Ze Open Source Boob Project, thoughts.
Yeah, like half the people in fandom haven't already weighed in on it. But, it's my LJ and I can be redundant if I want to.
First, it was a really dumb idea. And yeah, it could /really/ have gotten intimidating and skeevy and unpleasant for the women (not to mention the potential problems of some gleeful sixteen year old geek girl enjoying the idea, and the situation leading to a lot of grief), and was ill thought out. Was it intentionally so? Nah, probably not. But at the same time, if the guys had been at all conscious about the issues of sexism and fandom, they'd not have run on with it as they did. Or they would have framed it differently...for instance, having the /guys/ wearing green buttons saying that they would not be adverse to someone offering a free touch, or a red button saying no-thank-you, leaving it entirely up to someone else to approach them and not giving them carte blanche to go around pestering people. This would likely still be skeevy and wrong at some point, just because fandom contains a higher than average percentage of people for whom social skills, /particularly/ the social skills at the intimate end of the scale, remain a problem, but at least the burden of public identification would be the right way around.
It's interesting, overall, to see the ways that this has thrown some of the issues around women in fandom into relief, particularly at male-dominated cons/events, and the way that the 'sex-positive' feeling of a lot of these spaces is usually translated into 'we want to see hot girls wearing as little as possible'. Or wanting free reign to touch hot girls' boobies. Whatever.
First, it was a really dumb idea. And yeah, it could /really/ have gotten intimidating and skeevy and unpleasant for the women (not to mention the potential problems of some gleeful sixteen year old geek girl enjoying the idea, and the situation leading to a lot of grief), and was ill thought out. Was it intentionally so? Nah, probably not. But at the same time, if the guys had been at all conscious about the issues of sexism and fandom, they'd not have run on with it as they did. Or they would have framed it differently...for instance, having the /guys/ wearing green buttons saying that they would not be adverse to someone offering a free touch, or a red button saying no-thank-you, leaving it entirely up to someone else to approach them and not giving them carte blanche to go around pestering people. This would likely still be skeevy and wrong at some point, just because fandom contains a higher than average percentage of people for whom social skills, /particularly/ the social skills at the intimate end of the scale, remain a problem, but at least the burden of public identification would be the right way around.
It's interesting, overall, to see the ways that this has thrown some of the issues around women in fandom into relief, particularly at male-dominated cons/events, and the way that the 'sex-positive' feeling of a lot of these spaces is usually translated into 'we want to see hot girls wearing as little as possible'. Or wanting free reign to touch hot girls' boobies. Whatever.