On asking to touch the breasts of a stranger

[kate_nepveu]

If you are a stranger, especially a man, perhaps especially in a group of other strangers who are men, and you come up to me and say, "You're very beautiful. I'd like to touch your breasts. Would you mind if I did?":

You will put me in fear.

Because you could be someone who will go away quietly if I say no (which I will). You could be the exiled gay prince of Farlandia, cursed to wander this Earth looking for the key to his return that can only be revealed by touching the breast of a willing stranger, and who isn't enjoying this at all. You could, in short, not be a danger to me.

But how am I supposed to know that?

How am I supposed to distinguish you from the person who says he's really just whatever, but is actually going to put emotional pressure on me, or make a scene, or stalk me, or rape me?

I can't. Because that would require a level of discernment and of trust that is not possible, by definition, in my dealings with a stranger.

And therefore, if you ask to touch my breasts, you will frighten me.

If your goal is actually to make a better world, I suggest that you use a method that doesn't involve putting women in fear.

(Also, I find it hard to believe you can create "the kind of world where [people can] 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," by going up to women, touching their breasts, and then going away. Among many, many other problems that are noted in the comments to the original. But that's secondary to my main point here.)

Comments

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Fandom seems to include a lot of people whose utopian schemes make no allowance for path-dependence. There's no thought given to how the world got this way except for a general idea that terrible repressed people were ashamed of human bodies.

More to the point, fandom seems to include a lot of creepy guys.

[http://users.livejournal.com/_abulafia/]

More to the point, fandom seems to include a lot of creepy guys.

Truth.

[ms-maree.livejournal.com]

I have always wondered why this is. I've been to cons, I've been to fan activities for over a decade, and while it's true there are some really odd, and somewhat disturbing fangirls, most of them are really fun and cool to hang out with, the type you'd want to be friends with and socialise with.

But the fun/weird divide with the fanboys (in my personal experience) is heavy on the weird and sometimes on the disturbing side. And of coures the fanboys who are cool are married or in a committed relationship.

[ms-daisy-cutter.livejournal.com]

But the fun/weird divide with the fanboys (in my personal experience) is heavy on the weird and sometimes on the disturbing side.

Basic sexual politics, I'd say. Being a societal reject doesn't negate the male sense of entitlement to women's bodies. In fact, it often intensifies same, because such losers feel that the world owes them sex with a "hawt chik" to heal their high-school wounds (theferrett alluded to this openly in his post), while not feeling obliged at all to cultivate enough social skills to make a woman even want to talk to them. And I'm talking pretty basic skills, like how to use soap, let alone ever-so-slightly less-basic ones like looking women in the eyes instead of the tits. And male geek culture reinforces this sense of entitlement.

The flip side of it, of course, is contempt for women as people, which is honed as they continue to strike out with women — it can't be their fault, can it? No, all women are just stuck-up bitches like the cheerleaders who snubbed them in high school! (Naturally, it wouldn't occur to a great many of these sad sacks to seek out average-looking women, even though such women are still probably out of their leagues.) Said contempt is on display across the internet (Fark.com, *chan, etc.), on World of Warcraft, etc.

Such men comprise a classic subtype of Nice Guy™. If you've never read divalion's post on same (http://divalion.livejournal.com/163615.html), I highly recommend it.

[kate_nepveu]

Thanks for the link; I'm adding it to my collection: http://del.icio.us/katenepveu/nice.guy-ism

Well said.

[grendelkhan.livejournal.com]

One might think that after spending years stereotyped as socially retarded losers incapable of relating to other people, especially women, in any kind of healthy fashion, there'd be a tendency in geekdom to overcome those tendencies, to rise above the stereotypes and not only take the best revenge by living well and honorably, but to police our own and hold each other to the same high standards.

(Written less floridly, that means treating women as human beings rather than Mean Mean Pussy-Access Preventers. It means finally leaving middle school, emotionally. It means growing the fuck up.)

But no, various memetic defects (http://www.plausiblydeniable.com/opinion/gsf.html) in our makeup apparently mean that it's cool to wear social retardation like a badge of honor, it's cool to point carefully-tended well-aged adolescent frustrations at women because they're easy targets, because it's a socially-approved outlet, and because it provides some kind of cheap limbic-region satisfaction. Examining your own privilege, especially when you're so drunk on your own sense of moral outrage, is such a downer.

The next time someone starts waxing rhapsodic about how morally superior geeks are to mundanes, I'm going to spit blood.

[kate_nepveu]

utopian schemes make no allowance for path-dependence

True, that. Thanks.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

fandom seems to include a lot of creepy guys.

Uh, of course. It's the only group association that carries no social skill requirements for membership AND actively discourages exclusion, avoidance, or even the mildest correction.

It's the catchall for the people who can't find anyone else to talk to them, because everyone else has standards and fandoms, famously, notoriously, do not.

[jacquez.livejournal.com]

I find that circulating Geek Social Fallacies (http://www.plausiblydeniable.com/opinion/gsf.html) often helps people feel better about saying "fuck along now" to some of the creepier people.

It does not, however, offer any education to the creepier people, because of course it does not mean them. It just helps the not-totally-inept breathe a sigh of relief and impose some normal human order for their own sanity.

