Here she is, gleaming in the dark, all skin as she advances on the armed police sent to flatten the Black Lives Matter movement in Portland: a female protestor wearing nothing but beanie and facemask.
“And then? Naked Athena appeared and the little boys didn’t know what to do,” tweeted photographer Donovan Farley, who captured the moment, as though her nakedness alone was enough to shame the armed officers. Actually, they fired pepper balls at her feet, but she remained on the street doing yoga, and according to another witness, the officers dispersed about 10 minutes later.
https://twitter.com/DonovanFarley/status/1284410621283328000?s=20
The internet being the internet and social justice being social justice, all this eventually devolved into a conversation about whether the light-skinned protestor was in fact a problematic exerciser of her white-privilege, whether doing yoga is actually colonialism, and whether she even was a she at all, or of some other more compelling identity. No matter: the image stands for itself, a little absurd in the incongruity of flesh and firearms, a lot striking in the steadfastness of her stance. Something unforgettable about it. Something about it that you already know, as well.
Female nudity as protest is as old as anything. At first I thought of Sixties counter-culture shock tactics such as Yoko Ono’s Cut Piece — Ono in a white gown, inviting the audience to cut away her clothing until she was completely naked, which would by some mysterious process bring about world peace. But it goes back further than that. Apocryphal Godiva, naked on her horse sometime in the eleventh century, in opposition to her husband’s taxes. Liberty leading the people, bare breasted atop the fallen of the French Revolution. These are men’s versions of women’s bodies as emblems of freedom, stamped on our common imagination.
A naked man does not mean the same thing as a naked woman. For one thing, there is a lot more of a man you can put on show without breaking any taboo — although there are much graver taboos around that bit you aren’t supposed to show. But there’s more to it than that. As John Berger said: “A man’s presence suggests what he is capable of doing to you or for you,” but “a woman’s presence expresses her own attitude to herself, and defines what can and cannot be done to her”.
A man naked is a flasher, a threat (there’s a reason men send unsolicited dick pics, and they’re not a courting ritual, they’re an act of aggression); either that, or he’s simply ridiculous, emasculated by his exposure. His body doesn’t work as protest. A woman naked, though, is a study in defiant vulnerability. What can be done to her? Anything – she’s a naked woman. What can be done to her? Nothing that she hasn’t pre-empted with her self-display. In a limited sort of a way, she is in control.
Or to put it another way, female nudity as protest makes sense in a way male nudity doesn’t, because looking at women makes sense to us in a way that looking at men doesn’t. Despite some great steps forward in letching over men (for which, my most sincere thanks to the homosexual agenda), you only have to spend five minutes on Instagram to figure out that one sex still exists to be eyeballed while the other gets to do the eyeballing.
Feminist naked protest has tried gamely to overturn objectification, with women voluntarily stripping off to prove their bodies are their own. The Slutwalk protests began in 2011 as a reaction to a Toronto police officer who offered the rape prevention advice that “women should avoid dressing like sluts”. But the difference between having your tits out, and having your tits out ironically, is a very thin one. Activism that can safely be called “hot” probably isn’t that much of a challenge to men’s sexual entitlement.
Ukrainian feminist group Femen made headlines with multiple topless stunts that went nipple-first against targets including Vladimir Putin and France’s Front National party. Then a 2013 documentary revealed that Femen was – surprise! — the creation of a man, Victor Svyatski. “These girls are weak,” he says in the film. “They don’t have the strength of character. They don’t even have the desire to be strong. Instead, they show submissiveness, spinelessness, lack of punctuality, and many other factors which prevent them from becoming political activists. These are qualities which it was essential to teach them.” And how better to teach them than by getting them out of their bras? This ought to be all the depressing proof anyone needs that the political display of female flesh is directed by the male gaze.
Getting naked is intensely personal, but the moment a woman protestor drops her clothes is the moment she becomes a symbol, an object – an Athena, a Godiva – in a way that would be an indignity if you were gazing at a man. Men should remain their own selves: only women are supposed to have so little individuality that these archetypes can be impressed on them.
