The Body PoliticGetting Naked to Change the World
The Ukrainian activist group Femen has made headlines around the world by baring their breasts to protest against prostitution, exploitation and corruption. But can their naked stunts change anything, or are they just providing images for a sex-obsessed media?
It's a cool spring Thursday in Ukraine as the 24-year-old walks through the streets of Kiev with her attorney. She is wearing a leather jacket and black boots, and dangling an almost-finished cigarette between her fingers. Five years, because she bared her breasts in public once again.
The hearing at the Interior Ministry is at 5 p.m., and they are in a hurry. They walk past tall, brown and gray buildings from the Stalin era. They discuss ways to put a positive spin on the expression "kiss my ass," which is what Oksana said to the Indian ambassador. "It was a happy protest. A happy protest for the rights of Ukrainian women," Oksana finally says. She's decided it's what she will say in the hearing at the Interior Ministry.
Shachko is a Ukrainian women's rights activist, and her weapons are attached to her pale, petite body like the two halves of an apple.
Her weapons are the symbol of femininity, motherhood and sexuality, and filmmakers and marketers have used them millions of times to sell everything under the sun, from yogurt to vacuum cleaners. They have put Oksana and her fight onto cover pages around the world, and they've made her and her fellow activists into the cover girls of an international protest movement -- the icons of a naked rebellion.
Their supporters believe that by using these weapons, the women have invented a new feminism. Their critics say that they are turning themselves into pornography with these weapons.
Marxism Instead of Marriage
They were in their late teens, the oldest in her early 20s, when it all began, says Oksana, and their parents hoped that they would get married early. The creators of the movement are Oksana, Anna Hutsol and Sasha Shevchenko. At first, they lived in Khmelnytskyi, a city with 300,000 inhabitants and two nuclear reactors.
There were hardly any jobs to be had, and the men drank. The girls, for their part, spent long evenings discussing philosophy, Marxism and the situation of women in post-Soviet society. They decided that instead of getting married, they would bring about change.
Throughout its history, Western feminism has attempted a wide range of forms of protest, from committing acts of sabotage and placing bombs in the mailboxes of members of parliament in the 19th century, to major demonstrations and bra-burnings at the end of the 1960s.
In Germany, the fight against a law known as Article 218, which made abortion illegal, became a broad movement. In the early 1970s, under the motto "the private sphere is political," hundreds of thousands of women took to the streets to demonstrate for a woman's right to choose an abortion. But after the movement had reached its peak in Germany and Europe, nothing much happened after the 1990s. Women seemed to have achieved all of their goals.
Femen emerges from a part of Europe that has only tried its hand at democracy for the last 20 years, a Europe in which the greatest hope, for many 16-year-old girls, is to find a good husband after completing their university studies and eventually become a good mother. It's a Europe in which men can order women on the Internet as if they were running shoes, and in which women who bare their breasts in public can be locked up.
"That's why we scream and show our bodies," says Anna. And they don't do it just in Ukraine, but throughout Europe -- "because many things still aren't right in your countries, either." They take to the streets in maid outfits in Paris, shouting "Shame" in front of the house of former International Monetary Fund head Dominique Strauss-Kahn. They take to the streets in Kiev when a girl is raped and killed in Ukraine, as was the fate of an 18-year-old at the end of March. They also protest against the European Football Championship and the sex tourism it will bring. And they do all of this with naked upper bodies. "We are trying to give the breast, as a symbol, a different context." A breast, they say, can also be political.
"The reaction to a nude protest is a measure of freedom in a country," says Anna. "We were not arrested in Switzerland, but we were almost killed in Belarus."
The shrine of the movement stands in the hallway to the bathroom at Café Kupidon: a glass cabinet filled with Femen memorabilia, including coffee mugs and T-shirts imprinted with two stylized breasts in the Ukrainian national colors, the Femen logo. The display seems to have more in common with pop culture than with the women's movement.
'Quite Creative'
Even EMMA, the leading feminist magazine in Germany, recently devoted a cover story to Femen. It was written by the magazine's founder, Alice Schwarzer, Germany's most prominent feminist and anti-pornography activist. "The girls aren't just courageous and clever," writes Schwarzer, "they're also quite creative."
Schwarzer has fought bitterly against media depictions of female nudity. So why is she now displaying the breasts of Ukrainian blondes on the cover of an issue ofEMMA? When asked about her position on the group, Schwarzer preferred to respond to SPIEGEL's questions by email.
"The Femen women are catching the boomerang in mid-air and throwing it back," she wrote. "The bare breast, which would normally objectify them, becomes a weapon for them. They use it to attract looks, and to deliver their message to men, namely their protest against the exposure of women! Against prostitution! Against trafficking in women! I think that's a good thing."
Femen's methods are typical of the playful irony of the second or third generation of feminists, Schwarzer writes. But, she adds, the women are also performing a balancing act where they can easily slip and fall. "I recently saw that the women from Femen posed completely naked for the magazine Elle. That's one of those slip-ups. Now they have to be careful that the boomerang doesn't fly back, and they become objectified."
Despite her misgivings, Schwarzer has invited the women to Germany, where they plan to stage a joint protest. The old and the new feminists seem to be finding common ground: the older generation, which sometimes seems out of touch with the times, and the younger generation, which has recognized that it needs the media to attract attention -- and that the media happens to love breasts.
