Outstanding Arguments
The question almost answers itself: can a woman with large breasts be a feminist? Of course she can. The idea that the politics of your body depend on your cup size is so obviously wrong that it barely deserves a response—and yet it keeps getting implied, in both directions, by people who should know better.
Pasha Pozdniakova is Russian, was eighteen when I came across her work, and is the kind of person the internet tends to flatten into a single attribute. She paints. She practices yoga. Under the name queenparaskeva she was building an Instagram following and running a Patreon campaign—an unusual move at a time when Patreon was mostly the domain of musicians and illustrators. And yes, the first thing you notice is the obvious thing. She is extremely generously built in a way that gravity finds professionally challenging. This is not subtle. She is not trying to make it subtle.
There’s something beyond the obvious attribute, though. The paintings suggest someone who takes herself seriously as an artist. The yoga suggests discipline. The Patreon model—controlling her own distribution, owning her platform—suggests she’d thought practically about sustaining herself on her own terms. Whether any of it went anywhere, I don’t know. The internet is full of promising beginnings.
But the feminist question stays interesting because it touches something real. There’s a strain of feminism that treats conventional physical beauty as politically suspect—as if you have to neutralize your own appeal before anyone can take you seriously. That’s its own kind of policing, and it makes no more sense than the objectification it supposedly opposes. Pasha Pozdniakova painting and doing yoga and building an audience with her body fully, unapologetically present in the frame seems like exactly the kind of thing that should be uncontroversial. Palina Rojinski, the Russian-German television presenter who built an entire media career on a similar kind of visible presence, would probably agree—though given the comparative scale of the arguments on display, she might also just quietly sit down.