What better way to garner attention for a cause than to get naked for it? The international feminist activist movement FEMEN often protests topless, and it has sparked controversy among many.
According to Brut., FEMEN was founded in 2008 in Ukraine to combat issues in the country that were being swept under the rug, such as prostitution, sexism, and sex tourism. Their main focus in their beginning was women’s rights issues and has since expanded to authoritarianism, LGBTQ+ rights, religious institutions, gender-based violence, and political repression. On their website, they list their goal as “complete victory over patriarchy.” Within the last 16 years, Paris has been a hotspot for FEMEN protests.
Now to the question we’re all wondering – why protest topless? FEMEN has coined its approach as “sextremism”, defining it as “female sexuality rebelling against patriarchy and embodied in the extremal political direct action events” and “the woman’s mockery of vulgar male extremism and its bloody mayhems and a cult of terror”.
The answer lies in the oppressive history of how women’s bodies have been represented. FEMEN’s reclamation of the female body is one that goes directly against how female nudity has traditionally been portrayed in art. Instead of the naked female body portrayed as an object to be admired and observed, they have evolved it into an incredibly powerful form of protest. Women have been dehumanized to the point of being seen as passive subjects existing for the pleasure of men instead of autonomous individuals, and are now fighting back and repainting their bodies to become instruments of political expression.
Many critics of this method see issues in the aspect of nudity itself, wondering whether its emphasis draws attention away from the cause – but I think it’s perfectly disruptive. FEMEN’s activists are nude on their own terms, their presence demanding attention with slogans painted across their chests and chants erupting from their mouths. Now what was once sexualized and objectified is now an instrument of anger and resistance – a shift from one end of the spectrum to the other.
FEMEN’s approach raises eyebrows in the world of art and crime, challenging what has been considered acceptable in public spaces. This sextremeism and its surrounding controversies force us to question why the naked female body is acceptable in art galleries but condemned when women use it in political activism. Is women’s nudity only okay when being objectified? Does their naked agency ruin the fantasy of female passivity? I think that this controversy is a huge part of what makes their message so effective – the female body is no longer something to be observed but something demanding to be heard.
