Naked Protesters & Nude Activists

Here’s a French version of the “I’d rather go naked” poster campaign, this one featuring Eva Angéli:

A reader send these photos to me, identifying them as coming from the 2008 Dyke March in Toronto:

Anti war protester figures duct tape is better than clothing, for getting on TV:

…or at least, piss them off. That seems to be this woman’s plan:

Of course, this picture came to me without any attribution, so it could be from a movie or a spoof. There’s also no reason to suspect (beyond the presence of riot police, which is suggestive but hardly probative) that there’s any protest context to the picture.

You’ve got to admire this kind of courage:

An Israeli tourist who felt harassed when New Zealand road workers whistled at her Thursday stripped naked in response, police said.

Workmen in the small northern farming town of Kerikeri were repairing the main street when the young woman took offense at their attention.

On a balmy late-autumn day, she calmly stripped bare to use an ATM – bringing an abrupt halt to both the whistles and the road work – then put her clothes back on and walked away.

Sgt. Peter Masters said the woman told police she didn’t take kindly to the men’s wolf-whistles.

“She said she had thought ‘… I’ll show them what I’ve got,’ as the men whistled at her,” he said.

“She gave the explanation that she had been pestered by New Zealand men. She’s not an unattractive-looking lady,” he said.

Police treated the incident as a one-off.

“She was taken back to the police station and spoken to and told that was inappropriate (behavior) in New Zealand,” he added.

The woman was due to leave New Zealand later Thursday.

The signs tell you as much as we know:

If you’ve ever run any sort of adult-oriented internet site that’s open to comment, you’ll be familiar with a certain sort of Beavis-and-Butthead trollery, typified by short, crude comments like the title of this post. It’s reactive to the material (usually pictures) being commented on, but it’s usually leering, crude, and brief to the point of being sub-literate.

Needless to say, Naked Protesters attracts a lot of that sort of commentary, but it almost always gets caught in moderation and silently deleted with the penis pill spam.

Today, however, the Naked Protesters moderation queue contained an astonishingly focused burst of this raw troll energy. A man going by the handle of DudeWithPants, and offering a fake URL suggesting hostility to nudity, posted an astonishing thirty five comments in just fifty minutes. The comments, as you will see, portray an incredible mental mixture of lustful leering, misogyny, homophobia, authoritarianism, body judgment, and good old-fashioned crudity, all delivered in that sharp-elbow-to-the-ribs fake-jocularity style that’s designed to allow the speaker to retreat into “hey, I was just joking” at the first sign of criticism.

Silently deleting this fluxus would have been the normal moderation response, but it just seemed wrong, somehow, to do so. The comment set, taken together, feels like an an accidentally artistic artifact, an unselfconscious self-portrait of some widely-known but rarely-photographed internet beast.

Accordingly, the comment set is below the cut. These comments will not appear on their respective posts, because such material is a sort of sludge that not only contaminates what it comments on, but also tends to invite copycat commenting from likeminded others. And now, today’s zoological exhibit:

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This panel is from a Dirty Duck comic strip: