So, some guy has decided that by going to conventions with a group of his mates and asking random women if he can grope their breasts, he’s somehow being feminist and sexually liberating.
I cannot even begin to express how completely and disgustingly moronic and sexist that is. Fortunately, other people have expressed it much more eloquently than I can; I don’t really have much to add to the discussion.
Seriously, what kind of stupid fuck is he? I found this sentence, right at the beginning, particularly moronic:
"…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."
The problem there is simple: you might say that the mind is at least as important as the body, but the fact that you could even make (or agree with) the above statement says exactly the opposite — that the body is more important, so much so that you’re more interested in copping a feel of a woman than you are in getting to know her first. It’s not so much disturbing that this guy could think like this as mind-numbingly, frustratingly stupid.
Another one that was just disturbing was:
By the end of the evening, women were coming up to us. "My breasts," they asked shyly, having heard about the project. "Are they… are they good enough to be touched?" And lo, we showed them how beautiful their bodies were without turning it into something tawdry.
As some of the commenters on the original article have pointed out, there’s a whole load of judgemental bullshit about body image and so on tied up in that, like these guys are being generous enough to show women how beautiful their breasts are (because obviously that’s the only part of a woman that matters), and the women are lucky enough to have participated. Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for anything that’ll encourage women — and men — to stop worrying about their appearance, but this is really not the way.
There’s another cringingly moronic discussion on Matthew Garrett’s blog, where some other guy actually attempts to argue that by criticising this "project", people are disadvantaging the (vanishingly small minority of) women who don’t mind being groped by strangers; the obvious argument being that if a woman wants to be groped by strangers, she has many opportunities, whereas the women who don’t tend not to get the option — especially, apparently, at conventions.
Another thing that puzzles me — that again, several people have already pointed out — is, why would you want to grope some random stranger? It kind of devalues the whole thing; there’s no intimacy or whatever there, which I’d always assumed was the whole point of sexual interaction. It comes back to the whole mind-versus-body thing: if the person you’re groping is a stranger, you don’t know their mind, so they’re just a body to you — why would you even want to? Being sexually liberated doesn’t mean that you have to grope strangers, or allow yourself to be groped by strangers; again, other people make this point better than I can. I don’t think I’m expressing this very well, really.
Finally, a comparatively minor point, but what the bloody hell does it have to do with open-source? For a start, I’d rather not be associated with your moronic schemes to get your hands on a pair of breasts, ta very much, and I doubt many other people in the free software community would either. Geeks have a bad enough reputation as it is for being a bunch of guys (I use the word "guys" intentionally, because that’s certainly how geeks are seen by a lot of people) with no social skills and an overwhelming desire to get laid, without people going around and demonstrating that the stereotype is occasionally accurate. Quite aside from that, the term just makes no sense when applied to something that’s not software.
Update: via isako, two entries from his blog that suggest he’s not so much naïve, as I’d assumed, as typically sexist: arguing that if women dress provocatively, they’re "asking for" male attention. Hurray patriarchy!