One more iteration of the language of female skin. There’s a power in that Portland picture, even if you know it’s a bit silly, even if you know deep down that armed police probably can’t be scared off by a vagina. It’s not a power that comes from radicalism, though, or even from transgression. And it’s not a power that can be said to belong to the woman. The one detail I can’t stop thinking about is the Twitter bio of the photographer who recorded and named Athena: the first credit he boasts of is Playboy. The male gaze business is always just the male gaze business.
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Subscribe“armed police sent to flatten the Black Lives Matter movement in Portland”, hardly, There is or was no BLM movement in Portland, it has a 2% black population, what it does have is a small population of what seem to be permanent protesters, people who protest everything they possibly can, these protesters are encouraged by a “progressive” local government and are regularly allowed to disrupt the society there, quite often with the aid of the police, this is the city where 3 days of riots occurred after the election of Trump.
Most of the protesters are white, and do not come from Portland.
Does being white discount their protest?
Regarding where the protestors reside or were born, name your source or evidence, or at least reasoning, please, or realize that a discerning person must conclude your assertion is only your personal suspicion.
Ha! And it would be hilarious to hear your explanation of where all these “out-of-town” protestors sleep and eat!
Claiming that protestors come from someplace else is the oldest cheap-shot in the book. Next you’re going to say that George Soros is paying them! (Mind you I do not believe and will not suggest that you are Putin-directed robot! )
How about you go find out, like I did. There is plenty of information and photos if you look.
The point obviously being that these people in Portland are in effect “Professional” protesters, malcontents or anarchists, simply protesting the “cause of the day”, holding a sign for BLM does not make someone part of the BLM movement, tomorrow they will throw those signs in the trash for whatever is the cause of the day, a city where riots occur simply because some don’t like the results of a democratic election, that should speak for itself.
Every source I’ve read says that most of the protestors are white, they do come from Portland, and it’s easy to gather from the photos and videos that they are indeed protesting for Black Lives Matter.
To summarize: female sexuality is a uniquely powerful force to harness because it is compelling to men. But it is impossible to exercise this power without men becoming pleased, which is an intolerable indignity to women. Hence the ongoing feminist problem of how to harness the power of female sexuality without anyone enjoying it in the process.
According to Aristotle “nature does nothing without a purpose “.
“Female nudity as protest is as old as anything.”
So is exhibitionism
Succinct
Only as old as the beginning of the Christian Era.
Before that it was ‘ full throttle’ Bacchanalian excess, the like of which we will sadly, never see again.
Occ est vivere!
What utter drivel. This woman exposed herself for a bunch of Communist (Marxist…but still communists) traitors. Nothing more nothing less. The lady (?) is an exhibitionist and what she did was almost as ludicrous as the article attempting to make her and the author of the article relevant. She wasn’t, and neither is the article. MikeTwo Harsh Treatment for these criminal rioters.
Absurd. What sources do you have to back up your incongruous assertion they are communists and/or Marxists? What facts can you cite to support your phrase “criminal rioters”? You really ought to try to rise above name-calling.
Evidence that BLM are communists and or/Marxists? Try this video interview with Patrisse Cullors. “Rioting” is of course a legal term, and I suppose we’ll just have to wait to see if there are any prosecutions for this.
With reference to John Gray’s interview, if you want to know why liberal democracy is ‘over’ look no further than this woman and the beliefs she embodies.
A little modesty would be no bad thing
Sarah, I apologise for being gynaecologically pedantic, but you have made an error that so many do: You cannot see a vagina without a speculum. What you see externally is called a vulva.
I was going to say that! For some reason every where they get that wrong, you would think feminists in particular would demand corrections?
I ‘cant’ use the descriptor I’d like, but yes, unless a prolapse is involved.
“Or to put it another way, female nudity as protest makes sense in a way male nudity doesn’t..”
This is blatant biasism, prejudice and discrimination. How has this woman got a platform for her divisive poison?
Just kidding…. but it’s pretty dangerous these days, in terms of your opportunities to get paid, to suggest that, reasonably/understandably/intuitively, women ARE treated differently to men. And when I say ‘women’, I of course am using a term that has been relegated to the past… I mean ‘people with a cervix’, to be clear, so please no knee-jerk hate. Thanks.
The version of reality presented by this piece is just totally deranged.