Femen isn't alone with its neo-feminist form of protest. Some of its contemporaries include the Pussy Riot collective in Moscow, with their feminist punk rock, who are now in detention awaiting trial. They could face seven years in prison for having stormed the pulpit of a church and raged against Putin. There are the Slutwalks in the United States. And there is Egyptian art student Aliaa Magda Elmahdy, who undressed to fight for her sexual self-determination and whose photo went around the world after she published it on her blog. A branch of Femen was even established in Tunisia recently.
Sometimes they meet in real life, the old and the new feminists, the one version of Europe and the other, and sometimes they use each other for their respective ends.
Scoping Out the Location
A week after her hearing at the Interior Ministry, on a spring-like Friday, Oksana Shachko is standing at the Trocadero in Paris, with the Eiffel Tower in the background. A group of French women's rights activists has invited the Femen women to Paris, paying for their flight and providing them with accommodation in an apartment. They intend to get undressed together.
Shachko has actually been ordered not to leave Kiev until her trial, and she even signed a document stating that she would comply with the order. It will take at least another month before she knows what her sentence will be. "The main thing is that I'm here," she says. "It's such a nice place for a demonstration."
Together with Sasha Shevchenko, with her long blonde hair and aviator glasses, and Inna Shevchenko, also blonde and wearing hot pants, she stands among tourists as they take pictures.
To their left, someone is playing a pan flute, and a vendor is selling crepes to their right. But Oksana, Sasha and Inna don't notice any of this. There are actually here to scope out the square, looking for police officers, checking escape routes and minimizing possible points of attack.
Their plan, together with the French women, is to occupy the square the next day. Their protest will address the rights of Muslim women and the burka. The idea came from Safia Lebdi, the woman who brought Femen to France. Her office is in the Maison de la Mixité, a cultural center on the ground floor of a nondescript apartment building in the eastern part of Paris.
'Let's Get Naked'
She is known in France as a founding member of the women's rights organization "Ni putes, ni soumises" (Neither Whores Nor Submissive). She is also a Green Party politician, and she speaks with a loud voice as her black curls bob up and down. "We will throw our sex onto the public square tomorrow. It's cool. It's fresh," she says, although one has to wonder what the real issue is here: the rights of Muslim women or naked breasts? And where exactly do these protests lead? Do they cause men to change their way of thinking? Or do they simply give them a good look at beautiful bodies?
Oksana, Sasha and the other Femen women are standing in the next room, making signs for the next day with thick brushes and black paint, painting slogans like "Muslim women let's get naked," "Nudity is freedom" and "Afghanistan take off your clothes."
Lebdi has collected donations to bring the women from Ukraine to Paris. She spent weeks drumming up supporters, making phone calls and writing to all the women's rights activists she knows, including feminists who would be willing to undress for the cause. "It was very difficult to convince the women. There's a lot of fear, including the fear of talking about the burka," she says.
She contacted hundreds of women, and now she expects 20 of them, mostly with Arab backgrounds, to participate in the protest. Lebdi knows that she can benefit from Femen. She is using Femen to draw attention to her feminist causes, because it's easier to be heard when half-naked Ukrainian women are standing next to you. Conversely, the Femen women are using the French feminists to get to Paris and create new images of themselves for the world to see.
Slogan Dispute
The next morning, Oksana, Inna and Sasha are standing in front of a red table covered with paints and brushes, discussing what they want those images to look like. They will include the words they write on their breasts. Lebdi, standing next to them, discovers a sign that reads: "Islam is the religion of sadism."
"No," says Lebdi. "No, I'm not OK with that."
"Should we put a question mark after it?" Sasha asks.
"No, it's not a question," says Lebdi, her curls dancing on her head. "If we do that, the other women will back out." Islam, Islamism and fundamentalism are completely different things, she says.
Oksana, Sasha and Inna stare blankly at the sign, and it's clear that the thought never even occurred to them. They are good at making fanatical facial expressions and chanting slogans, and they are courageous and willing to take great risks. But the differences between Islam and Islamism? Lebdi, at any rate, makes sure that the sign ends up in the trash.
'You're Not Models, You're Soldiers'
The first activists arrive at the Maison de la Mixité in the late morning. The Iranian women's rights activist Maryam Namazie has come from London, and Lebanese born actress and author Darina al-Joundi is also there. The women eat cake and laugh and gradually take off their clothes. They staple together burkas out of pieces of black material, which they will put on and then tear off to increase the shock effect. Oksana, the artist, writes the words "Naked War" on the breasts of the younger women, and "I am a woman and not an object" on those of the older women.
They hide their passports in their underwear, in case they are arrested. Then they stand up in front of the other women and give them their final instructions. "We are a small army, but a powerful one," says Inna. "We'll count to four -- one, two, three, four -- and then we'll cast off our burkas."
The women stand in a half-circle, Inna counts to four, and they throw off their veils. "Don't pose," says Inna. "You're not models, you're soldiers."
Smiling Police
When they step out of several taxis at around 2 p.m., draped in their black veils, side by side, the old feminism next to the new, the activists encounter about 40 journalists with video cameras and microphones. Inna has informed the media about the time and place of the protest. It's the way they always do it, and it always works. Five police cars have also appeared.
Oksana, Inna and Sasha run into the square, and the other women run after them. They throw off their burkas and hold up their signs into the gray Parisian sky, the French women naked down to their jeans and the Ukrainians wearing nothing but black underpants, and they scream at the top of their voices.
The police officers follow the women into the square and stand in front of them, smiling. They don't want to arrest anyone.
They just want to watch.
femen activist Oksana Shachko is a professional icon painter and lives in a run-down
studio apartment in Kiev with greenish mold on the ceiling
FEMEN: Getting Naked to Change the World
Oksana Shachko, a girl with a doll-like face, is supposed to go to prison for five years.
