How to Piss on a President

While more than a hundred thousand Ukrainians were out on the streets of Kyiv fighting riot police over President Yanukovych’s decision to abandon an EU association agreement, the feminist activist group Femen found a different register entirely. In front of the Ukrainian embassy in Paris, they urinated—literally, not metaphorically—on an effigy of the man.

Whether this helped anyone on the Euromaidan is genuinely questionable. The people getting their skulls cracked by batons in Kyiv probably had more pressing concerns than a topless protest in the French capital. But there’s something to the gesture anyway—the deliberate vulgarity of it, the refusal to perform dignity in the face of something that doesn’t deserve any. Not every protest has to be legible or strategic. Some of them just have to be unmistakable.

The Euromaidan eventually forced Yanukovych out, though not before a lot of blood and not without consequences that are still unfolding. The Femen stunt barely registered in the long arc of it. But I remember it. Something about the specific absurdity of the thing lodged it in the brain, the way really committed acts of political theater sometimes do—not because they change anything, but because they refuse to pretend the situation calls for decorum.