It’s not worthy of any criticism, suffice it to say, that it is a thoroughly dishonest and objectionable piece of prose.
Please explain. I’m curious.
It’s interesting that the only thing she covered was her mouth out of which she could have made some form of arguement; and then people wouldn’t have to interpret what she was trying to do.
Did she have to sit with legs akimbo to prove she’s naked?
‘Thrush’…
No, Sheela na gig.
The “Male Gaze” – it’s so beautifully Victorian (I’m thinking one of those wonderfully stroppy early suffragettes). But despite religiously attending the Re-education camp that is contemporary Western society I just can’t seem to learn that us men’s love of gazing at women – and every last beautiful part of them – is filthy and oppressive. Back to school.
“Men should remain their own selves: only women are supposed to have so
little individuality that these archetypes can be impressed on them.” First of all, archetypes are not ‘impressed’ on anyone, at least not in the simplistic way implied here. In common Jungian understanding, they arise from our psyches, and they have deep evolutionary roots. They are biological manifestations having specific cultural expressions. And far from them being ‘impressed’ only onto women, they shape men equally. It’s not the case at that men can remain ‘their own selves’. What is the ‘patriarch’ but an archetype that feminists distort and wield to brand men and deprive them of individuality? What is ‘toxic masculinity’ but more of the same?
Sarah Ditum is a columnist, critic and writer.
You see, there’s that “self-identification” again.
Unherd’s columnists are getting a little shabby, proffering much bollox as opinion. It’s ok to have an opinion, better to have an informed one though…
As a UKIP Branch Chairman I had many meetings with leaders of the AfD through the years of media smears and lies of both UKIP and AfD. I found the followers and members to be very UKIP compatible. Ordinary citizens wanting a little say in the future of their country and being deeply disappointed that true conservatism was losing ground to socialism.
The fear on both sides in those days was that socialism would destroy the continent. After all we didn’t see Nazism as right wing. National Socialism is actually a very leftwing ideology. As in Scottish Nationalism.
The discussions were deep, far ranging and very patriotic. It is this love of country and the needs of its people that both UKIP and AfD were set up for. The establishment in UK and Brussels (led by Germany) was very against capitalism in its truest sense. They wanted global socialism and were hiding this fact under globalism. Teaching our children that the nation was a bad thing and that capitalism must morph into globalism to help the people. But we knew this was a lie. That EU wanted federalism and the break up of the nation state. Hence Great Britain became known as Britain, coastal state of EU. Not one media commentator was prepared to address this change in language. Not one Tory thinker was prepared to address the hijacking of true capitalism by the globalists in order to keep the poor down.
Of course immigration was a big factor in those discussions. But far more important in those days was keeping countries true to themselves and informing citizens of the real path to harmonisation of taxes, central government in Brussels and all countries becoming States or Councils. UKIP suffered badly through the propaganda of the establishment and the media. Fortunately Germany had a record of suppression and could see the path pf Brussels. The citizens didn’t listen to the propaganda of Merkel or Brussels and voted accordingly.
The “male gaze” is often the subject of feminist derision, part of the attempt to portray men as subhuman brutes by the same people who used to complain about sexist stereotyping. But then, double standards are treated differently when they’re female double standards.
The problem with this meme is that it turns out that there is also the female gaze, which objectifies men both as sex objects (“despite some great steps in leeching over men”, as Sarah admits, inadvertently revealing her own objectification of men through her female gaze), and as resource objects.
In fact, it’s even worse, for many, if not most women, revel in the “male gaze”, spending billions on revealing clothing, makeup, breast enhancement, dieting and exercise to elicit the very attention that feminists decry. It’s almost as if females exhibit their bodies to entice male interest the way men show off their resources to interest females.
But we must not say so, for the assertion that females are attention-seekers would position them as equally responsible for their own “objectification”. Better to blame men and ignore the same behaviour by women- even revelling in it as a form of “empowerment”.
Or even better, expose your genitals in public under the cover of political protest, then deflect any criticism for this self-righteous self-gratification on the grounds that it is really the “male gaze” that is to blame.
For the true believer, women are always the innocent party, the real “victims”, even when it is they who are acting out. Ironically, it is feminists like Dittum who continually reinforce the myth that females lack agency by blaming men for female behaviour, handing men the power to define women even as you complain about your “victimhood”.