It's a cool spring Thursday in Ukraine as the 24-year-old walks through the streets of Kiev with her attorney. She is wearing a leather jacket and black boots, and dangling an almost-finished cigarette between her fingers.
Five years, because she bared her breasts in public once again.
The hearing at the Interior Ministry is at 5 p.m., and they are in a hurry. They walk past tall, brown and gray buildings from the Stalin era. They discuss ways to put a positive spin on the expression "kiss my ass," which is what Oksana said to the Indian ambassador. "It was a happy protest. A happy protest for the rights of Ukrainian women," Oksana finally says. She's decided it's what she will say in the hearing at the Interior Ministry.
Shachko is a Ukrainian women's rights activist, and her weapons are attached to her pale, petite body like the two halves of an apple.
Her weapons are the symbol of femininity, motherhood and sexuality, and filmmakers and marketers have used them millions of times to sell everything under the sun, from yogurt to vacuum cleaners. They have put Oksana and her fight onto cover pages around the world, and they've made her and her fellow activists into the cover girls of an international protest movement -- the icons of a naked rebellion.
Their supporters believe that by using these weapons, the women have invented a new feminism. Their critics say that they are turning themselves into pornography with these weapons.
Marxism Instead of Marriage
They were in their late teens, the oldest in her early 20s, when it all began, says Oksana, and their parents hoped that they would get married early. The creators of the movement are Oksana, Anna Hutsol and Sasha Shevchenko. At first, they lived in Khmelnytskyi, a city with 300,000 inhabitants and two nuclear reactors.
There were hardly any jobs to be had, and the men drank. The girls, for their part, spent long evenings discussing philosophy, Marxism and the situation of women in post-Soviet society. They decided that instead of getting married, they would bring about change.
There were only three of them at first, but now the movement, whose ranks include students, journalists and economists, has spread throughout Ukraine and includes more than 300 women. Calling themselves "Femen," they have started a movement that has also caught hold among women in Tunisia and the United States. It's a movement that even encourages experienced women's rights activists to undress.
"Maybe I'll need political asylum," says Oksana. "What they're accusing me of is absurd." She and her attorney have arrived at the Interior Ministry.
Accused of Hooliganism
During the Russian presidential election on March 4, Femen tried to seize the ballot box containing Vladimir Putin's vote in Moscow.
Oksana is a professional icon painter and lives in a run-down studio apartment in Kiev with greenish mold on the ceiling. In other words, she has a profession and is living an ordinary Ukrainian life of poverty and turmoil. But her apartment is full of protest signs, and she has drawn a picture of a Femen activist, with flowing hair and bare breasts, on the wall. It's a self-portrait of a woman who is causing a lot of trouble.
She was released from a Moscow prison a few days ago, after having tried -- topless -- to steal the ballot box containing Russian leader Vladimir Putin's ballot during the March 4 presidential election. The stunt got her two weeks in a prison cell.
Now she stands accused of hooliganism and occupying the Indian Embassy to protest a claim by the Indian Foreign Ministry that women from post-Soviet countries are going to India to work as prostitutes.
Although the Indian Embassy denied the claim, this didn't stop Oksana and three other women from storming the building. They waved the Indian flag and banged it against windows and doors, shouting: "Ukrainian women are no prostitutes" and "kiss my ass."
Using the Body to Sell Ideas
November 2009, FEMEN activists staged a protest in front of Ukraine's Education Ministry in Kiev to denounce the sexual harassment of students by some university professors in the country
Such protest campaigns usually begin at the Café Kupidon. While Oksana is making a statement at the Interior Ministry, Anna Hutsol is sitting at a table in the café, working on her next campaign. Café Kupidon is in the basement of a tall townhouse on Pushkinskaya ulitsa, or Pushkin Street. The windowless café serves as the headquarters, office and press center of Femen. It's where the activists recruit new members, although some don't need to be recruited. The group already includes 30 nude activists, attractive, idealistic young women. They meet at the café, where they drink apple juice and chain-smoke.
The image of the Ukrainian woman is colored by the cliché that she is beautiful, poor and easy to get. Trafficking in women and prostitution are rampant in Ukraine, which is co-hosting the upcoming European football championships. Everywhere in Kiev, in the subway and in classified ads, women are recruited with spurious promises of employment. A phrase like "waitress in a club" is often code for prostitute in a brothel.
Many fall for these offers because they are poor and have no prospects. Almost 9 percent of Ukrainians are unemployed, and many of the jobless are women. "If the female body can sell all kinds of things, we also have to use it to sell social ideas," says Hutsol, as she puts out her cigarette in an overflowing ashtray. They staged theirfirst protest in the summer of 2008, when they took to the streets in prostitutes' clothing. "Ukraine isn't a brothel," they shouted, as they held up their signs. The protest attracted media attention and promptly triggered a debate. Suddenly the women realized that producing scandal translates into power. That, at least, is their hope.
They staged their first nude demonstration in 2009 on Khreshchatyk, Kiev's main shopping avenue, to protest against Internet pornography. "It was embarrassing at first," says Hutsol, "and we covered our breasts with our hands." But the public response was good, and so they did it again the next time. Eventually they came to see their breasts as nothing but a uniform.
Sought-After
The group also protests outside their native Ukraine. Here, a protest at the World Economic Forum annual meeting in the Swiss resort of Davos in January 2012.
The issues they protest about can be found in the news.
