The first rule of Boob Club is: you do not talk about Boob Club

[nameandnature]

There's a new LiveJournal meme doing the rounds, where you make a post about what you think of theferrett's Open Source Boob Project. All the cool kids are doing it, so I thought I'd join in. Here's a compendium of comments I've been making elsewhere.

I agree with springheel_jack's point that this is all about geekery. theferrett has been here before, expressing similar sentiments about how it would be easier if you could just tell women you wanted to do them.

The dance that most heterosexual courtship rituals involve is (what? all my courtship rituals have involved dancing) at least partly about face saving if it goes wrong, but also about not scaring off the woman, who is physically smaller and weaker, on average, and probably has reason to fear the sort of man who would ask direct questions of the sort theferrett talks about. Some geeks do dispense with some of the dance, and that can work for them when they're dealing with other geeks.

theferrett wants to dispense with more of the dance than most people are comfortable with. He had a nice time at the convention, which is fair enough. It also seems that the original thing was instigated by women who are happy to defend it. His mistake is to think that experience can be generalised and codified into a "project", and his other mistake is writing about it on LJ, especially in the style he used.

I'm becoming a big fan of synecdochic, whose postings on the drama itself and how not to be That Guy are excellent.

Comments

[laitaine]

Your subject line is made of win!

[flats.livejournal.com]

A non-geek perspective:
The dance, the ambiguity and the flirting are all part of the fun, so why'd you want to get rid of it? Suggests these people'd want to get rid of foreplay as well, as that's preliminary to (so-called) Actual Sex too... A definite missing of the point, methinks! ;)

And yes, springheel_jack does explain it well, cheers for that link. Frankly I had theferrett down as as Bit Of A Twat years ago - really risky for a socially-cluless geek to have what passes (on the internets) for social power.

[nameandnature]

Well, some people find the ambiguity hard to deal with and would prefer it if things were a little more straightforward. That's fine among consenting adults (there was a private post I commented on a while back where I linked to this and had a reply along the lines of "What, you mean there are people who don't start relationships by having meta-conversations about them?").

You can also run into problems if you're worried that dancing may be immoral (I'm recalling the old joke about why Presbyterians are against having sex standing up). If you've been (rightly) told that no means no and also tend to view women as the mysterious and beautiful other, you can feel some sort of moral imperative to turn the whole thing into a contractual negotiation. For example, see this, one of the things I'm glad I wrote as a Christian, because I've realised how fucked up my correspondent's Christian Union is (That said, "Surely God is good to Israel" is an allusion to Psalm 73: so the author's obviously feeling he could be getting more lovin' if he also wasn't so determined to make sure that I wasn't doing anything that someone didn't want).

Dispensing with dancing tends to break when two people have different ideas about how much dancing is good, or even if you're talking to someone who's open to a direct approach but you don't know how to manage it without being creepy. Hence all the articles about "how to talk to girls" that have sprung up in the wake of theferrett's posting.

I think theferrett is a nerd made good who occasionally still can't believe his luck (been there). He blunders about indiscriminately sometimes. I think his social power in this case has been blunted by the truly massive amount of raaage he's generated: nobody is going to be in a hurry to copy him.