From The Guardian UK: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/apr/10/femen-naked-shock-troops-of-feminism
Femen is at war with a patriarchy that sees women as sex objects. What weapons do we have? Our bare breasts
Inna Shevchenko
guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 10 April 2013
You can hear us shouting “Fuck off, dictator!”, “I’m not your sex toy!”, or “Religion is slavery!” You can see our half-naked bodies facing Berlusconi, Putin or the Pope. You can feel how deep our anger is by looking in our eyes. We are feminism’s shock troops, a spearhead unit of militants, a modern incarnation of the word fearless.
We are Femen. Our nakedness attacks the raw nerve of the historic conflict between women and “the system”. We are nothing less than its most visual and fitting embodiment. Our activists’ bodies represent undisguised hatred for the patriarchal order, and display the new aesthetics of a rejuvenated woman’s revolution.
Femen is our attempt at rethinking the history of feminism in its entirety. We believe that if women are left with little more than satisfying sexual desires as a life purpose, then our sexuality must become politicised. We are not denying our potential to be treated as sex objects. On the contrary, we are taking our sexuality into our own hands, turning it against our enemy. We are transforming female sexual subordination into aggression, and thereby starting the real war.
Make no mistake about it: we are at war. This is an ideological war, a war of traditionalism against modernity, oppression against freedom, dictatorship against the right to free expression. We are targeting the three principle manifestations of patriarchy: religion, the sex industry, and dictatorship.
“I didn’t have time to see if they looked good or not, whether they were blondes or not” – such were the words of Putin after our most recent act of diversion, when Femen activists confronted him in Hanover, shouting to his face, “Fuck you, dictator!” Putin was quick to smile, but a Kremlin official was already demanding that Germany punish our activists. Within half an hour, four criminal cases had been opened against the dictator’s assailants.
This is our reality. Femen activists are arrested, beaten up or even kidnapped, as happened to us in Belarus after our protest ridiculing president Alexander Lukashenko in Minsk.
Continue reading at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/apr/10/femen-naked-shock-troops-of-feminism