They don't just demonstrate for women's rights, but for issues like the economy and corruption, and against politicians like Putin and former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi. They aren't, however, protesting over the prison conditions endured by former Ukrainian Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko, who seems to have caught the attention of much of Europe at the moment. In fact, say the Femen women, Tymoshenko is part of a clique of oligarchs who are fighting with other oligarchs, and they see no reason to do anything for the jailed politician.
Today they are planning a trip to Paris, in response to an invitation by a group of French feminists. "I have to fly to Moscow tomorrow, for a TV show," says Anna. Oksana was originally scheduled to appear on the program, but now she has been barred from entering Russia for the rest of her life.
Anna Hutsol has become a sought-after face. She doesn't look like most of the Femen girls, who put their beauty on display with peroxide-blonde hair, heavy eye makeup and high heels. Anna is petite and serious, wears red rubber boots and keeps her hair cut short and dyed red. At 27, she is the oldest member of the group and, together with Oksana and Sasha, is in a sense its chief ideologue.
When they began the movement in Khmelnytskyi, she was 21 and just starting to read August Bebel, the founder of the social democratic workers' movement in Germany. She read that Bebel had introduced a bill in parliament on equal rights for women at the end of the 19th century. After reading that, she thought about her own life and that of her female friends, and concluded that nothing had changed.
Not a Typical Movement
She told everyone about what she had read. She found supporters and, together with Oksana and Sasha, founded a group they called "New Ethics." They organized discussion groups at the university, where Anna was studying economics, and soon they held their first demonstrations -- fully clothed, at first. They didn't start baring their breasts until two years later in Kiev.
"I knew from the start that I didn't want us to mutate into a typical feminist organization," says Hutsol. "I didn't want an organization in which women talk, talk, talk, while the years go by and nothing happens. We have brought more extremism into the women's movement."
Starting in 2008, the three women moved to Kiev -- first Anna, then Sasha and, finally, Oksana. They began campaigning for the rights of female students. But soon the fight against prostitution and sex tourism became their central concern. "The issue was in the air," says Anna, explaining that it was annoying to them that they, as normal women, couldn't even walk along Khreshchatyk street without someone asking them for sex.
That was when they began calling themselves Femen. Anna had read that there was a part of the female femur that is called "femen" in Latin. This isn't entirely correct, though. "Femen" simply means femur, both in women and men. But it sounded good and, most importantly, it evoked an image of strong women.
Throughout its history, Western feminism has attempted a wide range of forms of protest, from committing acts of sabotage and placing bombs in the mailboxes of members of parliament in the 19th century, to major demonstrations and bra-burnings at the end of the 1960s.
In Germany, the fight against a law known as Article 218, which made abortion illegal, became a broad movement. In the early 1970s, under the motto "the private sphere is political," hundreds of thousands of women took to the streets to demonstrate for a woman's right to choose an abortion. But after the movement had reached its peak in Germany and Europe, nothing much happened after the 1990s. Women seemed to have achieved all of their goals.
Femen emerges from a part of Europe that has only tried its hand at democracy for the last 20 years, a Europe in which the greatest hope, for many 16-year-old girls, is to find a good husband after completing their university studies and eventually become a good mother. It's a Europe in which men can order women on the Internet as if they were running shoes, and in which women who bare their breasts in public can be locked up.
"That's why we scream and show our bodies," says Anna. And they don't do it just in Ukraine, but throughout Europe -- "because many things still aren't right in your countries, either." They take to the streets in maid outfits in Paris, shouting "Shame" in front of the house of former International Monetary Fund head Dominique Strauss-Kahn. They take to the streets in Kiev when a girl is raped and killed in Ukraine, as was the fate of an 18-year-old at the end of March. They also protest against the European Football Championship and the sex tourism it will bring. And they do all of this with naked upper bodies. "We are trying to give the breast, as a symbol, a different context." A breast, they say, can also be political.
"The reaction to a nude protest is a measure of freedom in a country," says Anna. "We were not arrested in Switzerland, but we were almost killed in Belarus."
The shrine of the movement stands in the hallway to the bathroom at Café Kupidon: a glass cabinet filled with Femen memorabilia, including coffee mugs and T-shirts imprinted with two stylized breasts in the Ukrainian national colors, the Femen logo. The display seems to have more in common with pop culture than with the women's movement.
'Quite Creative'
A protest in Belarus was one of the riskiest the group has done. "The reaction to a nude protest is a measure of freedom in a country," says one Femen activist. "We were not arrested in Switzerland, but we were almost killed in Belarus."
Even EMMA, the leading feminist magazine in Germany, recently devoted a cover story to Femen. It was written by the magazine's founder, Alice Schwarzer, Germany's most prominent feminist and anti-pornography activist. "The girls aren't just courageous and clever," writes Schwarzer, "they're also quite creative."
Schwarzer has fought bitterly against media depictions of female nudity. So why is she now displaying the breasts of Ukrainian blondes on the cover of an issue ofEMMA? When asked about her position on the group, Schwarzer preferred to respond to SPIEGEL's questions by email.
"The Femen women are catching the boomerang in mid-air and throwing it back," she wrote. "The bare breast, which would normally objectify them, becomes a weapon for them. They use it to attract looks, and to deliver their message to men, namely their protest against the exposure of women! Against prostitution! Against trafficking in women! I think that's a good thing."
Femen's methods are typical of the playful irony of the second or third generation of feminists, Schwarzer writes. But, she adds, the women are also performing a balancing act where they can easily slip and fall. "I recently saw that the women from Femen posed completely naked for the magazine Elle. That's one of those slip-ups. Now they have to be careful that the boomerang doesn't fly back, and they become objectified."
