Assets, are they?

[elettaria]

If you haven't heard about the Open Source Boob Project scandal yet, go to the_red_shoes' post here, where you can catch up. Many people have said much of the stuff I'd have said myself and phrased it beautifully - and may I mention in passing how delightful it is to see good quality feminist crit coming from a straight man - so I thought I'd add a few

Comments

[elettaria]

Oh dear, so he thought that if he said, "No, you don't get it, it was a really skimpy outfit!" that would make it better?

There's a passage in an Emma Donoghue novel where a woman reports back from a group holiday in Greece or somewhere, all friends, all lesbians, where they all ended up comparing breasts one day. The description is so many miles away from the way theferrett talks that I don't think they're on the same planet. I could dig it out if you like.

[elettaria]

It would, of course, be half-way through the book, which I've just skimmed starting from the back. I'm adding an amusing bit from further up the same paragraph.

Strange how it was more respectable to show the distinct outline of a bra than the smooth surface of a back. Presumably true feminists all had small breasts and so could afford to burn them. The bras, I meant, not the breasts. [...] Last summer when Cara went to the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival - I was invited to go along, but didn't think it my sort of thing - she came back singing the praises of breasts. The sheer difference of them: the nipples that simply shaded in, the ones like raspberries perched on top, the fiercely pointy ones, on all the long and flat and globelike bosoms. Watching thousands of women walk around naked in the woods, what had struck her was not the naturalness of breasts in the human body shape, but the opposite; how, after the logical lines of hips and ribcages and limbs, breasts seemed completely gratuitous.

- Emma Donoghue, Hood, pp.132-3

[elettaria]

It's a good novel.

I think the point I was trying to make was to compare the way women talk about breasts and how they look at breasts, and the way this chap is doing it. Chalk and cheese. With these two writers, you feel that they're talking about real people, normal people, people with personalities, people with a relationship with their own breasts rather than being defined by someone's else's view of them. With theferrett, you feel he's talking about some sort of fantasy figure from a comic, unreal, distorted, unable to talk for herself, existing for the pleasure of the viewer. And in which cases are the women described fictional? Alarming.

[elettaria]

Oh, go on, you know you want to!

If you want to read something so far gone in sexism that it's just funny, try this. Teaser line: "Millions of women feel they are goddesses, they control a man through his contraceptive penis."

[elettaria]

Keep reading. The blog gets crazier. I feel terribly sorry for his wife and kids.