So a man naked in public is always but always a bad thing. Ok doke.
Not necessarily, but where a woman sitting naked may be considered ‘brave’ a man sitting naked may be considered a sex offender.
UnHerd, you have raised the bar of journalism in your short life. Please don’t lower it for whatever reason it was that you published this article.
I have no problems with articles like these as long as it is possible to comment on them
Some women have lost the plot. They’ve thrown away the most valuable weapon in the arsenal and haven’t valued the gifts inherent to womanhood/ femininity. This woman is the proof. Then they complain men don’t respect them. Time to get wise girls.
I used to think that “journalists” just couldn’t see or comprehend the elephant standing in the room. However, it becomes increasingly clear that they actively avoid even a remote reference to it, lest they be recognized and promptly crushed. I’m guessing that both David Frum and Anne hold three passports and their criticism of independent thinkers have nothing to do with “classical liberalism,” but everything to do with a failure to render nodding obedience to the long sought world order that those two represent.
BTW…..”where Viktor Orbán and Fidesz have gutted democratic institutions right under the nose of the European Union.” Since when has the EU been a symbol of , much less a protecter of – “democratic institutions?” The EU has more in common with the structures erected by Joseph Stalin than anything that was ever gleaned from representative government.
A book by an elite for elites. She will never have to worry about where her son will work. Manufacturing is all offshore. A stem degree is no guarantee as foreign visa workers are preferred. And straight white men are so déclassé now.
“Most books on witchcraft will tell you that witches work naked. This is because most books on witchcraft were written by men.” -Neil Gaiman
Surely the underlying factor on nudity is hugely instinctive with a dusting of cultural overlay and is based on what has caused successful reproduction for eons and likely from Men seeking Fertility in Women which is an overwhelmingly visual exercise and Women seeking Power in Men which requires more analysis than just visual particularly as societies became complex.
It would be genuinely interesting to know what kind of reactions & commentaries she would have inspired had she had been black.
And to think the Ancient Olympic Games were held stark naked, and Spartan women wrestled nude and covered in olive oil.
Where did we go so wrong?
Tell me more about the Spartan women wrestling nude covered in olive oil ….
Sadly, the sources are rather meagre. However Spartan women seem to have been unique in this, as in so many other ways, compared to the rest of Ancient Greece.
Great column by James. The only book I’ve read by Applebaum is “Gulag”. It will never compare with Solzhenitsyn’s “Gulag Archipelago” and some of her statements were dubious (she put the number of people killed in the Holodomor at six to seven million people; the esteemed Ukrainian-Canadian scholar John Paul Himka says it was from 2.5 to 3.5 million). Nevertheless, the amount of solid research that went into it, including numerous interviews with survivors was truly impressive. Like other NATO war hawks, she bizarrely combines an overblown sense of the Russian security threat with a ridiculous undervaluation of the size of the Russian economy. (In 2018 she actually said the Russian economy was about the same size as Benelux’s!) But take her as she is, she is still worth reading on Eastern Europe. Now in her columns and again in this book, from what James says about it, she seems to see herself as an expert on the West as well, or the world tout court. She isn’t. I won’t read her book. She comes across like David Frum in drag, just another Republican writer who has pretty much morphed into a Liberal Democrat, and will likely continue to move left, even into crazy land.
An excellent summary! “This wasn’t so much the Tories parking their tanks on Labour’s lawn as barging through the front door, plonking themselves on the sofa and grabbing hold of the remote control.”
Men’s bodies can’t be used beautifully as emblems of freedom and protest? I don’t think you were around in the great public-event Streaking era of the 70s. Perhaps more tongue in cheek (no, I mean the upper ones) than our Athena’s here, but superb paeans to freedom and delightful protests against our staid mores nevertheless (and welcome relief from those long rugby games).
If she had rounded, strong, female thighs, the world would have taken her seriously. She didn’t, so everybody thinks she’s emaciated and probably on drugs or something.
This is only even news because she has a “good” body. If she was obese no one would be calling her Athena or writing at length on what FeMaLe nUDiTy MEEEEAANSSSSSS. Muh symbolism.
Men – and women – like looking at good-looking naked women. What’s new?