Despite her misgivings, Schwarzer has invited the women to Germany, where they plan to stage a joint protest. The old and the new feminists seem to be finding common ground: the older generation, which sometimes seems out of touch with the times, and the younger generation, which has recognized that it needs the media to attract attention -- and that the media happens to love breasts.
Femen isn't alone with its neo-feminist form of protest. Some of its contemporaries include the Pussy Riot collective in Moscow, with their feminist punk rock, who are now in detention awaiting trial. They could face seven years in prison for having stormed the pulpit of a church and raged against Putin. There are the Slutwalks in the United States. And there is Egyptian art student Aliaa Magda Elmahdy, who undressed to fight for her sexual self-determination and whose photo went around the world after she published it on her blog. A branch of Femen was even established in Tunisia recently.
Sometimes they meet in real life, the old and the new feminists, the one version of Europe and the other, and sometimes they use each other for their respective ends.
Scoping Out the Location
A week after her hearing at the Interior Ministry, on a spring-like Friday, Oksana Shachko is standing at the Trocadero in Paris, with the Eiffel Tower in the background. A group of French women's rights activists has invited the Femen women to Paris, paying for their flight and providing them with accommodation in an apartment. They intend to get undressed together.
Shachko has actually been ordered not to leave Kiev until her trial, and she even signed a document stating that she would comply with the order. It will take at least another month before she knows what her sentence will be. "The main thing is that I'm here," she says. "It's such a nice place for a demonstration."
Together with Sasha Shevchenko, with her long blonde hair and aviator glasses, and Inna Shevchenko, also blonde and wearing hot pants, she stands among tourists as they take pictures.
To their left, someone is playing a pan flute, and a vendor is selling crepes to their right. But Oksana, Sasha and Inna don't notice any of this. There are actually here to scope out the square, looking for police officers, checking escape routes and minimizing possible points of attack.
Their plan, together with the French women, is to occupy the square the next day. Their protest will address the rights of Muslim women and the burka. The idea came from Safia Lebdi, the woman who brought Femen to France. Her office is in the Maison de la Mixité, a cultural center on the ground floor of a nondescript apartment building in the eastern part of Paris.
'Let's Get Naked'
She is known in France as a founding member of the women's rights organization "Ni putes, ni soumises" (Neither Whores Nor Submissive). She is also a Green Party politician, and she speaks with a loud voice as her black curls bob up and down. "We will throw our sex onto the public square tomorrow. It's cool. It's fresh," she says, although one has to wonder what the real issue is here: the rights of Muslim women or naked breasts? And where exactly do these protests lead? Do they cause men to change their way of thinking? Or do they simply give them a good look at beautiful bodies?
Oksana, Sasha and the other Femen women are standing in the next room, making signs for the next day with thick brushes and black paint, painting slogans like "Muslim women let's get naked," "Nudity is freedom" and "Afghanistan take off your clothes."
Lebdi has collected donations to bring the women from Ukraine to Paris. She spent weeks drumming up supporters, making phone calls and writing to all the women's rights activists she knows, including feminists who would be willing to undress for the cause. "It was very difficult to convince the women. There's a lot of fear, including the fear of talking about the burka," she says.
She contacted hundreds of women, and now she expects 20 of them, mostly with Arab backgrounds, to participate in the protest. Lebdi knows that she can benefit from Femen. She is using Femen to draw attention to her feminist causes, because it's easier to be heard when half-naked Ukrainian women are standing next to you. Conversely, the Femen women are using the French feminists to get to Paris and create new images of themselves for the world to see.
Slogan Dispute
The next morning, Oksana, Inna and Sasha are standing in front of a red table covered with paints and brushes, discussing what they want those images to look like. They will include the words they write on their breasts. Lebdi, standing next to them, discovers a sign that reads: "Islam is the religion of sadism."
"No," says Lebdi. "No, I'm not OK with that."
"Should we put a question mark after it?" Sasha asks.
"No, it's not a question," says Lebdi, her curls dancing on her head. "If we do that, the other women will back out." Islam, Islamism and fundamentalism are completely different things, she says.
Oksana, Sasha and Inna stare blankly at the sign, and it's clear that the thought never even occurred to them. They are good at making fanatical facial expressions and chanting slogans, and they are courageous and willing to take great risks. But the differences between Islam and Islamism? Lebdi, at any rate, makes sure that the sign ends up in the trash.
'You're Not Models, You're Soldiers'
The first activists arrive at the Maison de la Mixité in the late morning. The Iranian women's rights activist Maryam Namazie has come from London, and Lebanese born actress and author Darina al-Joundi is also there. The women eat cake and laugh and gradually take off their clothes. They staple together burkas out of pieces of black material, which they will put on and then tear off to increase the shock effect. Oksana, the artist, writes the words "Naked War" on the breasts of the younger women, and "I am a woman and not an object" on those of the older women.
They hide their passports in their underwear, in case they are arrested. Then they stand up in front of the other women and give them their final instructions. "We are a small army, but a powerful one," says Inna. "We'll count to four -- one, two, three, four -- and then we'll cast off our burkas."
The women stand in a half-circle, Inna counts to four, and they throw off their veils. "Don't pose," says Inna. "You're not models, you're soldiers."
Smiling Police
When they step out of several taxis at around 2 p.m., draped in their black veils, side by side, the old feminism next to the new, the activists encounter about 40 journalists with video cameras and microphones. Inna has informed the media about the time and place of the protest. It's the way they always do it, and it always works. Five police cars have also appeared.
Oksana, Inna and Sasha run into the square, and the other women run after them. They throw off their burkas and hold up their signs into the gray Parisian sky, the French women naked down to their jeans and the Ukrainians wearing nothing but black underpants, and they scream at the top of their voices.
The police officers follow the women into the square and stand in front of them, smiling. They don't want to arrest anyone.
They just want to watch.
There were only three of them at first, but now the movement, whose ranks include students, journalists and economists, has spread throughout Ukraine and includes more than 300 women. Calling themselves "Femen," they have started a movement that has also caught hold among women in Tunisia and the United States. It's a movement that even encourages experienced women's rights activists to undress.
"Maybe I'll need political asylum," says Oksana. "What they're accusing me of is absurd." She and her attorney have arrived at the Interior Ministry.
Accused of Hooliganism
Oksana is a professional icon painter and lives in a run-down studio apartment in Kiev with greenish mold on the ceiling. In other words, she has a profession and is living an ordinary Ukrainian life of poverty and turmoil. But her apartment is full of protest signs, and she has drawn a picture of a Femen activist, with flowing hair and bare breasts, on the wall. It's a self-portrait of a woman who is causing a lot of trouble.
She was released from a Moscow prison a few days ago, after having tried -- topless -- to steal the ballot box containing Russian leader Vladimir Putin's ballot during the March 4 presidential election. The stunt got her two weeks in a prison cell.
Now she stands accused of hooliganism and occupying the Indian Embassy to protest a claim by the Indian Foreign Ministry that women from post-Soviet countries are going to India to work as prostitutes.
Although the Indian Embassy denied the claim, this didn't stop Oksana and three other women from storming the building. They waved the Indian flag and banged it against windows and doors, shouting: "Ukrainian women are no prostitutes" and "kiss my ass."
Using the Body to Sell Ideas
Such protest campaigns usually begin at the Café Kupidon. While Oksana is making a statement at the Interior Ministry, Anna Hutsol is sitting at a table in the café, working on her next campaign. Café Kupidon is in the basement of a tall townhouse on Pushkinskaya ulitsa, or Pushkin Street. The windowless café serves as the headquarters, office and press center of Femen. It's where the activists recruit new members, although some don't need to be recruited. The group already includes 30 nude activists, attractive, idealistic young women. They meet at the café, where they drink apple juice and chain-smoke.
The image of the Ukrainian woman is colored by the cliché that she is beautiful, poor and easy to get. Trafficking in women and prostitution are rampant in Ukraine, which is co-hosting the upcoming European football championships. Everywhere in Kiev, in the subway and in classified ads, women are recruited with spurious promises of employment. A phrase like "waitress in a club" is often code for prostitute in a brothel.
Many fall for these offers because they are poor and have no prospects. Almost 9 percent of Ukrainians are unemployed, and many of the jobless are women. "If the female body can sell all kinds of things, we also have to use it to sell social ideas," says Hutsol, as she puts out her cigarette in an overflowing ashtray. They staged their first protest in the summer of 2008, when they took to the streets in prostitutes' clothing. "Ukraine isn't a brothel," they shouted, as they held up their signs. The protest attracted media attention and promptly triggered a debate. Suddenly the women realized that producing scandal translates into power. That, at least, is their hope.
They staged their first nude demonstration in 2009 on Khreshchatyk, Kiev's main shopping avenue, to protest against Internet pornography. "It was embarrassing at first," says Hutsol, "and we covered our breasts with our hands." But the public response was good, and so they did it again the next time. Eventually they came to see their breasts as nothing but a uniform.
Sought-After
The issues they protest about can be found in the news. They don't just demonstrate for women's rights, but for issues like the economy and corruption, and against politicians like Putin and former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi. They aren't, however, protesting over the prison conditions endured by former Ukrainian Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko, who seems to have caught the attention of much of Europe at the moment. In fact, say the Femen women, Tymoshenko is part of a clique of oligarchs who are fighting with other oligarchs, and they see no reason to do anything for the jailed politician.
Today they are planning a trip to Paris, in response to an invitation by a group of French feminists. "I have to fly to Moscow tomorrow, for a TV show," says Anna. Oksana was originally scheduled to appear on the program, but now she has been barred from entering Russia for the rest of her life.
Anna Hutsol has become a sought-after face. She doesn't look like most of the Femen girls, who put their beauty on display with peroxide-blonde hair, heavy eye makeup and high heels. Anna is petite and serious, wears red rubber boots and keeps her hair cut short and dyed red. At 27, she is the oldest member of the group and, together with Oksana and Sasha, is in a sense its chief ideologue.
When they began the movement in Khmelnytskyi, she was 21 and just starting to read August Bebel, the founder of the social democratic workers' movement in Germany. She read that Bebel had introduced a bill in parliament on equal rights for women at the end of the 19th century. After reading that, she thought about her own life and that of her female friends, and concluded that nothing had changed.
Not a Typical Movement
She told everyone about what she had read. She found supporters and, together with Oksana and Sasha, founded a group they called "New Ethics." They organized discussion groups at the university, where Anna was studying economics, and soon they held their first demonstrations -- fully clothed, at first. They didn't start baring their breasts until two years later in Kiev.
"I knew from the start that I didn't want us to mutate into a typical feminist organization," says Hutsol. "I didn't want an organization in which women talk, talk, talk, while the years go by and nothing happens. We have brought more extremism into the women's movement."
Starting in 2008, the three women moved to Kiev -- first Anna, then Sasha and, finally, Oksana. They began campaigning for the rights of female students. But soon the fight against prostitution and sex tourism became their central concern. "The issue was in the air," says Anna, explaining that it was annoying to them that they, as normal women, couldn't even walk along Khreshchatyk street without someone asking them for sex.
That was when they began calling themselves Femen. Anna had read that there was a part of the female femur that is called "femen" in Latin. This isn't entirely correct, though. "Femen" simply means femur, both in women and men. But it sounded good and, most importantly, it evoked an image of strong women.
Despite government threats, Femen carries on with its activities. Although the organization remains small, the topless protests have given it a global reputation.
Security guards also keep their eyes peeled for Femen protesters. Here, a guard attempts to remove a protestor from a cultural event in Kiev.
State authorities have gone to great measures to suppress Femen's actions in the Ukraine.
Femen activists don't consider their eye-catching protesting to be problematic: "We have the right to use our bodies as weapons. It was men who made breasts into a secret."
Femen protests take to the streets in Kiev's Independence Square.
As is lots of leg.
Bare-breasted protests are common.
Even Facebook took a shot at Femen, deleting the group's Facebook page for suspected pornographic activity.
Femen's activities have struck a nerve with Ukrainian authorities. The Ukrainian security service SBU has investigated members and threatened to "break the legs" of Femen's leader if she didn't stop anti-government attacks. Femen protesters often end up behind bars.
Using a woman's weapons: Ukrainian women's rights group Femen fights sex tourism and prostitution with breasts bared.
All around the world, people are getting naked for political causes. The activists of the Ukrainian group Femen are famous for posing topless. Here they are protesting in Lviv against sex tourism, prostitution, and alcohol sales at sports stadiums during the Euro 2012 soccer championship that Ukraine will co-host with Poland
Here, the Femen women are seen acting out against orders from the Kiev city administration prohibiting residents from going out onto their balconies naked or half-naked during the upcoming Euro 2012 soccer championship. The activists' placards read, "This is a rebellious balcony!"
This Femen protester made an appearance in Vatican City earlier in November.
And this one did the same in Zurich four days later.
For Femen, publicity is guaranteed, the risks are manageable and the distribution channels are obvious. Few newspapers would fail to print a picture of attractive Ukrainian women who have stripped naked for a good cause....
...especially when they're so up-front about it. Here, Femen activists stage a performance in front of the Ministry for Science and Education in Kiev protesting sexual harassment of female students by professors at colleges and universities.
Recently, art student Aliaa Magda Elmahdy caused a storm in Egypt with her naked photos of herself, which she posted on her blog.
A group of Israeli women stripped naked to show solidarity with Elmadhy.
In China, supporters of Ai Weiwei are posting nude pictures on the Internet in protest against his treatment by the authorities. The Chinese government has accused Ai Weiwei of pornography because of a series of naked photos he made, such as the one shown here.
Here, a woman in Beijing looks at a blog showing pictures of Ai Weiwei's supporters.
In Spain, members of the "Indignant" movement have also been getting naked, as seen here in Madrid in July 2011.
These protesters were representing a special interest group: nude artists' models. They were protesting outside the Paris cultural affairs office against a new rule that would deprive them of tips from the artists (Dec. 2008 photo).
Here, students in Medellin, Colombia protest against an education reform bill on Nov. 10, 2011.
Naked protests certainly seem popular in Colombia. These women marched in Medellin on Sept. 7, 2011 in a protest against government intentions to alter teacher's health insurance plans.
And here naked cyclists cruise through central Paris in June 2007. The worldwide naked cycling protests at the time were intended to highlight the vulnerability of cyclists on the road and protest against oil dependency.
They took place in cities around the world, including Washington DC...
... and Mexico City.
In Canada, scores of people dropped their trousers and rode through the streets of Vancouver to promote cycling as an environmentally friendly mode of transportation.
Even the group People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) jumped on the au naturel bandwagon. This advertisement featuring international supermodel Joanna Krupa posing in front of the Hong Kong skyline was part of the group's anti-fur campaign.
Here, Dutch model Natasja Vermeer holds a sign reading, "Earn your wings - Lose the fur."
Fur? Actress Eva Mendes would rather go naked.
Australian "Penthouse Pet of the Year" Kobe Kaige also took off her clothes for PETA. Her sign reads, "Give fur the cold shoulder."
Athletes also got involved in the PETA campaign. US Olympic gold medalist Amanda Beard unveiled her ad just two days before the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games.
Olympic figure skater Tai Babilonia skates in her underwear in 2009, holding a sign for PETA's "Rather Go Naked Than Wear Fur" campaign.
To mark World Vegan Day, PETA tasked actress Sarah-Jane Honeywell with lying on a huge plate to urge onlookers to "know their food."
Hundreds of people pose on the Aletsch glacier in Switzerland during a nude photo shoot organized by American photographer Spencer Tunick. Greenpeace commissioned Tunick to take the pictures to raise awareness about global warming.
Nude protests have huge advantages. The protester does nothing more than pose naked in a public place. The authorities, however, have to use force or bureaucratic power to stop them. Here, Ukrainian policemen arrest Femen activists in Kiev in August 2011.
A system that has to mobilize men in uniform to stop someone from posing in their birthday suit has a problem.
And sometimes the authorities look really ridiculous. Like here, when a worker from the Georgian Embassy in Kiev accosted Femen activists decorated as spies. The women were demanding that the case of three photojournalists accused of espionage be opened up to public scrutiny.
No, this man isn't looking for a hug. He's an Iranian security guard trying to drag a partially dressed Femen protester away from an Iranian cultural event in Kiev in November 2010.
People get naked to protest on a wide range of issues. An activist with "Cuba Democracy Now" demonstrates in front of the European Office in Madrid against human rights violations in Cuba and the permissiveness of Spain.
An almost completely naked protester wearing only one sock gestures to police during a demonstration in Malmo, Sweden in 2008.
German activists with Oxfam re-enact in 2010 a historical photograph of Berlin's Kommune 1 to mark the 40th anniversary of a promise made by United Nations member states to pledge 0.7 percent of their gross domestic product to developmental aid.
Anti-bullfighting protesters in Spain play the part of the bull in Madrid in March 2010.
Old habits die hard in eastern Germany where stripping off was a subtle but popular form of rebellion against the former East German communist government. Here, a man carries a peace flag past police officers at a beach at the Baltic Sea resort of Heiligendamm on April 15, 2007, during the G8 summit.
Ukraine has become a favored destination for sex tourism, particularly from Western countries. A group of mostly young women in Kiev has organized a group called Femen to bring attention to this fact and how it degrades the country's women.
According to figures from the Ukrainian Interior Ministry, there are approximately 12,000 prostitutes in the Ukraine. A recent poll conducted by the Kiev International Institute of Sociology (KIIS) found that one in every eight of these prostitutes was a student at university or high school. Here, a Femen member speaks with a tourist about sex tourism in Ukraine.
Most of the group's members are university students, but there are also some high school students and even a few men. Their mission: to fight against sex tourism and prostitution -- and to do so with riotous activities.
For example, on one occasion, some of the students belonging to Femen threw themselves into mud puddles on the street in order to protest against "the political mud-slinging in our country." In particular, they were voicing their displeasure with the long-lasting feud between President Victor Yushchenko and Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko, which crippled the country and turned many off to politics.
On another occasion, the women dressed up as nurses with backpacks full of syringes to protest in front of the Turkish Embassy. Anna Hutsol, one of Femen's founders and leaders, says that the action was "meant symbolically." "We wanted to cure foreigners' sex addiction," she says.
On another occasion, some members who are fashion designers came up with some fairly intricate costumes that bore pricetags. Women wearing the costumes threw themselves in front of the feet of men "to demonstrate how women are forced to debase themselves."
On another occasion, members allowed themselves to be tossed about by men...
...and symbolically crucified.
One member threw a pie in the face of Oles Buzina, the author of a book entitled "Ladies, Back to the Harems." One of his controversial positions holds that women belong to the herd and should be prepared to have sex at any time. The woman was let off with a €8.50 ($12) fine.
Femen recently received a bit of unexpected support from Germany in the form of Helmut Geier, who also goes by the name of DJ Hell. "I found out about the group via a newspaper article about it," Geier explains.
He paid his own way to fly to Ukraine and put on a performance with Femen members in downtown Kiev. The banner reads: "Ukraine is not a whorehouse."
Femen believes that sex tourism in Ukraine will continue to grow. One reason is the fact that Ukraine will co-host the European Championship football tournament with Poland in 2012.
Figuring that not all the fans drawn by the tournament will only be interested in sports, Femen has drawn up a special plan of action. The group's members have prepared a tip for foreigners: "Don't frequent prostitutes. Instead, visit the Mikhail Bulgakov Museum dedicated to one of our country's greatest writers."
"If we were to run around dressed in baggy clothes, no one would pay any attention to us," says Anne Hutsol, one of Femen's founders and leaders.
Philly Naked Bike Ride 2011
لم يكن الهدف الحقيقى هو العرى بغرض العرى أو الجنس أو التعامل بتلك الصورة التى تخدش حياء الكثيرون ولكن هؤلاء أستباحو بأنفسهم حرمة أجسادهم بأن تعريها غير ذو قيمة فداء للدفاع عن وطن مستعدون أن يبيعو ويظهروا ويضحوا بأجسادهم وأرواحهم فداء له وللدفاع عنه وليقل الغير ما يشاء عنهم فهم لا بعبئون بأقوال من حولهم وكان تعريهم هو الرسالة التى غيرت الكثير والكثير من قرارات فى العالم عن طريق هؤلاء المتظاهرين العاريين فكل ما يدافعون عنه شرعى وقانونى وحق لهم لتحرير أوطانهم وتلبية رغباتهم بشتى الصور حتى ولو كانت بالعرى الفاضح فأن أجساما قد خرقها الخرطوش والرصاص وشظايا الطلقات هو نفس الجسد الذى يتعرى الأن ليقول بصرخة مدوية لنحر الباطل والمطالبة بالحق والعدل والشرعية ليقولوا (أقتلنا بكل ما لديك فصوتنا مدوى وسيصل للعالم لننال حقوقنا) وكما قلنا نحن (أقتل أسحل أضرب فينا..كل رصاصة بتقوينا) وبالفعل كانت الصيحات واحدة لسقوط نظام فاشى او قامع او ديكتاتورى وتم تغييره بالفعل وسقط.قالوا (تسقط الفاشية والديكتاتورية والرجعية والجهل)..أما نحن الان فنطالب (يسقط يسقط حكم المرشد..والأخوان المتأسلمبن) والبقية تأتى.فأما الرخاء والحرية وأما العرى أو الموت فى سبيل الاوطان للدفاع عن الحق
للحب....والسلام....والحرية
أعد التقرير
طيار:طارق العجمى
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