| Current mood: |  thoughtful |
I heard about the (poorly-named) Open Source Boob Project because a friend posted to her LJ about it with a level of mouth-frothing that startled me. I came to it a day or two after the initial post, after the poster had already added certain salient details that were apparently missing from his original description. So I do not have a true measure of what my response would have been if I’d first seen only the original, as many people did.
As it was, on first reading I had a very mild response. I had a moment of identification with the author, as one high-school geek outcast to another. And I had a moment of discomfort and pity at the description of the girl who hesitantly asked whether her breasts were ‘good enough to touch’. Otherwise, I was pretty shrug about the whole thing. Knowing myself, I doubt I would have felt much more strongly before the revision began.
Here’s one explanation: I don’t tend to make judgments about people and circumstances unless I have a great deal of firsthand information plus some correlating secondhand data. I don’t say that from a horse of any particular height; it’s just what makes sense to me. If I know a person well, I will usually have a filter whereby I interpret things she says based on my understanding of her particular psychology. Anything related by a complete stranger gets a fairly Spock-like response: “Fascinating.” Judgment remains in indefinite superposition. I am certainly not the sort of person to respond with rage over an event for which I was not present and where I know none of the participants. Rage for me is a very personal response, on behalf of myself or someone else I know and care about.
Here’s another: Unless the speaker is someone I know from personal experience is an unreliable narrator, I tend to take everything he says at face value. Someone says ‘This happened, and it was good,’ and I assume that’s true until and unless evidence to the contrary presents itself. (And by ‘presents’ I mean ‘smacks me repeatedly upside the head’.) I am particularly trusting of people’s self-assessments; if someone tells me, ‘I am this way, and this,’ I typically accept it without question. She has to regularly and consistently behave otherwise before I will adjust my filter away from her stated self-assessment.
Both of these things are true. The former strikes me as a good place to be; the latter is dangerously naive, and has bitten me in the ass more times than I can count. I need to stop it.
For the better part of a week, now, I’ve been thoroughly — perhaps even obsessively — reading spinoffs from the original post ... comments and posts and comments to the posts and comments to the comments ad infinitum. A certain percentage of them are crap, but a surprising number are thoughtful and eloquent and resonant.
Periodically, I’ve also gone back and reread the original post. And what’s interesting to me (“Fascinating.”) is how my feelings about it have changed over these several days. I am still holding to the non-judgment regarding the original participants and circumstances. But I now read those same words and flinch, repeatedly, in places that didn’t affect me before. It’s like I had been wearing heavy woolen gloves, and now I’m touching it with my bare skin.
I’ve also been thinking a lot. Not so much about the OSBP per se, but about my own experiences: of being female in this time and place, of bodies and sex and more.
I believe I have learned some things this week, and been reminded of some others I’d forgotten. My mind is roiling with it all, even in sleep.
I would go into more detail, but I am about to spend ten whole days sans both internet and computer. Perhaps I’ll be able to gather my thoughts into something coherent when I return.
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karawynn) wrote,
