More thoughts on open-source boobs

Well, this blog is all about my random thoughts, especially when I don't have salacious stories to share, so here's a few more random thoughts...

I've been musing off-and-on about the so-called Open Source Boob Project. As someone rightly pointed out, the name's a real misnomer, since the people who started it aren't contributing boobs, and in fact there is very little similarity at all to the open-source software (umm, no pun intended, for once) movement. But I digress...

So on the one hand, I think people are judging it too harshly. It doesn't seem like it was about a bunch of guys believing that they are entitled to sex, as some people have claimed. It seems more like they just wanted to cut out the awkwardness and embarassment of the normal courting process, and be able to ask women, directly, if some sexual interaction was okay. The women were always intended to be able to say "no".

On the other hand, I can see that the default option should be "no, it's not okay", and women don't want to have to live their lives constantly being asked if someone can cop a feel of their tits. Nor do they want to live in an environment where there's an chance of peer-pressure making them feel like they have to go along with something they don't really want to.

But what strikes me on further reflection here is that the folks whose brainchild this was were trying to solve what they perceived to be a problem. You can condemn them for their solution, but you can't fault them for trying. However, nobody who's been really critical of them has, to my knowledge, tried to do the same thing - identify a problem and find a solution for it. They've just indulged in name-calling, labelling these people "creeps", "nerds", or whatever.

I really feel that it's better to nurture than to punish, to educate rather than insult. So here's the problem I think needs to be solved - how do you educate the people who feel the need for an open-source boob project, so that they have a better chance of respecting women, and feeling fulfilled as men? If you could do that, you will have achieved a whole lot more than the
proposed open-source-knuckle-sandwich project ever could. Because let's face it, society does have some pretty fucked-up attitudes to sex. And while a lot of people have treated the women as victims of society's rediculous pressure to conform to stupid body-images, et cetera, men are often victims too. Victims of society's tendency to make women look unattainable and impossibly perfect. And that leads to a lot of insecurity on the part of men, which in turn leads a lot of men to act really badly around women, because they simply don't know what else to do. Hurling invective at such men is not going to rectify the problem, one little bit...