Crouching fanboy hidden boobies
I was up way too late, but the Sci Fi convention I was attending had negotiated extended pool hours with the hotel. I couldn’t resist the temptation. I had to check out the hot tub.
I like cons. They’re silly and exuberant and many of my nerdy friends are there. But there are also all these… other people around. Some of them are the “friends you haven’t met” kind of strangers, indubitably, but there are also the “that guy that talks like a robot just farted on me in the elevator” kind. So conventions are admittedly a mixed bag.
Another thing about geeks: they’re often (not all of them, mind, but probably more than average) starved for attention, kinky, and accepting of the social quirks of others. I love this about them, but it puts a little extra pressure on me to be tolerant of quirks I don’t enjoy.
Take, for instance, bad breath. I have nothing against you if you have bad breath. I think you’re, like, fearfully and wonderfully made and stuff, and I’m sure your gorgon breath has nothing to do with dental hygiene and everything to do with a medical condition you can’t control. I’m not saying it’s your fault or that it reflects on you as a person (although I am totally judging you) but I’m still going to want a significant space between your face and mine. I would like you to stay outside the breath bubble, had I my druthers.
…And that’s just one example. But it often comes back to the personal space thing.
But I was talking about general acceptance before I was talking about my raging olfactory hatemongering. Acceptance is good. It’s freeing. Watching some of these people, it’s like a metric ton of societal pressures have been lifted off their shoulders for one weekend and they tool around frenetically, being who they wish they could be every day, in a gentler world.
This is all just a very round about way to say that as I entered the pool enclosure, 90% of the people there were stark naked.
Fandom is populated with some legitimately hot people and a host of other people that aren’t… I mean, that are more… well, people I’m sure are beautiful on the inside. I’m speaking for me here, since everyone finds different things attractive, but I’m going out on a limb and saying that there were three naked people tops at that highly attended pool party who would be considered above-average looks-wise.
Yeah, it’s shitty that my brain made evaluations about which naked people were pretty and which weren’t. They were just hanging out (ha) and not necessarily asking to be stared at and graded by shallow sex bloggers. But guess what? I’m human and I’m anonymously honest on the internet, and my brain probably didn’t do anything yours wouldn’t have. So there.
I wasn’t actually there to gawk at naked or to be naked. I was there to relax a bit in the hot tub before bed. If I flirted with some hot people (naked or clothed) so be it! But personally I’m a little naked shy, so I stripped down to my bra and knickers and grinned at my own cleverness having selected dark colored undies that day.
The sunken hot tub was crowded, but I found some space next to my (betrunked, if you’re curious) friend Crispin Hijanx. We chilled out and maxed, relaxing all cool, trying not to stare directly at anyone’s fun bits. It was all of two minutes before a naked (not ugly, if you’re curious) guy I’d never seen before came up and started small-talking me. I made some fairly bland, exhausted answers, failing in my attempts to not watch a curvy girl with an awesome ass ascend the hot tub stairs and dive into the nearby pool. When she was safely submerged, I turned back to my nameless naked companion.
“So,” he said, now that he had my attention, “you’re not going topless?”
I looked down at my bra “No. No, I guess I’m not.” Actually none of the women there were topless. They were naked or suited. But I guess Nameless Naked Dude thought boobs would be a good start.
“Why not?” Hmmmm. I’d never had a stranger ask me why I wasn’t showing him my tits before. His tone creeped me out: like he wasn’t mad, just disappointed. Like I was cheating him out of something. I suddenly felt oddly exposed. With all the flesh in that room he was feeling petulant that my breasts (probably the smallest pair in the room, even) were going to remain a mystery.
The cute thing about carefree light-hearted nudity is that no one makes that a big deal of it and no one solicits it. Everyone’s enjoying it, sure. That’s natural. But I don’t think that a hot tub needs an Ambassador of Naked. I didn’t have to flash Crispin the “save me” eyes or anything, but the whole exchange did convince me that the best way to get me to keep clothes on is to creepily request that I remove them. Maybe that was Nameless Naked Dude’s cunning plan all along: to keep me covered and hasten my departure. If so, his naked fu is very good.
Yikes. I’m naked-shy, too, but I always figured that part of the attitude that allowed a person to feel comfortable being nude in public was…well…the whole comfortable thing. What I mean is, shouldn’t it be an “I’m okay, you’re okay” kind of atmosphere where clothing is optional and nobody even mentions whatever you are(n’t) wearing?
Anyhoo, amen on the whole grading thing, too. That’s at least half the reason I’m naked-shy; I don’t want to be graded by strangers. If you’re putting it out there for the world to see, you should expect that most people will form an opinion about it.
@Brock F’in Samson The more pressure there is (and this is with nonsexual or sexual nudity) the less I want to take off clothes. Not mentioning it in a public nudity setting would be ideal. If I were an exhibitionist or something I’m sure this would be very different, but that’s my style.
Sometimes I wish I were less naked shy. Maybe someday.
This right here would be why I found the whole Open Source Boobie Project a complete fiasco. It takes nanoseconds to slide from “free choice with permission still asked on part of the boob owner” to resentment of women who choose not to participate.
@LabRat Actually knowing a few of the people who first conceived of and participated in the OSBP (although I wasn’t at either con where they invented/implemented it), I can say with confidence that it was an adorable idea among that particular extended group of maybe 12-20 people– maybe at a private party or as a secret project hidden in plain sight. But the idea becomes seriously problematic for a larger population, even at a Con with a generally positive atmosphere. Once it’s public there would always be the pressure to include everyone, since most people that go to Sci Fi conventions know what it feels like to be outcasts, and it’s considered gauche to make a “cool kid” club and leave people out.
With my sex life I totally get to leave people out just as I wish: that’s actually a healthy attitude, and one it took me a while to cultivate. But when you suddenly make boob touching more “social” than “sexual” you’re in that weird place where you feel kind of bad if you don’t want that creepy, smelly guy that talks like a robot to grope your tits. It’s not even necessarily the resentment that he might feel; it’s also that you worry you’re being too cliquish, which is tacitly frowned upon in geeky circles.
Once Robot Guy and Nameless Naked Dude are in on it, things will become creepy. There’s no way around that.
@quizzical pussy
Yeah, it really is that whole “this does not scale” aspect to it, because no matter how beautiful and enlightened you make the language, what it boils down to outside of a group of friends who know and trust each other and have all agreed to it is forcing strangers to participate in your sex life, even if it’s by having to opt out of it.
If I had been an attendee at Penguicon, words could not describe how epically pissed I would be to discover that I had to repeatedly, explicitly reject men I had never met before from groping me because some group of guys I had also never met before thought it would be awesome if some boobs were “open-source”. It does remind me of this comic more than anything else, though.