The Body as the Argument

Feminist protest in Germany in 2015 had at least three distinct speeds. There was the new wave—young publications trying to talk about equality without making it feel like a tribunal. There was Alice Schwarzer’s EMMA, which had been running since 1977 and managed to respond to the Germanwings crash—150 people dead—by calling for female cockpit quotas, earning it the kind of collective eye-roll that only decades of accumulated credibility can produce. And then there was Femen: topless, slogan-painted, absolutely committed to the body as the medium.

Journalists Stefanie Gromes and Katrin Hafemann spent a week embedded with the German branch of Femen for the NDR documentary series 7 Tage, following the activists through their rituals and convictions. The footage that stayed with me was Steffi, just before a photoshoot, working through the implications out loud: If I get naked, Google owns me. Then she throws the shirt in the corner anyway. Minutes later, "Don’t Cum on Human Rights" is written across her chest in black marker.

I don’t think Femen’s tactic actually moves institutions. The spectacle tends to overwhelm the message—which might be the point, or might be the problem; I’ve never been certain. But there’s something honest about that moment of hesitation before she takes the shirt off. The question of who gets to look and under what terms, the body as both the protest and the thing being protested over. You can’t resolve that with a slogan. It just sits there, written across someone’s chest.