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.

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.

Sometimes I wish I were less naked shy. Maybe someday.

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.