Deep within the internet lies Livejournal, the nearest thing Web 2.0 will ever have to a subculture. It’s Web 2.0 for people who hate Web 2.0. On there, millions of internet socialisers take advantage of its status somewhere between a blogging and a social/community networking facility. Achieving LJ fame and drama is no mean feat, a process so renowned that it has its own (highly homophobic, racist and misogynist - ie frat culture) encyclopedia.
Recently the LJ-famous user known as theferrett posted a story and a proposal about Open Sourcing women’s breasts. For some time I had been noticing the diametrically opposite attitudes to property in the discourses of female bodily integrity, and FLOSS ideology. theferrett, who appears to suffer from what internet feminists call ‘nice guy syndrome’, managed to initiate the inevitable by proposing that those who were open to requests to touch their breasts, could in certain circumstances wear a badge marked ‘yes.’
By contrast, the blogging-famous radical feminist Twisty Faster (self identified as a gentleman farmer and spinster aunt eating lunch in Austin, Texas) at I Blame The Patriarchy had only a year earlier proposed the inverse system for defining rape. In her proposal, the legal system will presume ‘no’ as a default answer to sexual requests to women, even during intercourse. Women alone are capable of offering the ‘yes’ which can be offered - or, controversially, revoked - at any time, even after the event.
It seemed firstly, a good idea to write a text comparing these argumentations (and I hope to do that properly). However, a friend told me about CommentPress lately and, being a long time habituee of internet forums, I became interested in the possibilities of texts and writings answering each other as a process - criticism becoming the fabric of the text itself rather than as a necessarily secondary response. I want to write a CommentPress essay, within the fabric of another’s essay, soon. But first I wondered what would happen if you just mash the ferrett and Twisty Faster together. Sometimes the texts swim apart, in their relevance to each other, because matching lines up is an accidental process - but sometimes their thematics merge, as if simply putting them together produces - via irony or via the false impression of conversation - a mutual criticality.
As the formatting is fiddly, below the jump I’ve posted this as an image rather than text. You’ll need to click to enlarge. As a matter of practicality and aesthetics, I have used edited versions of both texts - taking only the material in which the authors outline their arguments. They should be read completely, though, and even beyond that, the original texts have been much commented upon, discussed, disseminated, edited and appended to since, so even the expanded texts are by no means the authors’ final word (there is no final word on the internet). The original texts can be found:
She said I know what it’s like to be dead - Twisty Faster
The Open Source Boob Project - theferrett
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