The Fast-Food Feminism of the Topless Femen

From Le Monde Diplomatique  

http://internationalboulevard.com/europe/115-france/194-the-fast-food-feminism-of-the-topless-femen

Blond young women stripping off their shirts to protest for...women's rights. Le Monde Diplomatique's Mona Chollet reviews the purportedly feminist protest group called the Femen, finding little evidence of feminism and a budding affinity with France's anti-Muslim right. Amina Tyler, Alia el Mahdi and other young Femen of the Arab Spring would do well to have a second look at their Ukrainian mentors, she suggests.

"Covering women's bodies seems to give Muslims a sense of virility, while Westerners derive their own from uncovering them", writes Moroccan essayist Fatema Mernissi in Scheherazade Goes West. The French media's excitement over figures like the Ukranian 'Femen' or Alia el Mahdi, the Egyptian student who in 2011 posted naked pictures of herself on her blog, once again underlines the truth of Mernissi's observation. To commemorate International Women's Day, France 2 aired a documentary on March 5 about the Ukrainian women's group, which has been based in France for more than a year now.

So much for the thousands of women who have the poor taste to fight for their rights while fully clothed, or to put on a show that does not conform with the dominant standards of youth, slimness, beauty and bodily firmness. "Feminism is women on the march in the streets of Cairo, not the Femen," raged France Inter's Egypt correspondent Vanessa Descouraux on Twitter, on February 6. "But we never see documentaries about those women on television!" Feminist organizations in France these days are more likely to be asked their opinion of the Ukrainian women's group than about their own undertakings.

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