My Body Is NOT Open Source Material! (Why is This Not a No-Brainer?)

Okay...

So, regarding the whole "Open Source Boobs" Thing...


Oh, dear...


Okay. Pretty much everything that ticks me off about this has been brought up.

The bit about how it's breasts, and therefore specific to women being touched.
The bit about how TheFerrett is assuming that clothing choice = asking for it.
The bit about the assumption/declaration that anyone who said 'no' Didn't Get It and was unenlightened or whatever.
The bit about how this whole business totally plays up to Male Privilege.
The bit about... Oh, hell, I'll just link you to Commodorified's post, and you can follow the links from there.



As for myself, I am a tad torn on the idea.

See. As presented? I hate it. Categorically. It's loathsome. For all the reasons that have been mentioned above.

At the same time, I like the idea of being more open to touching and being touched.
In a situation where I am actually safe, this can be lovely and wonderful. (Witness: The massages that get traded around at birthday parties, the way I hold hands with my friends when we talk about Intense Stuff, the way I used to Sprawl About with my high school friends, etc).

However a Con full of strangers is not such a place. Especially when said strangers are pestering me for gropes. :-P


As someone who finds women beautiful/sexy/attractive/lovely/physically-desirable, I totally understand the "Mmmmm... Boooooooobiiiiiiiies" thing.

However, as a woman I also totally understand the "Get the fuck away from me, you creep(s)! For the forty-sixth time, I am not interested!" thing. Possibly better. :-P


Additionally, I am someone who is struggling to reconcile her feelings of "I don't deserve to be treated like cattle, and dammit, I shouldn't have to put up with these presumptions", with her feelings of "I like being admired, it's flattering and I feel empowered when I find myself able to deal with cat-calls and come-ons in ways that leave me feeling strong, beautiful and in-control, rather thank like a victim or a jerk".

As such, part of me really likes this idea of women being sexual agents / owning their sexual agency.
Unfortunately, that's not (by the looks of things) what's going on here.


Were a woman to come up to, say, me and offer - as in "Hey. Would you like to touch my breasts? 'Cause I'd enjoy it, if you did." - well, okay, this is me, so I'd probably want to sit down with her and pick her brain about why she made the offer in the first place and get to know her a little bit[1], but: What I'm getting at is that it wouldn't bother me.
It might shock the hell out of me, since we are - as a gender - taught on many levels not to be sexual initiators (I started out writing that as 'sexually active' - as opposed to passive - but, while it still came out accurate, it didn't come out right...), but it wouldn't squick me the way this thing is squicking me.


This is, I think, where the buttons thing comes in.

See, the idea that "red" means "stay away" and "green" means "you don't even have to ask, just go ahead", and that "no button" means "ask, but I might not say 'yes'," bothers me a great deal.

Because of this:
This particular coding system forces (stay with me, now) everyone (by which I mean every woman) to participate in the exercise, whether she wants to or not, purely by virtue of the fact that it's going on around her[2].
There is no "non-participatory" status in this game.
If you choose to not wear a button, you're presumed to be fair game for harassment, and if you choose to wear a red button, you're Participating and, as such (in a way?) tacitly supporting, the exercise as a whole.

This is a fucking problem.


A proposed alternative:

People who are wearing green buttons - regardless of sex/gender - may be cruised approached and asked if they would like to grope and/or be groped. Anyone not wearing a green button is not playing the game and must, therefore, not be approached in such a manner.
As such, a green-button-wearing individual could approach another green-button-wearing individual and say "I note that you're wearing a green button. Would you mind if I touched your ______________?" or, similarly, "I note that you're wearing a green button. Would you like to touch my _______________?"
And if the answer was "no", the rules of the game would require the asker (regardless of sex/gender, and regardless of what was being asked) to fuck the hell off.
And everyone else would be left alone.

A game where the players are specifically identified (like LARP?) is significantly better than one where the players don't have a choice in whether or not they're playing, may not know the rules, and may not even know the game is going on until someone explains why they've been getting all of this seriously unwanted and off-putting attention.

Wouldn't you agree?


- Still Pissed Off
- Amazon.


[1] Does that make me weird? Or Unenlightened? ;-)

[2] Gee. Kinda like fucking society, isn't it? :-P

Feminist Books and Vocabulary. :-D

So, I missed the poetry thing at Chapters.


I went to the C.U. library (which took a little longer than expected, due to the train running every half hour on Sundays - which I didn't realize was the case), and hunted up Volume 31.2 of Atlantis (a women's studies journal) - which was called "Sexy Feminisms?" and was all about the intersection of feminism and sexuality (personal and professional).

I will have to go back and read another article or two, I think.
The one I read was "From Abject to Subject" about sex workers, sex workers rights, victim feminism, and how the Whore and the Liberated Woman[1] have been set up as opposites in historical and contemporary feminism[2].

