Is the high fashion industry inherently sexist? Is it a class question? Protesters drag the issue onto the foreground.

EDITOR’S NOTE:
Blasting the fashion industry for exploiting women (many of whom, by the way, are awfully glad to capitalize on their genetic good fortune when chosen as supermodels, or for the sheer vanity of it all) may seem silly and futile, like accusing a dog for craving meat.  Carnivores like meat, nay, are built to survive on meat, and the fashion world, by definition, a profoundly decadent, bourgeois milieu in which sexual titillation, exploitation and cynicism are simply par for the course, is doing what comes naturally to it. It won’t stop until the entire matrix of social values changes radically, and that may take a revolution. Real social change.

Anyone even briefly exposed to this world is aware of such realities.  By now, its dimensions of debauchery have acquired galactic proportions in an era of global capitalism when enormous fortunes and fame permit a sybaritic existence to the lucky few, a way of life until recently reserved for royals or industrial tycoons.  Creatures like Donatella Versace, a business mogul who seems to drip depravity from every uber-cosmeticized pore, are emblematic of this new subsection of the ruling class. Indeed, how could it be avoided? Bourgeois high fashion is just one of the many ways in which capitalism and its inherent classism pervert art and subjugate beauty to commerce and the most primitive human instincts, albeit all carefully camouflaged by many seductive layers of socially approved exhibitionism.  Radical feminists and even bourgeois feminists have tried to protest such manipulation to little avail. As a primal drive, the esthetic of the human body, especially the female body, is a force that can’t be beaten back, only accommodated.  The parasites whose business it is to exploit such drive, know this fact very well and make fortunes on it.  Everyone wants to look better.

Femen, the aggressively unorthodox feminist group from the Ukraine (compared to the West, the former Soviet Union, in its current iteration and social chaos seems to be a cauldron of irreverent behavior) obviously is not quite convinced that nothing can be done.  Instinctively trusting in the old “epater le bourgeois” formula, they decided to expose the world to their beliefs by simply exposing themselves. It has worked, of course, maybe beyond their dreams, just like baring skin has worked for PETA and other causes systematically neglected or distorted by the major mills of miscommunication.

Femen is perfectly aware they are engaging in manipulation.  But expect no apologies. Here the corrupt media met its match in terms of manipulation: the group simply threw beautiful naked women at the lenses and the media came, they could not resist. From the young women’s perspective it was a small price to pay to get at least some of their messages across, serious messages, mind you, even if telegraphically transmitted. To force global public attention on issues normally ignored by the supposedly professional press is always something of a victory. That sectors of society with an urgent, valid story have to go to such extremes, literally laying media traps to get a morsel of public attention while imbecilic programing abounds is more a reflection of the bankruptcy of the system’s media than a failure on the part of these women to implement less controversial and self-exploiting tactics. The Femen approach is certainly open to debate. Stay tuned for a new piece exploring the pros and cons of such tactics to gain publicity.—Patrice Greanville

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