Yawn.
It’s far more conceivable that the police, or anyone else, might put the boot in on a naked man than on a naked woman. A naked woman immediately signals vulnerability and for normally constituted people is an immediate signal to protect. Hence the officers confusion and inability to act.
“All this eventually devolved into a conversation about whether the light-skinned protestor was in fact a problematic exerciser of her white-privilege, whether doing yoga is actually colonialism, and whether she even was a she at all, or of some other more compelling identity”.
That is.. in the simplest of words, incredibly sad. Anyone with a right mind would wonder why people are more concerned about the woman’s background and identity, rather than the very blatant stupidity of an act she put on in public. But hey, coming from someone who has tragically witnessed the traumatic events and images from feminazis at “women’s march” parades, this is in no way surprising.
I think we are experiencing this first-hand in the Anglo-sphere. Perceptions of racial inequality and privilege have made it socially acceptable to demonize pale-skinned people in much the same way Semites were the targets of racist diatribe back in the early twentieth century.
There are many similarities between Woke cultists and Nazi propagandists.
Germany doesn’t have to wrangle so much with their past as they need to deal with the story that has been told about their past. Even 75 years after the end of the war, historians that reveal truths from original-sourced materials are banned from publication and vilified. Such is the power of the “doctrine” we continue to call “history.”
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/…
Aren’t pheromones a determining factor alongside a complex variety of genetic, psychological, and cultural factors.
For example, hormone levels throughout the menstrual cycle affect a woman’s overt behaviours, influencing the way a woman presents herself to others during stages of her menstrual cycle, in attempt to attract high quality mates the closer the woman is to ovulation.[4]
So in conclusion, a naked, culturally desirable, catwalking, pheromone producing, ovulating womanly person seeks to sexually attract a large contingent of the Portland police department as a form of non violent protest by opening her legs and stimulating sexual arousal.
I wonder how much she got paid?
Unfortunately she sounds a lot like the typical Progressive who abhors the ongoing process of ecological adaptation in relation to social, economic and ecological change. And so like many Progressive intellectuals, have come to label and identify the problem with ecological adaption as the evil of populism with vexatious and ignorant claims that the electorate are too stupid to know what is good for them in voting in people who are clearly more in touch with ecological adaption than they are themselves. As a result, they perceive democracy being in crisis.
The true crisis and for that matter, the true narcissism, is in the mind of the Progressive who thinks that history and time should be abstracted along with human population growth, resource consumption growth, dwindling oil reserves, rising costs of living, rising co2 emissions and the 6th mass extinction. All of which are slowly promulgating into a human growth crisis for which an ecological response is required.
In this respect, the current UK response is a national resilience strategy (Project Defend), a data driven State and an independently managed domestic and international capitalist economies from which to provide for human needs and satisfy import dependancies.
In contrast, the Progressives live almost entirely within their abstractions (or simulacra or representations of actual reality) of which populism is one. Consequently, they reject self-preservation instincts, they reject ecological adaptation and they reject the mechanisms of democracy that allow people to peacefully choose from a range of self-preservation and ecological adaption choices.
Unfortunately, like much of Progressivism and their multi faceted denialism, these neo-conservatives cum Progressives do not provide much in the way of implementable alternative ideas and solutions which accord with their ideological beliefs other than abstracted identity formations like ‘Black’ or ‘White’. As a result, all we get from ecologically illiterate Progressives is intellectual sophistry and intellectual vacuity generally demonstrated in the form of hollow criticism and abstracted identity politics.
“The policy has been very successful apart from the fact that is has killed lots more people than similar countries to ours”
It ain’t over ’til it’s over. And it ain’t over.
“Communism had been swept aside in favour of globalisation, free markets and the unipolar American world.”
Actually, Communism had been swept aside in favour of Democracy.
http://inproportion2.talkig…
In overall mortality Sweden is ahead of Finland and barely behind Denmark. Norway seems to have been unaffected completely. Which seems rather strange. I don’t trust how they count. I agree with the author’s conclusions.
“Overall conclusions: Overall mortality in Sweden is better than that of Finland and Scotland, and very close to that of Denmark. Comparisons of Covid deaths per million in the Nordic countries made in the media are unreliable. The hostility and negativity of the media towards Sweden’s approach to Covid is unjustified, harmful and deeply irresponsible.”
