of world where say, ‘Wow, I’d like to touch your breasts,’ and people would understand that it’s not a way of reducing you to a set of nipples and ignoring the rest of you, but rather a way of saying that I may not yet know your mind, but your body is beautiful.”

Obviously, the solution to our sexually repressed, sexually confused culture where women are objectified and reduced to a collection of body parts is to instigate a con-wide gropefest. Being geeks, the guys in charge of this project decided that the gropefest needed to be perfected and streamlined, so by Penguicon, they had two sets of buttons that could be issued to women, advertising the availability status of their ta-tas.

I can only assume from reading the post that an empowered, post-patriarchal utopia ensued.


Oh, it didn’t? I wonder why. Springheel_jack has an excellent smackdown:

The ferrett wonders why a man’s asking, out of the blue, if he can feel up a woman’s boobs shouldn’t be understood as “a way of saying that I may not yet know your mind, but your body is beautiful.” But this is simply to ask why he shouldn’t be able to continue to treat women as they have always been treated. Body first, sexual delectation to men first, as object first, “mind” - i.e. as a human subject - very firmly second. It’s simply to intensify the condition of patriarchal gender relations that already existed - or, to put it more simply, it’s a frustrated man’s fantasy of putting women back in their place.

And here we have the usual libertarian solution to everything - in the name of a false individuality, itself the product of an illegitimate reification and universalization of the social conditions of propertied white men - we have a retreat into the worst of the dark days of gender relations before feminism, offered as a so-called “advance” into a “more honest” and “freer” world. This is pernicious masculine ideology at its most pure and most insufferable. In the name of “empowering” women, we have…more of the same poison that women have been trying to free themselves of for all this time.

Go read the whole thing—I can’t add much to his analysis beyond to say that it’s spot-on. Obviously, this is not just about geekdom. Certain problems are more pronounced in geekdom because a lot of the standard modes of interpersonal relations and social niceties go out the window (and rightly so). But the patriarchy doesn’t. You can tell, because no one was proposing an open-source nutsack-grabbing project.



Look, I have a nice set of boobs. Really nice, according to some. Ever since I got them, I’ve been fending off assholes who think they have the right to grab them, whether I want it or not. I don’t need a button to advertise whether my boobs are touchable or not—if they are, gentlemen, you’ll know about it.


Update: Misia has a response. You should read it.