This is, apparently, how it happened:

"This should be a better world," a friend of mine said. "A more honest one, where sex isn't shameful or degrading. I wish this was the kind of world where say, 'Wow, I'd like to touch your breasts,' and people would understand that it's not a way of reducing you to a set of nipples and ignoring the rest of you, but rather a way of saying that I may not yet know your mind, but your body is beautiful."

And to that end, a bunch of kids at a sci-fi convention developed (ha ha! pun!) The Open-Source Boob Project, wherein convention-attending ladies pinned badges to their chests, green for Yes, You May Request to Put Your Nasty Hands All Over My Tits Before We've Been Introduced, and red for No, I Have Not Lost My Mind or My Sense of Personal Boundaries and My Body is Not the Place for You to Work Out Your Issues with Women, Dicksmack. Other attendees approached the ladies who were wearing the green buttons and requested permission to grab their boobs. Permission was granted on a case-by-case basis, and in this way, this group of children made the world a more beautiful, sex-positive place, and made me want to punch someone in the face.

As you can maybe, possibly tell, I'm not pro-Open-Source Boob Project. Call me humorless--and sometimes, I can be, despite my awesome puns--but my definition of a better world has never, once, included the official institutionalizing of the objectification of women. But a lady could wear a button and officially opt in to opting in or out! the project coordinators cry; indeed, by all accounts, those without buttons were left out of the grope fest. But it seems to me that every damn day women are forced to make that same decision, to opt in or out of being looked at, accosted, paid attention to in a very particular, unwelcome way. How is this button system--this making concrete the unspoken, unpleasant reality--supposed to be enlightened, a positive step in relations between the sexes, a way to empower women? I am not buying into their party line, and it's the party line that's making me the most angry.

Because look: I am pro-sex. I am very pro-sex. I am very pro the idea that everyone comes around to thinking that sex is beautiful and natural like a butterfly and wonderful like a puppy and that everyone should be able to be free and happy and comfortable in their sexuality and free and happy and comfortable in their bodies. And what makes me angry is that this project is being posed as the way to get to that utopian state, that it is being sold as a noble and righteous experiment for the betterment of human relations, that it's not sexual, certainly not skeevy, not at all objectifying, when what it pretty much sounds like to me--what it basically seems to boil down to--is "We like boobs and we totally want to touch them, hur hur."

And you know, boobs are nice. Boobs are very very nice to touch. But by the parameters of this project, me not wanting someone to ask me if they can touch my breasts, me not wanting to have to even opt into the possibility or opt out of it or even have it be a question of possible discussion, that makes me uptight, a prude, someone who is not comfortable with her body or her sexuality and probably I hate kittens and puppies. Not wanting someone to talk about my tits like this makes me unenlightened, apparently:

And lo, we touched her breasts--taking turns to put our hands on the creamy tops exposed through the sheer top she wore, cupping our palms to touch the clothed swell underneath, exploring thoroughly but briefly lest we cross the line from 'touching" to "unwanted heavy petting." They were awesome breasts, worthy of being touched.

And I think I might be okay with that.

Maybe, though, maybe I am just skeeved out by the creepy Dear Penthouse Letters vocabulary and phrasing (creamy tops? clothed swell? Jesus Christ) and that's blinding me to the brilliance of the plan; maybe it is possibly a little unfair that I am picturing his palms as sweaty and his pants as way too tight. Maybe it is totally unwarranted that I am enraged by the condescending declaration that these creamy swelling breasts he just spent five minutes pawing were worthy of his stubby little fingers, as if he had any right to judge their merit. And hey, wait a minute--why does their worthiness have any relevance at all to their noble overarching purpose in launching this project? Because when you strip away their ridiculous, angry-making justifications, that's pretty much what this project is all about, isn't it.