Privilege, Context, Etc.

[tablesaw]

With the rage gone and the sleep (mostly) back and my humors rebalanced, I want to add some more stuff about what is now being called "The Public-Domain Breast Project." Specifically, I'd like to point out a lot of other excellent responses that I haven't yet had the time or energy to highlight while I was wrapped up with my own battle.

What I took on was a close reading of the story that was presented. The sentence that turned me into a rage ball was this one:

Defaulting to a male-dominated group may be an assumption that's societally-valid, but I find that equally troubling that people would go, "Hmm. He talks about a group, so it must be guys." I wouldn't have assumed that at all.

And I spent the rest of the day going, "Here, here, here, in what you wrote, this is why we are assuming those things."

I was talking about how things were presented; my own straight male privilege made it harder for me to see a lot of the other context issues, the ones that explain why this was a bad idea generally. So I want to showcase those issues here. Hopefully it's obvious that the comments to these posts have lots of good information too:

• First off, after putting up with me all of yesterday, ojouchan had her own say this morning, which talks about the way internet culture, con culture, and geek culture mix into a smoothie of badness. She also explains why, as I had mentioned before, she cried reading the theferrett's post.
  
• ithiliana has still more con stuff, and links the attitude to Harlan Ellison groping Connie Willis during the Hugo Awards two years ago.
  
• mswyrr has a whole lot of amazing stuff in the comments to the original post, especially in this thread, and most especially in this post which has so many people agreeing with it that LJ doesn't even want to show them all.
  
• springheel_jack also talks about con/geek culture and has good words about libertarian ideals that don't acknowledge preexisting power imbalances.
  
• coffeeandink debunks the argument that opposing the project means that men should be ashamed of their sexuality.
  
• In the spirit of the open-source movement, others have offered derived works based on the original source code:
  • hahathor presents The Open-Source Knuckle Sandwich Project.
    
  • misia presents The Open-Source Swift Kick to the Balls Project.
• the_red_shoes is mostly collecting links in her main post, but since I used it to find a lot of the links in this entry here, I want to give the massive credit where it's due. (Also, it has hundreds of comments.)
  
• kate_nepveu's response is short and cogent and it features the exiled gay prince of Farlandia.

And there's an odd bit of synchronicity in that last one. Kate_Nepveu mentions "OH JOHN RINGO NO," and then The_Red_Shoes links to it. And it's weird because the evening before Theferrett's post, I'd just been reading American Women! You Are Not Inadequate! Really! by maga_dogg which uses the same reference. This is also a skewering of straight male privilege from a man, and it probably primed the pump for my own words the following day.

Now, getting ready for work. And when I have some spare moments, I'll get a chance to actually spend some time exploreing the journals at all of the people who've started reading this one.

Comments

[smonsterbite.livejournal.com]

Hello, I'm friending you as well. Your comments and posts on the PDBP/OSBP + linguistic geekiness was too much to be denied.

Really I'm commenting to ask... have you seen one of those saws from your default icon demo'd in real life? It is LOUD AS SHIT when the blade drops. Loud enough that if I were in the area working with another tool, I might startle and hurt myself. Pretty cool, though.