(Why, yes, it did make me feel better about cutting those creepozoids who skeeved me out and kept being inappropriate to me out of my life, why do you ask?)

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

That article, and this one (http://www.savantmag.com/16/retail16.html), explain every problem I've had with the inadequate socialisation of fans, and they do it better than I do.

I've never been a carrier of the Geek Social Fallacies, but I've certainly been on the receiving end of "Ostracisers are evil" once or twice. And I'm okay with that, really - my desire to avoid the losers outweighs my desire to hang out with the reasonable people who insist on hanging out with the losers.

But I get the impression I'm relatively rare, among geeks.

[jacquez.livejournal.com]

I spent about, hm, three years of undergrad trying to negotiate the waters of Geek Social Fallacies, and then my now-husband and I looked at each other, said "do we even LIKE these people?", and started behaving in ways that made us a lot happier.

For example, our social circles liked to have "commutative coolness" parties, where if you were invited, you were cool, so anyone YOU invited was cool, because coolness is commutative. We decided we just weren't going to go to any parties operating on the commutative coolness principle anymore -- we were going to be "busy". That alone cut about 90% of the highly obnoxious/highly scented/highly inappropriate people out of our lives. It had the unfortunate side effect of cutting some nice people mostly-out, too, but...it was worth it, and I'd do it again, a hundred times over.

Also, I just realized I'm wittering about this because I am so...*something* about the original post that my brain, she is going in circles, so I'll quiet down now. But damn.

[dlganger.livejournal.com]

Unfortunately so. This is a large part of the reason why Steph and I stopped going to cons, even though that's how we met.

[leighdb.livejournal.com]

God, I forgot about that article. Cat Piss Man!

My non-geek friends do not believe me, sometimes, when I tell them about the version of him I met. *shudder*

[threeringedmoon.livejournal.com]

GSF4 just explained some classic WTF reactions I've had over the years, when I have wondered why on earth a particular person would expect me to do THAT for them. Great essay.

[jacquez.livejournal.com]

I went to a very geeky university; the GSF essay came years too late for me, but I made sure my younger sibs got copies. Because DAMN.

[holyschist.livejournal.com]

There's the SCA, too. There's some overlap, but not complete.

"Oooh, we must be WELCOMING, even of clearly sleazy people!"

[ladypeyton.livejournal.com]

The SCA has changed. It's motto is no longer "Oooh, we must be WELCOMING, even of clearly sleazy people!" due to recent legal actions taken against it.

[kate_nepveu]

As a lawyer, I approve of this change of motto. =>

[holyschist.livejournal.com]

I have to disagree--the SCA is somewhat more careful now about certain types of sleazy (the blatantly illegal types), but still much more welcoming of the everyday creeps than most social groups.

I'm very active in the SCA and I like it, but it is a more-than-average-tolerance place.

[athenais.livejournal.com]

I don't find fandom has a higher content of creepy guys than, say, your average corporate office. I think fandom has an unfortunate tendency to tolerate the social ineptitude, whereas a corporate culture will pretty quickly teach you to keep your hands to yourself and your sexism on the back burner. Unless you want to get fired.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

Fandom is where the creeps feel *entitled* to be creepy.

[lirrin.livejournal.com]

At least the fandom creeps are open about it and therefore easier to 1) spot and 2) avoid. In the office, creeps are more subtle about it for a variety of reasons.

[(Anonymous)]

Hey, some of us have no choice about the social ineptitude but don't want to be creepy (perhaps we are but cannot judge). It's not like we're all advertising executives or something.

(Sexism and groping are an entirely different matter, and this Open Source Boobs thing had me WTFing for some time: I mean, yeah, it's different if you really are inviting it, but still, WTF?! I'm fairly sure that had I been there, I'd have spent far too much time looking for people wearing these badges so I could run away from them, not because there's anything wrong with them but because the simple idea stresses me out. And I'm not even female.)

[kate_nepveu]

Advertising execs are socially ept . . . ?

(This is a joke. I don't think I know any advertising execs.)

I have been thinking about self-esteem and socialization about all of this, not coming to any great conclusions. The only thing that worked for me in terms of social ineptitude was experience, but I realize that is a vast chicken and egg problem.

Oh, and I'd appreciate it if in the future you could sign a handle or nickname or something, so readers can tell if this anonymous comment is from the same person as another one.

[(Anonymous)]

I was thinking more `advertising execs -> creepy people who really don't think the way normal humans do'. (These are people who in many cases *watch ads for fun* and did it *before* they became ad execs.)

I'm not sure anything fixes social ineptitude completely, ever. Some people have got the neural wiring and can handle it at bewildering speed, and become politicians: some don't have it at all and spend their lives sitting in one small room: and most people are somewhere in the middle. Those of us closer to the 'one small room' than to a politician *can* get better, slowly, but it still feels like an act, always. (Perhaps this is how it is for neurologically normal people too, but I'm not sure this is even an answerable question. 'What is it like to be a bat?')

-- Nix

(And thank you for showing the way to that immortal review of John Ringo's... *inimitable* work _Ghost_, which gave the Internet the phrase OH JOHN RINGO NO. The only references I'd ever seen to this before were occasional despairing screams emerging from rec.arts.sf.written: nobody had actually said what was *wrong* with it before. Now I know. I'm scarred for life just from reading the review, but I know. ;) )