'Men are scared by uncontrolled naked women'
Who is behind FEMEN, the topless protest group who have made headlines with naked ambushes of world leaders? A new documentary, Ukraine Is Not a Brothel, finds out
11:00AM BST 16 Oct 2013
Eight months ago, as he arrived at a polling station in Milan for a photo opportunity, Silvio Berlusconi was pounced on by three half-naked young women. The former Italian Prime Minister did not look happy to see them, which may have been a first where half-naked young women were concerned, although the slogan "Basta Silvio" (enough of Silvio), splodged across their bare breasts in thick black paint, suggested they were not in town for bunga bunga.
Seconds after they had thrown off their shirts, policemen and carabinieri surged towards the women and wrestled them outside, where a light show had started to fall. They were held face down on the pavement, while photographers and television cameras swarmed for a better look. Back indoors, Berlusconi smiled weakly and held up his ballot paper for the scheduled photo op, but he knew in his heart that the headline was no longer "Former Italian PM casts vote in general election". This is topless feminism in action.
The three women were members of FEMEN, a protest group that was formed in Kiev in 2008, and which now has branches throughout continental Europe. Since the Berlusconi stunt, the group has ambushed a wide range of political and media events, including Russian President Vladimir Putin's visit to the Hanover Trade Fair, a speech by Alberto Ruiz-Gallardón, a prominent figure in the Spanish anti-abortion lobby, and a Nina Ricci show at Paris Fashion Week.
Their interests go beyond European borders, too: when Sheikh Saleh al-Luhaidan spoke out against a campaign to relax the law that prevents Saudi Arabian women from driving, citing dangers to their reproductive systems, Femen staged a protest outside the Saudi embassy in Kiev, with topless women wearing veils roaring up and down the street in a black saloon.
They also released a statement which warned the Sheikh that the oppression of women by means of bogus health scares "increases to men the risk of sexual impotence and defects of the penis."
"Ukrainian women would wear these to attract a husband, but we are playing with standards of beauty and sexiness," Inna says. "We transform that. Now I'm making you scared, my dear man – you don't find me attractive any more."
Russian President Vladimir Putin and German Chancellor Angela Merkel are confronted by a topless Femen demonstrator in Hanover (EPA/JOCHEN LUEBKE)
With them is the Australian filmmaker Kitty Green, whose first feature, Ukraine Is Not a Brothel, is now playing at the London Film Festival. The film charts the early days of Femen, and particularly their entanglement with Victor Svyatski, a Svengali-like oddball who for years had been the group's de facto leader.
Sviyatski certainly had an eye for a good publicity stunt and an ear for a snappy slogan. But in front of Green's camera, he admits he is less interested in the group's original message – drawing international attention to the plight of young Ukrainian women for whom adult life is a binary choice between domestic drudgery and the sex industry – than the medium (naked girls running around outdoors). Since the film was completed, he and Femen have parted ways.
In Ukraine is Not a Brothel we see Sviyatski berating the women, calling them "weak", "spineless" and "bitches". In one sequence, he explains that he actively discouraged protesters he deemed to be less attractive from taking part in Femen stunts. Having a rampant misogynist at the helm of your anti-misogyny group was, Inna and Alexandra admit, problematic, although both say they are glad for the opportunity to exorcise this particular demon in public.
"Making the film was like a confession," says Alexandra. "We decided to trust Kitty and to show everything. When we started Femen we were trying to get advice from different people and we turned to Victor, who then started to oppress us.
"He didn't beat us, but it was psychological, and this film shows it can happens everywhere – even to feminists who have decided to fight against the patriarchy. And we should recognise it in the very moment it happens, and fight back."
Green first encountered Femen in early 2011, in a report in a Melbourne newspaper. Enthralled, she quit her job with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, flew to Eastern Europe with a camera, and spent the next 14 months living with them on the outskirts of Kiev and documenting their work.
To many westerners, topless feminism will sound at worst murkily cynical and at best a contradiction in terms, and Green admits she was sceptical at first about the group's methods. This changed quickly, however, when she arrived in Ukraine.
"Everything was startling for me," she says. "I grew up in a very progressive area of Melbourne, and all the women I knew worked. I knew there was such a thing as gender inequality of course, but never appreciated what it might actually be like. And it was only when I got to Ukraine that I realised how big the divide between the sexes is.
"The women stay at home and aren't allowed to speak up. And at the protests, when the police see women who aren't doing either of those things, they react brutally. They would push the girls and shove them and throw me down, and me too for being with them."
Alexandra adds: "When men see uncontrolled naked women, that they used to see only in their beds, out in the street, screaming against them, they are afraid. They see that this regime that has stood for centuries is starting to shake."
For me, too, Green's footage of the reaction to the protests is shocking. Burly, uniformed men grab at the women's limbs and hair, dragging them across the ground and hurling them into vans, in which they are driven to a police cell, and perhaps worse.
A Femen protest in Kiev, Ukraine (REX)
During a 2011 action in Belarus, in which Femen protested the alleged vote-rigging that had returned Alexander Lukashenko to power in that country the previous year, three members including Inna Shevchenko were scooped up off the streets of Minsk by men in dark clothing and driven in vans to a forest on the Ukrainian border, where they were stripped naked, beaten up and doused in oil. Green, who had filmed the protest, had her camera confiscated and her footage deleted.
When I ask Inna about the ordeal, she talks about it in flatly matter-of-fact terms. "Every day I get hundreds of death threats on my phone," she shrugs. "Every time we speak out, we get threats – 'we will burn you witch' or 'we will cut your head off' or 'a bottle of acid is prepared for you'. It's the lifestyle."
But for them, the alternative is unacceptable. "If we hadn't started Femen we would be living the terrible life of normal Ukrainian women," says Alexandra. "Sexual slaves or domestic slaves, or slaves to our work.
"It's easy to become a prostitute in Ukraine because what else is there? When a young woman goes to an office to look for a job, they say we are too young, or not educated, or even if we have a master's degree we will be pregnant or married in a few months.
"I've been told that if I want a job I have to sleep with the boss. I don't want to? OK, then I don't get the job."
Later that day, it occurs to me that these Ukrainian women stripping off on their own terms might have something in common with the black Americans who have 'reclaimed' racist language: something that once symbolised the sheer hopelessness of their situation becomes a means to push back.
And of course there's an element of playing the media here – but if they hadn't gone topless, would Femen have caught the eye of a young documentarist on the other side of the planet, looking for a subject for her first feature? And would you have just finished a 1,350-word article on women's rights in Ukraine?
Ukraine Is Not a Brothel is showing in the London Film Festival on October 18 and 20
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