The web page above also did a study on the UK after their health leaders declared that covid was the 3rd leading cause of death in the UK in June 2020. Looking at the details deaths for the other 9 leading causes… heart disease, cancers, organ failure, etc… all went down quite significantly. I’m sorry but this just isn’t possible. I’m honestly to the point that I’m not sure if it is real. Is the dramatic spike in deaths related to a virus or is it related to poor healthcare because hospitals stopped services to focus on covid? That they locked elderly in their nursing homes so relatives couldn’t support their care and god only knows how they were treated? I have some serious concerns about all of this. The Billionaires at the WEF clamoring on about the “great reset” has the hair standing up on the back of my neck. I smell the stench of the perfumed rats in this one. They haven’t been able to cover their stench up. http://inproportion2.talkig…
This article contains a lot of feminist theory stated as fact. Much of the reasoning is just pure conjecture.
Anglo-Saxons have weird trauma with nudity, impossible to understand for the rest of the world (Maybe apart from Indians).
As a woman I find this type of nudity an insult to women. It isn’t powerful at all. It is just sexually telling men they cannot touch you. It reinforces the man must look after woman. Because most men know they shouldn’t hurt or abuse women, as women are vulnerable. And that is the insult, because most women are not vulnerable unless they choose to be.
Therefore these women are reinforcing the vulnerability myth. Once a brave policeman breaks that myth and fires the teargas directly at her, she would have run away. Why? Because she is a coward.
There’s another question to ponder, and I believe it is a more important reality check: Why, in the first place, would a policeman fire teargas at a nude woman or at any peaceful protestor? The answer is that the policeman and his commanders are immoral and craven. The head of Homeland Security says his forces are there to protect Federal property and to stop anarchists from burning down Portland. How does firing teargas at peaceful and in fact unarmed protestors and beating them with clubs achieve that?
There is nothing brave about these men in riot gear and nothing brave about those who have deployed them. They truly are the cowards. They are afraid to acknowledge the humanity and the constitutional rights of the protestors.
There seems to be a mode of almost pastoral wistfulness about Paul Embery’s writing, an elegy for a long-last golden age perhaps. It might be more difficult perhaps to pinpoint when this age actually was. The Labour Party was, after all formed as an amalgam from the Trade Unions on the one hand and the more theoretical-minded people inspired by the writings of Marx (to a small extent) Shaw, Morris Wells (Mr and Mrs) and many others. Attlee’s government had a mixture of Public School boys, graduates, professionals and manual workers some of whose education had gone no further than elementary school. Furthermore it is hardly new for the Labour Party to lead on social issues as well as trade unions, decolonisation, anti-racism, abortion, divorce reform, gay rights and plenty others have always been lead by the Labour Party even though they are now pretty much accepted by most.
Paul Embery has, I feel when he talks of working-class, of a white man, probably in his 50s, doing a manual job, skilled or not,possibly with flask of tea and box of sandwiches. But if this is the constituency he has in mind it is painfully tiny and shrinking; Embery needs to get on board with the idea that working class people need not be white, they can be working in shops, call centres amazon fulfilment centres and plenty more. Unless he can get his head around these facts Embery will continue simply to paddle the same lines.
Embery talks more about “Identity Politics” (and I will brush over the fact that “working Class” is an identity) than most people in the party. The Party’s manifesto in 2019 had, I believe half a side on trans identity; It had masses on the weakness in our health services (presciently) the need for better control of utilities and transport better funded education better planning and lots more.
The goals of the Pandemic planners are now focusing on year-to-year control of populations and the flames under the fear-factor boiling pot will need to be kept “high.” People who get in the way of that or worse yet, allow individuals freedom of decision over their own lives, will need to be dealt with. In America such people often choke on a piece of food while dining, commit suicide by stabbing themselves in the chest or often sleep-walk off the top of a tall building. Dr. Tegnell will need to be protected. The folks who work at the enforcement desk are not limited by borders.
Oh come on. Prince Charles and his billionaire buddies are going to fix everything. Just listen to them on the evils of “affluence”. https://www.weforum.org/age…