CONTROVERSY: Why We Need FEMEN, and Why We Need to Criticize FEMEN

So far in 2013, only a handful of news stories about gender equality have made it past the feminist blogs and the uber leftist websites all the way to the U.S. mainstream media. Alongside Sheryl Sandberg, the precarious state of Afghan women’s rights, rampant sexual assault in our military, and the Wendy Davis filibuster, the international “sextremist” group FEMEN has claimed a huge portion of this elite mainstream stage.

And we all know why: boobs.

No one can deny that one simple piece of clothing separates the amount of media coverage given to FEMEN from the amount of media coverage given to every other feminist protest group. Even FEMEN spokesperson Inna Shevenchko frequently tells reporters that the group only started protesting topless after years of failing to garner enough attention for their causes. Now, nearly every one of their demonstrations makes international headlines, even if only a few protesters attend.

Of course, this makes a lot of sense from the major news corporation’s profit/ratings-obsessed perspective. Every couple of weeks, it seems, they cover a “women’s issue” in order to appease us annoying feminists. Why run a story about honor killings in Pakistan, or ridiculously high rape rates on our college campuses, or female genital mutilation in East Africa, when you could fill that same quota by showing a couple of half-naked, attractive white women screaming incoherently while being crammed into the back of a police car? Women’s issue? Check. Ratings? Check.

The question is, given that gender-equality news only receives a tiny sliver of mainstream spotlight, and given that FEMEN monopolizes a pretty big portion of that sliver, why aren’t more feminists talking about them? Why is no one pointing out that FEMEN needs to tweak their approach if they want to make people pay attention to their messages at least as much as they pay attention to their boobs?

This isn’t to say that other feminists never criticize them (Meghan Murphy has written some bold critiques for The Feminist Current). When FEMEN staged their international Topless Jihad in April, they rightfully received a shitstorm of angry criticism from Muslim women, feminists bloggers, and even some mainstream websites. But while the Topless Jihad was certainly their worst offense, it wasn’t their only offense.

We need more feminists to acknowledge the amount of power FEMEN has within our movement because they are often mistaken for a leading feminist group, despite their self-proclaimed extremism. We need more feminists acknowledging that FEMEN is one of the faces of Feminism the general public sees most often–to many, FEMEN is what a feminist looks like. And so we also need more feminists critiquing FEMEN for what they say, what they don’t say, and how they say it. Because whether we like it or not, they are representing us to the world.

I’m not suggesting that anyone should tell FEMEN what to say or how to say it. That wouldn’t be very feminist at all. But we also shouldn’t ignore the fact that the spotlight is shining on them, which affords them the opportunity–and the responsibility–to say something important, and to actually have a lot of people hear it. As of right now, both FEMEN and other feminists are wasting that opportunity by failing to admit that current media coverage is more focused on their boobs than their messages.

I think part of the reason feminist writers have been afraid to critique FEMEN’s approach is because, in theory, the topless protest is genius. Inna Shevchenko, FEMEN’s Ukranian leader, wrote of the feminist theory behind the topless protests

We use the sexist weapons of patriarchy against itself. Playing with stereotypical codes is a way of breaking the male domination notions about the nature of female sexuality in favor of its great revolutionary mission.”

In person, topless protests unfailingly draw the male gaze, and then immediately subvert the expectations of that gaze. They allow women to very directly and visibly use their bodies as political tools against the patriarchy. They allow women to reclaim their subjectivity and visibly state ownership of their bodies while under a gaze that would normally objectify them. (It must be a very empowering, liberating, satisfying thing to experience all that in one moment.)

Unfortunately, while that may be how it works for someone who sees FEMEN protest live, that is not what we get once the “sextremist” protest is filtered through the lens of a major news corporation and disseminated to the rest of the world. FEMEN’s problem isn’t the idea of the topless protest, or even their execution of it, but the impact once the images hit the internet. In photos and news stories, the effect of the protest is not the same. The objectifier is still able to objectify the protester because she cannot use her living body, her voice, her anger, to subvert his gaze. Photos cannot capture or translate the power and passion of that moment of protest, so they end up having the exact opposite effect. Suddenly, the women of FEMEN become objectified again.

This happened just last week, when FOX News ran a story and photo about FEMEN’s protest against the increasing religious conservativism of the Turkish Prime Minister. The headline wasn’t “FEMEN protests Turkey PM’s religious conservatism.” It was “FEMEN stages topless protest against Turkey PM.” The story does quote FEMEN’s press release explaining exactly why the lone representative of their group was protesting the Prime Minister, but not until the fifth paragraph of the eight-paragraph story. The second sentence, however, tells us that the protester was wearing “only mini-shorts and high heels.” Clearly, how she looked (what she was wearing, what she wasn’t) was more important here than what she said, even though she said it by writing it across her bare chest. The reader/viewer walks away from this story with an impression of nudity and an exposed, objectified female body, not an impression of an act of defiance against religious oppression.

How can feminists remedy this? How can we take the media attention FEMEN has captured and use it to advance gender equality? Well first, feminists need to start talking about FEMEN a lot more than we are right now. Feminists need to interact with FEMEN in a way that makes them feel more responsibility, more pressure to take full advantage of their reserved spot on the mainstream media stage.

We need to ask them to acknowledge that they are speaking on behalf of feminism to the world (whether they like it or not), because that is how the media portrays them. We need to challenge them to make their messages clearer, so that even when filtered through the objectifying lens of FOX News or USA Today, FEMEN’s message will be impossible to ignore. Right now, that is not the case. But if more feminists put our heads together to figure out how to work around this objectification, we may be able to change it so that the message comes before the toplessness in stories about FEMEN protests.

Even though FEMEN has disowned traditional feminism, Feminism needs FEMEN (just as we have always need our radicals) to keep grabbing the spotlight, and to keep passionately fighting patriarchy. But we also need to push them to start fighting the patriarchy on a more complex level, one that acknowledges the media’s current objectification of their protesters.

We need to start publicly appreciating and respecting what they do, even though they certainly aren’t perfect. True respect will involve subjecting them to the same amount of attention and critique warranted to every other feminist who makes it to the front of the mainstream stage. Think about the amount of attention we gave to Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In, and the volume and value of the discussions we got out of that, especially when they involved critique. We owe that same attention and discussion to FEMEN.

And FEMEN owes it to feminists to stop using the precious, rare resource that is the mainstream spotlight to draw more attention to their organization, and start using it to draw attention to important issues that affect women around the world.