Kat Payne makes my little, feminist heart sing. :-D For many reasons, granted, but one of them is the simple fact that she uses both "quotidian" (which I totally had to look up[3]) and "tough-assed" (which, not surprisingly, I totally didn't) in the first paragraph of that essay.
Gods, she makes me happy. :-D


Picked out six books.

A Canadian feminism 101 reader (which includes an awesome article about Aboriginal women and the government/dominant-paradigmatic definition of a "good mother"[4] as being firmly rooted in racial and class-based, as well as heterosexist, assumptions), two books on young (third or fourth wave, I'm not sure yet) feminists/feminism, a source book for women in Ontario about funding cuts and where they're hitting (it's about ten years old, but then my understanding of this stuff would only be ten years out of date, as opposed to completely non-existent, which is at least a start), a book about Canadian women living in poverty, and a book about feminism in pop culture. :-D

It's going to be a fun (and probably enraging) two weeks. (Whee!! :-D)



All that being said: Just before I signed all these lovely things out (at 2pm, so just as The Poetry Thing was starting), the fire alarm went off. So rather than say "screw it" and hit up the poetry thing, and come back, I waited around outside (in the beautiful weather) for us to be able to go back in.

Then I signed out my books, ran for the train (which I missed), decided to forget about the poetry thing, and went home.
But I stopped at the second cup and got coffee and cake (and sat in the sun and read), and then hit up the grocery store and got dinner fixings, first. :-)

I walked home from south keys. :-) It was lovely, but I was ready to sit down when I got back (my right hip and knee were acting up again. :-P)


That said: Regarding Teh Exercise: I was able to do *two* (<*sigh*> no, this really is progress for me, folks) sets of The Plank (20 seconds long, each). Which means I'm getting a little bit stronger. Hurrah! :-)\
Also: Have found that I can lift a small chair over my head (and move it up and down without locking my arms) in lieu of using some sort of free weights. Go me! :-D
I figure if I do this often enough, I might actually develop both arm strength and (in my dreams) buffness[5]. Woohoo! :-D


In other news: Amazon.ca has shipped my order! :-D It might be here by tomorrow! :-D (I can hope, anyway. ;-) And my other book should be here by the end of the week! :-D I'm all excited again! :-D


Something that needs to be said (and might, eventually, merit its own post): I love feminist books. I love them. Even when they're making me really, really angry (for one reason or another, and sometimes because of that). It doesn't matter if they're Goddess books or class/economics books, or sexuality books, or writing books, or gender books, or whatever.
No matter what they're about, they give me the vocabulary to articulate my own mind.

They give me words that, once, I didn't have and, thus, they give me a way to explain my own thoughts and feelings.
This gift of words is a gift of speech and, as such, a gift of power.

When I can't speak - when I can't articulate why a given state of affairs makes me so angry - my anger squirrels around my head, an impotent, self-destructive, storm.
Frustration.
I feel like a toddler who wants to Do It Myself, and can't. Who wants to say something, but doesn't have the vocabulary to say it. (And, unlike an actual toddler, if I point to injustice, sexism, classism, or whatever, and go "What dat?" my question will not really be answered).

To take a recent example (and to reference Kathryn Payne again since, clearly, she's wallpapering my brain at present): Before I read her work, I'd never heard the term "sexual agency", let alone "women's active sexual agency".
If I hadn't read her work, I would not have had that concept in my head as a defined, speakable concept, and so wouldn't not have been able to articulate what bothers me so much about that red/green/no buttons Boob Thing this morning.


I am so grateful to these women, these writers (all of them, even the ones who piss me off) for giving me the gift of their words, from which I can build my own truth. :-)


Right. Having got that off my chest: Time to fill out that registration form for Gaia Gathering. :-)


- TTFN,
- Amazon.


[1] Read: "Virtuous", and therefore deserving of her liberation.

[2] Oh, look: The mutually miserable sexual dichotomy that exists inside my head. :-P Well, now I know how it got so damn firmly rooted in there. :-P

[3] "Ordinary", "everyday", or "commonplace". Which I probably should have known, but didn't. (Oh, well, new word for me. I'll have to see if I can use it in a sentence or something. ;-) /geeks.

[4] Which totally backs up what I was going on about in terms of my fears about not being a Good Mother. According to that definition, I'm Not. Call me a book-addict (you'd be right), but it's nice to have a published document that not only backs up what I said, but also takes that stupid definition to task for being rooted in hetero/sexism, racism and classism. :-D I feel slightly better, now. ;-)

[5] This is what happens when I watch "Million Dollar Baby". I start wanting muscle definition and the ability to knock people out really quickly. ;-)