The Body as Broken Weapon

Breasts. Small, large, firm, soft, covered, bare—I love nearly all of them, with the specificity of a devoted researcher and considerably more enthusiasm than objectivity warrants. The variations in shape and proportion alone could fill a bibliography, and largely have. This is not something I apologize for.

So when FEMEN, the Ukrainian feminist collective, stripped topless on the Nina Ricci runway during Paris Fashion Week to protest the clothing industry’s exploitation of women, I should have felt something. A spark of solidarity, at least. Maybe a baseline physiological response to the methodology. Instead I felt nothing—not hostility, not arousal, just the flat recognition that I had seen this before, would see it again, and that nothing would change because of it.

There’s a particular kind of activism that becomes its own parody through sheer repetition. FEMEN belongs to it now. They appear, they are photographed being dragged off by security, they disappear. The industry absorbs the interruption like it absorbs everything—as content, as spectacle, as free publicity for the very brand they disrupted. The bare chest as weapon has the half-life of a trending moment. It lands, it is consumed, it is gone before the next show starts.

What gets me isn’t the nudity. I’m not the person to object to that. It’s the redundancy. The animal rights protesters who used to storm these same runways with fake blood and shredded fur coats at least varied their materials. FEMEN has found their one gesture and commits to it with the certainty of people who have confused repetition with escalation. The fashion industry, the machinery behind it, the economics of cheap production and cheaper labor—these remain entirely unmoved. Can a breast change the world? Obviously it can. Breasts have been quietly running the world for thousands of years. But not like this. Not with this particular flavor of ignored righteous noise.