Kerry privately urges Poroshenko to provide evidence of Kremlin involvement with separatists in Ukra

[JackRiddler]

69. Femen stunts highly questionable...

Ukraine is not a Brothel, directed by 28-year-old Australian film-maker Kitty Green, has “outed” Victor Svyatski as the mastermind behind the group. Mr Syvatski is known as a “consultant” to the movement. According to the Femen website, he was badly beaten up by the secret services in Ukraine earlier this summer because of his activities on behalf of the group. However, Ms Green reveals that Svyatski is not simply a supporter of Femen but its founder and éminence grise. “It’s his movement and he hand-picked the girls. He hand-picked the prettiest girls because the prettiest girls sell more papers. The prettiest girls get on the front page... that became their image, that became the way they sold the brand,” she says.

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/news/the-man-who-made-femen-new-film-outs-victor-svyatski-as-the-mastermind-behind-the-protest-group-and-its-breastbaring-stunts-8797042.html

The fast-food feminism of the topless Femen

Blond young women stripping off their shirts to protest for...women’s rights. Le Monde Diplomatique’s Mona Chollet reviews the purportedly feminist protest group called the Femen, finding little evidence of feminism and a budding affinity with France’s anti-Muslim right. Amina Tyler, Alia el Mahdi and other young Femen of the Arab Spring would do well to have a second look at their Ukrainian mentors, she suggests.

Exclusive April 2013, by Mona Chollet

SNIP

The permanent reduction of women to their bodies and their sexuality, the negation of their intellectual abilities, the social invisibility of women who cannot please the male gaze: these are keystones of the patriarchal system. It is rather stupefying that a purportedly feminist ’movement’ — there are no more than twenty Femen in France — cannot see this. «We live under male domination,» Inna Shevchenko told The Guardian, «and nudity is the only way to provoke them, to get their attention.» So, a feminism that bends to male domination: well, it had to be invented.

Shevchenko not only accepts this order of things, she approves of it: «Classic feminism is a sick old woman, it does not work anymore. It is stuck in the world of conferences and books.» She is right: death to sick old women, they are not even pleasing to look at! And books? They are full of words that cause headaches.

In his excellent book on the use of bodies in politics, Claude Guillon said of Shevchenko’s sick old woman: «Even the most charitable of readers would say that Shevchenko’s statement expresses the presumption and the cruelty of youth. But we should also add: the greatness of its imbecility! The image of feminists as old ladies, cut off from the rest of the world — and if Inna read books she might have known this — is an abiding anti-feminist cliche. A pity to see it taken up by an activist who pretends to be renewing feminism.» More recently, the group’s members in France resigned themselves to publishing a book, of interviews. «In France, you have to publish something in order to be taken seriously,» sighs one of the Femen in an interview in Liberation. Oh, the misery.