Naked Protesters & Nude Activists

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:

From a 1970s photograph by Allan Tannenbaum, this is stripper Candy Love being arrested “for going topless in front of City Hall in a one-person protest” in New York City:

There’s no word on the message behind Candy’s naked protest.

From deep in the past via Spanking Blog comes this 1935 newspaper article documenting the unwilling public nudity and humiliation of twenty women strike breakers (scabs) in Dallas Texas, who were seized, stripped, and spanked by a hundred union women:

This photo is all over the web, but it’s always described as “Dykes on Bikes, San Francisco, 1980s.” So that’s what we know: