Did I say update last Sunday? I did. Back to the old habits so soon!
This will be up on Femusings tomorrow but here's a sneaky preview for blog readers. I love you guys! I mean, go to Femusings too. But also keep coming here.
Boobies in this post!
It’s always quite inconvenient when feminist
things get ruined by manipulative men. Just ask anybody involved with the
dismal Hugo Schwyzer, who set himself up as a paragon of reformed male feminism
only to have a lengthy meltdown involving twitter marathons, manipulative
semi-apologies, a (hopefully!) career-ending confession about sleeping with
students and perhaps the most obtuse Jezebel article ever written. Of course,
plenty of people were already well aware of how sleazy Schwyzer has always been,
not a difficult conclusion to come to given that his main man-feminist tactic was
to tell sob stories about awful things he used to do but now virtuously
refrains from. The discovery that the virtuous refraining was in fact
compulsive lying therefore came more as a depressing confirmation rather than a
stunning revelation. A manipulative man ruining a thing? Not really so
surprising to most of us, unfortunately.
So it goes with Femen, who this week are
sending their activists into damage control mode with a new
documentary, “Ukraine is not a brothel”, which reveals that the entire
movement was masterminded by their “advisor” Victor Svyatski. On camera, Svyatski
claims that “on some deep unconscious level” he probably started the group to
meet girls, which is pretentious manipulative man speak for “I am very clever
and self-aware and am going to tell you nasty truths in a really clever way so
the intelligence and honesty will cancel out my utter moral bankruptcy”. He
also makes a long statement about how his presence was necessary because on
their own the women of Femen are weak and directionless and need a strong male
hand. Clearly these are not the words of a man who expects to endear himself to
a wider audience, so it’s probably not surprising that “leading member” Inna Shevchenko
has come
out to say that Svyatski has been out of Femen for a year, they all knew
how awful he was most of the time, and anyway they came up with topless
protests on their own and didn’t need him. Except they sort of did. But they don’t
any more! All is well and feminine in the land of Femen.
The damage has been done, however. In March,
Tunisian Amina Sboui’s topless protest and subsequent arrest provoked a range
of Islamophobic responses from Femen members in various cities: prompting Sboui
herself to publically
leave Femen at the end of August, suggesting that a more specific anarchist
movement might be more her thing. She and others have pointed out the lack of
transparency in the group’s finances, with most members apparently completely
unaware of how the group funds itself. And it’s long been an open secret that
the group selects its members based on their conventional attractiveness. Scouring
both press photographs and the pictures the group takes of themselves reveals
very few muffin tops or stretch marks, and racial diversity is limited to a couple
of shots of light-skinned black women. Sometimes these perfect-bodied women paint
“breast feeding army” onto themselves, to demonstrate how great breasts are
even though most mothers could tell you that post-natal perfect bodies look a
bit different to the pornographic ideal.
 |
| Could I find this scene recreated in any number of demeaning videos on RedTube? Absolutely. |
Because the thing about Femen, really, is
that they are trying to “smash the patriarchy” by upholding the pornographic
ideal of women. While writing this article, I spent a very long time refreshing
the Femen website to check out the different banners they have. My favourite is
a beautifully-dishevelled slim naked women glaring sensually at the camera with
white semen-like liquid oozing out of her mouth. This is made feminist by the
fact she is flipping the audience off and “Fickt die Sexindustrie” (fuck the
sex industry) is written over the top of the picture. The “X” in sex is a
swastika, for that extra edgy touch! When they’re not taking these sorts of subversive
selfies, Femen are out on street protests which are designed to attract media
attention by setting up one of two kinds of shots: either straight-up male gaze
objectification shots of hot naked bodies, or images of nearly-naked women
being dominated and controlled by fully-clothed men. Now, where else have I
seen nearly-naked women being dominated and controlled by fully-clothed men
this summer? Oh, that’s right, Robin Thicke’s “Blurred Lines”. That feminist
classic.
Nudity and objectification are regularly used
as tools to degrade women, and that makes a movement to reclaim the female body
an incredibly important part of the feminist movement. It also makes it a very
difficult thing to get right. The difference between pictures of nude activists
in newspapers about men with their clothes on, and pictures of nude glamour
models in newspapers about men with their clothes on, is a quite nuanced set of
concepts about intent and power and ownership that make it enormously important
that the work of groups like Femen is done right. If, as the latest allegations
suggest, this work is being done as a result of male desire to manipulate women
into being naked, this all becomes a lot less nuanced and a lot more
straightforwardly awful. That there are women like Sevchenko who do appear to
passionately believe in their organisation’s goals is a step in the right
direction, but if Femen aren’t constantly considering how topless protests fit
in to a wider feminist dialogue involving more than just hardy nubile white
girls, and particularly into the massive grey area that is female nudity and
pornography, then they are failing in their job as anti-patriarchy
provocateurs. And if they have been producing male gaze pornography and images
of women being dominated on the directive of a man who believes that his own
presence is necessary to make the movement happen at all, then the group’s use
of nudity becomes effectively indistinguishable from any other male-mandated
use of women’s bodies. Femen’s message turns from women smashing patriarchy to
patriarchy having a bigoted, self absorbed conversation with itself, using
women’s bodies as notepaper.
When Robin Thicke turned around and said Blurred
Lines was a feminist manifesto, nobody gave him the time of day- rightfully so,
both because he was already on record saying “what
a pleasure it is to degrade a woman” and because you can’t just add
feminist meaning to any random act that involves women. When people who are in
favour of Page 3 suggest it’s a tool of empowerment because Censorship Is Wrong,
we laugh at them or facepalm, or maybe both if we are feeling particularly
co-ordinated on that day, because that is missing the fundamental point about
what the intention of Page 3 is. If the Stunning Revelations about Victor
Svyatski came at the end of a stunningly successful year for Femen, in which
they challenged pornographic ideals and promoted an inclusive movement and
designed strong, clever protests which made for rallying symbols and furthered
the feminist cause, the information in “Ukraine is not a brothel” would be
shocking and sad but also not insurmountable. But, as with Hugo Schwyzer, the
fact that Femen are not who they say they are is frankly old news. Pessimists
win, the world gets a little sadder, but it’s time to close the door on this
particular group. The movement to reclaim the female body is going to need some
new and better champions.
