Pissing On Power

There’s something both brilliant and hollow about Femen’s decision to literally piss on Yanukovych’s portrait outside the Ukrainian embassy in Paris. While over 100,000 people were back home getting tear-gassed in the streets for refusing to accept the status quo, here was a feminist activist group finding its own language: crude, defiant, impossible to ignore.

The Euromaidan protests were real. The violence was real. Yanukovych refusing to sign the EU agreement wasn’t abstract—it meant people bleeding on snow, getting arrested, watching their country turn inward. But Femen’s tactic wasn’t about that specific political question. It was about shock, about forcing the world to look at something primal and ugly. You can’t ignore someone desecrating a president’s image. You can’t unsee it.

I get the impulse. There’s honesty in crude protest that clean marches can’t touch. It says: you don’t deserve respect. You don’t deserve dignity in how we respond to you. Femen knew that image would spread, would disgust people, would make the news when a thousand respectful petitions wouldn’t. Shock works. It travels.

But shock is also the end of the story, not the beginning. You piss on the dictator’s portrait and then what. The camera moves on. Yanukovych didn’t care. His government didn’t care. The only people who felt something were the ones already watching, already angry, already there. The undecided person scrolling through news didn’t think the EU agreement matters, they thought these women are crazy. Which maybe was the point. Hard to say.

What Femen understood was that visibility is a weapon, and sometimes you have to be willing to look ridiculous to wield it. There’s courage in that—taking your body and your refusal to be polite and using it as a tool. In a world that wants women to be palatable and quiet, they chose to be impossible.