Getting naked to change the world

Spiegel Online International
The Ukrainian activist group Femen has made headlines around the world by baring their breasts to protest against prostitution, exploitation and corruption.

PHOTO GALLERY

Modern Marxism

There were only three of them at first, but now the movement, whose ranks include students, journalists and economists, has spread throughout Ukraine and includes more than 300 women. Calling themselves "Femen," they have started a movement that has also caught hold among women in Tunisia and the United States. It's a movement that even encourages experienced women's rights activists to undress.

"We scream and show our bodies!"

Femen emerges from a part of Europe that has only tried its hand at democracy for the last 20 years, a Europe in which the greatest hope, for many 16-year-old girls, is to find a good husband after completing their university studies and eventually become a good mother. It's a Europe in which men can order women on the Internet as if they were running shoes, and in which women who bare their breasts in public can be locked up.

"That's why we scream and show our bodies," says Anna. And they don't do it just in Ukraine, but throughout Europe -- "because many things still aren't right in your countries, either."

Neofeminism: Pussy Riot | Slutwalks | Femen

Femen isn't alone with its neo-feminist form of protest. Some of its contemporaries include the Pussy Riot collective in Moscow, with their feminist punk rock, who are now in detention awaiting trial. They could face seven years in prison for having stormed the pulpit of a church and raged against Putin. There are the Slutwalks in the United States. And there is Egyptian art student Aliaa Magda Elmahdy, who undressed to fight for her sexual self-determination and whose photo went around the world after she published it on her blog. A branch of Femen was even established in Tunisia recently.