Naked Protesters & Nude Activists

Here at Naked Protesters we are really troubled by the power implications of this story — I did not realize that we still live in a world that lets bishops demand (and get) criminal charges for mocking the pope:

Carnegie Mellon University’s review of two students’ public nudity at an on-campus parade last month came to this conclusion Friday by the university president: Students have the right to express controversial views, but not to break the law.

In a letter sent to the university community, President Jared L. Cohon wrote that campus police had filed misdemeanor charges for indecent exposure against two students, identified in court records as Katherine B. O’Connor, 19, and Robb S. Godshaw, 22.

…

The parade, a College of Fine Arts tradition known as the “Annual Anti-Gravity Downhill Derby,” took place April 18 on the area of CMU’s campus known as the “cut” as part of the university’s spring carnival. That afternoon, campus police were notified that a naked woman was on campus, according to the criminal complaint.

The woman, later identified as Ms. O’Connor, was wearing a pope costume, but had no clothing below her waist, and on her pubic area was the shape of a cross.

…

The nudity incidents, noted by campus police on the day of the event, became more high profile after Pittsburgh Bishop David A. Zubik expressed concern about Ms. O’Connor’s display, saying it was offensive. CMU officials investigated following Bishop Zubik’s complaint, and on May 1, Mr. Cohon wrote a letter to the community apologizing to those who were offended.

The decision today, to file charges, was greeted positively by Catholic officials.

Bishop Zubik, in a statement Friday, acknowledged that CMU “has taken the time to treat this unfortunate incident in a serious manner.

“Once again, and as I have said over these last few weeks, this is an opportunity for all of us to be reminded that freedom of speech and freedom of expression do not constitute a freedom to dismiss or disrespect the beauty of anyone’s race, the sacredness of anyone’s religious belief or the uniqueness of anyone’s nationality.”

First of all, Bishop Zubik is an idiot and an asshole. Freedom of speech does indeed mean precisely the freedom to disrespect the sacredness of religious belief! And he’s an educated man, so he knows that — which makes him a lying idiot and asshole, to boot.

Just to be clear, let’s recaps the sequence of events, shall we?

1. Girl wears a pope hat and no pants. In a parade. With creative pubic topiary.
2. Campus police note the incident, but don’t otherwise give a shit.
3. Bishop Zubik gets his robes knotted around his genitals and starts complaining.
4. CMU investigates, having not been interested previously.
5. To placate the bishop, the CMU administration instructs the campus police to file indecent exposure charges.

In 21st-century America, can you believe it?

Progress comes to Naked Protesters. Slowly, but it comes. Grabbed the @NakedProtesters twitter account years ago, but didn’t really know what to do with it. Still don’t, not in the proper twitter spirit of short frequent communications, which don’t happen here — but a few days ago I did tart up the twitter page with Lady Godiva background art and an avatar cribbed from this book cover (which we first saw back in 2005):

There’s also now a loyal software robot who is supposed to automagically send out a tweet every time there’s a new post here. Trumpets may or may not play when that happens. Probably not:

Follow @NakedProtesters

Although naked protesters often seem like a modern phenomenon, they are not just a product of the hippie 1960s. One chilly example comes from the Doukhobor splinter sect in Canada known as the Freedomites (also also called Svobodniki or Sons of Freedom). Originally refugees from religious persecution in czarist Russia, the Doukhobors settled in Canada in the late 1800s and lived somewhat communally, but they differed among themselves as to how much communalism was appropriate. Inspired by Tolstoy, who wrote from Russia that whether it was defended by the state or the individual, private property went hand in hand with violence, the Freedomite contingent renounced all property, which they attempted to symbolize by marching nude. On one such occasion in the winter of 1903,

The Freedomites decided to demonstrate their beliefs to the other Doukhobors and stripped naked, as free from possessions as Adam and Eve, and marched through the villages. They ate leaves and grass like their animal brothers and begged others to follow them.

This being Canada in winter, it was chilly:

Thus it seemed a miracle when they did not freeze to death:

There were fifty-two of the marchers when they ran into Peter Verigin who was driving his carriage. The Freedomites demanded that Verigin free his horse. Peter the Lordly refused. The Freedomites, of course, thought he meant the opposite so they unharnessed the animal and set it loose. They marched on down the road while Verigin sent word to the next village to stop them. There the naked marchers were whipped with willow switches until their legs bled. Women and children were removed from the march but the men continued on.

That night, as the temperature dropped, the Freedomite men huddled together for warmth. Other Doukhobors, clad in sheepskin coats, gathered around and embraced them to keep the men from freezing. The next morning, when no one was found frozen, a miracle was proclaimed and the Freedomites marched on.

The Mounties had been tracking the progress of the march. The Freedomites were left alone while on the Doukhobor lands but as they approached Yorkton, the marchers were stopped. A crowd of about a hundred people swarmed out of Yorkton and forcibly clothed the Freedomites. The Doukhobors who were used to the communal nudity of the steam baths were surprised by the prudish reaction of the townspeople, but it was something they did not forget.

This protest isn’t nude (although they used the favorite “bodysuit in a fleshy color” dodge to attract the eye from a distance) but the elements of public display in a London shop window brings this into the Naked Protester realm-of-interest, as does the acceptance by our brave model-activist of public humiliation to promote her cause:

Her cause, it turns out, is the use of animals in cosmetic testing, and the pictures were taken about a year ago at a Regent Street shop window as part of an awareness campaign by the Humane Society International.

According to The Mirror, in April 2012 a woman

…was restrained, force-fed and injected with cosmetics in a high street shop window as part of a hard-hitting protest against animal testing. The 24-year-old endured 10 hours of experiments, which included having her hair shaved and irritants squirted in her eyes. Jacqueline appeared genuinely terrified as she was pinned down on a bench and had her mouth stretched open with two metal hooks while a man in a white coat force-fed her until she choked and gagged. The artist was also injected with numerous needles, had her skin braised and lotions and creams smeared across her face. Passers-by were gobsmacked to see Jacqueline, a social sculpture student at Oxford Brookes University, forced to have a section of her head shaved. The gruesome spectacle aimed to highlight the cruelty inflicted on animals during cosmetic laboratory tests and raise awareness that animal testing is still a common practise.

From Edouard Suivi De La Reserve by Georges Pichard.

Normally I’d draw the line between naked protest and naked property destruction, but given the role the Russian Orthodox church has played in the persecution of Pussy Riot, I can’t really fault the brave girls of FEMEN for cutting down a huge crucifix in Kiev:

Pictures from FEMEN.

We are looking at Brazilian author Vanessa de Oliveira, who stripped outside a government building in Lima to protest ebook piracy in Peru, saying:

“I’m doing this so my book is not pirated anymore anywhere in the world. A country is built with culture, with books. Pirating books endangers culture. This is the first country where I’ve see this phenomenon. In Brazil, there are no pirated books. What I’m seeing here is a disgrace.”

Sorry, Vanessa. What I’m seeing is no disgrace!

Video here; link via Tiny Nibbles.

This comes out of one of the slutwalk protests in Toronto, via Bondage Blog: