What a Topless Photo Cost Amina
A nineteen-year-old woman in Tunis posted two photos of herself online. In one, she’d written "Fuck Your Morals" across her bare chest. In the other she’s holding a cigarette, looking at the camera like it owes her something. For this, a Salafist preacher named Adel Almi—head of Tunisia’s national religious police—announced that she should be stoned to death. Her name was Amina. That was essentially all anyone knew about her, which became the point.
Femen, the feminist activist group that started in Ukraine, had been expanding its reach in the years before this. Their method is brash and deliberately provocative: topless protest, bodies as billboards, women screaming slogans at politicians and heads of state. You can hold whatever mixed feelings you want about the tactics—and the organization has attracted serious criticism alongside genuine support—but what was happening to Amina was simpler and more terrible than any argument about protest aesthetics. She had posted photos on Facebook, and someone with institutional power had called for her execution.
Almi’s stated concern was contagion. If Amina got away with it, other women might get ideas. That’s the exact logic of every authoritarian panic: the body that refuses control gets treated as an epidemic. He used that word. An epidemic. A catastrophe. Tunisian law backed him up with a potential two-year prison sentence for indecent exposure. And if the law didn’t take care of it, there were always the stones.
Her parents, reportedly convinced she was mentally ill, committed her to a psychiatric hospital. Inna Shevchenko, Femen’s founder, told The Atlantic in a Skype interview that the two had been in contact just days before: We spoke about Femen’s ideology, and then suddenly her phone went dead and her Facebook page disappeared.
Shevchenko also mentioned that Amina had apparently been struggling badly enough to consider suicide before the photos went up—the act less a calculated protest than a last statement from someone out of options. Disappeared is doing a lot of work in that sentence.
The internet responded the way it does: thousands of solidarity photos flooded Femen’s pages, the hashtag #Amina dominated Twitter for a news cycle, petitions gathered tens of thousands of signatures. Whether any of that reached Amina in a psychiatric ward in Tunis is a separate question. Whether it deterred Adel Almi from anything is another one entirely.
What I keep coming back to is the economy of it. Two photos. A cigarette. A sentence written in marker on skin. Against that: the machinery of religious law, the compliance of a family, the threat of being buried to the waist in the ground and murdered with rocks by men who consider this a righteous act. The disproportion is the message. It always is. The more brittle the ideology, the more catastrophically it responds to a nineteen-year-old with a phone and nothing left to lose.
You don’t have to endorse everything Femen stands for—and I have reservations about the organization—to understand that what happened to Amina was obscene. The right to exist in your own body without requiring permission isn’t a political position. It’s a floor. And the people threatening to kill her for standing on it were loudly announcing exactly how terrified they were of what happens when that floor holds.