The Open Source Boob Project, as I’m sure many GRC readers have learned, was a private-to-public experiment held at Penguicon (not under the aegis of the convention), wherein a number of women (some wearing badges indicating their willingness/antipathy, and some not) were approached by people asking if they could touch their breasts.
In April, which is, not incidentally, Sexual Assault Awareness Month.
Livejournal’s the Ferrett, an early adopter of this… oh, let’s say, ‘astonishing’ endeavour, wrote a rapturous post about how great it was that he ‘touched at least fifteen sets of boobs at Penguicon’ in the spirit of totally non-tawdry empowerment of women .
For some bizarre reason, not everyone responding embraced the notion that empowering women to mystically heal the wounds of men with their breasts heralded an exciting movement towards a feminist utopia.
The aftermath has included some excellent discussions on the vectors of power and privilege that make a reverse-gender campaign unworkable, some extraordinary satire, plenty of anecdotal real-life examples of why such an experiment is utterly untenable, and many, many passionate and discerning responses on why, whether participants were enjoying themselves or not, representing women as ‘available’ or ‘unavailable’ for touch is not just a way to erase the memories of one’s high school rejection, or a worshipful celebration of the female body, but a reification of the cultural gender binary where women’s bodies are always rendered as either ‘available’ or ‘unavailable’, and never as a body actually belonging to the woman in question.
It has also included numerous fascinating examples of that amusing phenomena I like to call ‘Look! A monkey!’ wherein someone will defend something they or someone else has said, not on the grounds that the thing itself is defensible, but because this person has done or said other things that were laudable. Or has acted in support of the group that they have now pissed off. Or in the most egregious examples, have a girlfriend/black friend/gay brother/transgender roommate/Jewish teacher, so it is totally unfair to call them out on the misogynistic/racist/heterosexist/transphobic/anti-Semitic thing that they have just said.
This is a good person and you are hurting their feelings! Stop taking this out of context of the rest of their lives! Can’t you concentrate on the positive? LOOK: A MONKEY.
So it is for the Ferrett, who has had stalwart defenders pointing out that he is a good guy, that he has written a comic strip that poses more than a few feminist responses to adverse situations, that his intentions were good and, of course, that he is married.
The problem is that no matter how many monkeys are thrown into the background to provide eyecatching stunts of simian prowess, the person who has said the stupid thing has still said the stupid thing. The problem is that whether the injured party is diverted by monkey spectacle or not, the person who has said the stupid thing has still said the stupid thing. The problem is that when the earth burns up in a supernova flare and the monkeys that have taken over the world in ages past disassemble into atoms, the person who has said the stupid thing will still have said the stupid thing, although, admittedly, at that point it will mean significantly less to the injured party.
The Ferrett wrote this, which works from the assumption that women’s self-worth and body image is dependent on male approval:
We went around the con, asking those who we thought might be amenable – you didn’t just ask anyone, but rather the ones who’d dressed to impress – and generally, people responded. They understood how this worked instinctively, and it worked.
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.
With feminist co-author Roni*, he also wrote the script for this comic, which neatly and viciously dissects a particularly irritating trend of poor stories for female characters.
The two are not irreconcilable.
It is entirely possible to do both bad shit and good shit in one’s life. The hard part is recognizing, first, which is which, and second, that one has to own all of one’s crap. Among a flood of ifs, buts and protestations that it wasn’t like that and he didn’t mean it that way, the Ferett has acknowledged that he did indeed screw up tremendously. And that is to his credit. Few people like to think that the words coming from their mouth are tainted with the stench of refuse, but sometimes it is time to recognize that one has indeed spoken with one’s ass. And, also, it is time to abandon this metaphor.
No matter what good deeds you have done, and will continue to do, you will almost certainly say something hurtful, offensive and wrong at some point in your life. You can probably name about half a dozen off the top of your head – I certainly can, starting from the truly fucked-up number of times I called my autistic little brother a retard.
Calling my brother a retard did not make me a bad person forever and ever world without end amen. It made me a person who said something horrible, many times. But just as the wrong things I have done do not cancel out all the good things I have accomplished for myself and others, the good things I have done do not absolve me of saying something truly reprehensible.
I will always have called my brother a retard. I can never not have done it. Don’t look at the monkey: I did it, and I will regret it until I die.
Don’t look at the monkey: Joe Quesada’s love for his daughter doesn’t mean that his theories on why women don’t enter the industry aren’t inaccurate and insulting. Brian Michael Bendis’ devotion to his mother and female friends doesn’t mean his responses to those objecting to the Tigra beatdown sequence were not dismissive and rude. Gail Simone’s entirely laudable contributions to exposing the plight of women in comics do not excuse her from a feminist critique of a no-no-no-okay, yes story.
Those of us protesting misogyny in comics are used to exhortations to look at the monkey. You ought to concentrate on the positive, we’re told. And we do know the monkey is there; we may well watch it later.
Truth be told, it’s no fun to deal with sexism. Taking the time to inspect it is sometimes painful, distressing, and humiliating for all concerned. But nothing will ever change until we can look, undistracted, and see what’s wrong.
