Why thank you for liberating me from my repression
I'm late to the party on this one, which has already exploded all over the fannish 'net, but I can't let it go by without adding my own (albeit fairly redundant) $0.02.
The Open Source Boob Project, they called it.
Ostensibly, it was an experiment in sexual liberation.
The problem with sexual liberation is that, oddly enough, it so often seems to become men's liberation to objectify women. Theoretically, we're all supposed to be free to express our sexual desires without shame, without feeling dirty. But all too often it starts to feel like an excuse for men to tell women who don't want to take off their shirts or have their breasts groped or have sex with person x y or z that they're "repressed" and that their inhibitions are unreasonable. Women are the objects for the sexually liberated subjects (men) to admire and to use. And that's just unacceptable.
Look, I'm just as much in favour of a utopian orgy world as the next person. But I happen to live in this world. And in this world, we're not all starting from the same place when it comes to control of our bodies. Women live in an entirely justifiable state of fear that they're going to be attacked simply because they have women's bodies. And when we're not worrying about rape, we're worrying about how to make our bodies fit the desireable ideal. We struggle to be attractive without "asking for it". Every decision we make about our appearance and our bodies is made in this context.
If this all sounds rather fraught, well, it is. So you can see why someone asking to grope a woman's breasts isn't just a harmless question. Whether it's respectfully asked or not, whether it's all in good clean fun or not, it's going to make some women uncomfortable. Because they live in the real world where questions about a woman's body's availability are not, by default, good clean fun.
If you're with a group of friends, and you all want to feel each other up, have at it. But for crying out loud, don't do it in public, don't involve strangers, and don't make it a "project" to be expanded to the world at large. Because the world at large already has plenty of unpleasant ideas about what to do with women's bodies and their breasts.
There's been a lot written about this, much of substantially more eloquent than my own semi-incoherent sputtering:
