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Our Feelings About Boobs Are Apparently Not As Open-Source As We'd Hoped
Gee, this is rich. At a sci-fi conference in Michigan recently, some gent kindly created a system that allowed women to easily express permission for men to fondle them -- what an altruist! And his remarkable, breathtaking, totally unforeseeable discovery: people feel uncomfortable when they are asked to publicly specify their preferred level of anonymous sexual contact.
This is how the guy explained his project:
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.
Now, if you really want to tell someone that they're beautiful, you can say, well, just that. We have to think that women would rather hear "you're beautiful" than "can I do something that would violate the boundaries of any healthily socialized individual."
The real reason they're asking to touch boobies is because that's all that they primarily want; talking about beauty simply isn't as interesting. The "may I touch your breasts" game is just play-acting porn. It's not friendly; it's selfish, mostly on the part of people who want to grope, but also on the part of the participating women whose decision places all other nearby breast-owning people in an unpleasant position: that of having to say "no" when it should be assumed. Just suggesting that it's even slightly acceptable to ask is unkind.
As sexually liberated San Franciscans, we're accustomed to a culture that permits somewhat more sexual directness than, say, our parents back east. That is, we terribly hip urban SF-dwellers know that if we want to avoid the Process of Courtship -- the lengthy dance of boundaries and feelings -- we can just skip over it easily enough: there, hookup accomplished, the end. But we don't do that; or at least, most of us don't. (Or rather: most of us who are happy within this 7x7-mile top of land don't.)
Because tens of thousands of years of human development have taught us -- gays and straights -- that the Process, as difficult as it is with all of its invisible rules and secret codes and total failure of logic, is something that we cannot resist.