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.