Commentary: The Femen Effect On Feminism

Commentary: The Femen Effect On Feminism.(Rferl).By Joanna Rohozinska.When the activist group Femen burst onto the Ukrainian protest scene in 2008, holding mud-wrestling matches on Kyiv's central Independence Square to protest the country’s notoriously dirty politics, I was hopeful the stunts could succeed in kick-starting a serious discussion about sexism and gender inequality, problems that continue to plague the states of the former Soviet Union.
Four years and a new office in Paris later, the group, which professes to use “sextremism” to fight against patriarchy as manifested by dictatorship, the church, and the sex industry, more closely resembles a girlie show. More flash than substance.
Femen has raised eyebrows -- and certainly provoked salacious grins -- with its topless antics, which have made it the most visible advocacy group on women’s issues. Now that Femen has successfully roped in the international media with its stunts, it's worth examining what exactly the “founder of a new wave of feminism of the third millennium” is advocating or contributing to contemporary feminist discourse.
Ultimately, a message is only effective if it is clearly conveyed. Though it would seem that there couldn’t be a clearer message than one written on nubile, bare flesh, a closer look reveals that what Femen is actually proposing remains obscured.
In an interview with Gazeta.ru, Femen activist Oleksandra Shevchenko stated that the organization’s goal is a "female revolution” but was sketchier on what that actually entails. The group’s website offers little beyond somewhat garbled slogans and repeated references to “hot boobs.” A survey of their protests fails to provide much insight into what the concrete goals are or what the contribution to feminism may be.
In sum, there is little evidence of any of Femen's protests having significant impact, either in terms of early local campaigns concerning, for example, protests against the tradition in Ukraine of turning off hot water in rotating districts of a city, let alone larger issues such as the international sex trade.Read the full story here.

Video - Topless Femen Protester Attempts to Attack Russian Patriarch.

Topless Femen Protester Attempts to Attack Russian Patriarch.An activist of the Femen group of female Ukrainian protesters, with a flair for topless stunts, attempted to attack the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, Patriarch Kirill as he arrived at Kiev’s airport on Thursday.Source: RN.

Saudi Driving Star Pays a High Personal Price, Saudi women their push to drive.

Saudi Driving Star Pays a High Personal Price, Saudi women their push to drive.(WENews).Saudi Arabia’s women on Sunday are bracing themselves for potential arrest as they defy a ban on driving in the ultra-conservative Gulf Kingdom. To mark the one-year anniversary of the Women2Drive campaign, Saudi women are expected to again take to the roads behind the wheel in protest against Riyadh’s continued refusal to grant women the right to drive a vehicle in the country.
On Wednesday, two founders of the movement, Manal al-Sharif, 33, and Najla Hariri, 45, posted an open letter with 600 signatories to King Abdullah, appealing once more for an end to the ban on women driving. The letter said: “Our initiative is not aimed at violating laws.” The petition asks for “the possibility for women to get a driving license in nearby countries and allowing them to start driving.” “Our initiative is not aimed at violating laws. We only want to enjoy the right to drive like all women over the world,” says the petition, signed by al-Sherif, who in 2011 launched an Internet campaign encouraging Saudi women to challenge the driving ban.
With her life torn apart by the events of the past year, it's not clear whether Manal al-Sharif will be able to keep leading the push by Saudi women to drive.
Al-Sharif posted Tuesday an open petition to King Abdullah to end the ban on women driving. "It is our hope that you take into consideration our campaign I Will Drive My Own Car to encourage women who have obtained driving licenses from neighboring countries to forgo their male drivers and start driving themselves when they need to." The soft plea is a far cry from the buoyant protests last year on June 17, when more than 100 Saudi women and their male supporters drove cars publicly. To continue her leadership on behalf of women's rights in Saudi Arabia, al-Sharif risks being jailed again and further death threats, she made clear during a recent interview here.
Last week, al-Sharif was unable to join four other Arab women in receiving a prestigious Vital Voices Leadership Award in Washington, D.C. Vital Voices was founded by U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and the former Secretary of State Madeline Albright in 1997, when Clinton was the first lady. "The main reason for not being there was for my family safety after receiving death threats from insane people," al-Sharif wrote in a Tweet using the event's hash tag. A year after she defied this nation's religious prohibition against women driving, al-Sharif is jobless, facing intense death threats and worried about going broke. Yet she is far from broken. 
"I always tell my mother," she recently wrote in her blog, "they might handcuff me and send me behind jail bars, but I will never accept them putting cuffs on my mind. They can break my bones mom, but they can never break my soul."
The nation's powerful Shura Council, a religious body, has publicized a study by a local university professor finding that allowing women to drive in Saudi Arabia would lead to higher rates of divorce, prostitution and drug abuse. The claims were reported widely by Saudi and international news media. Unbowed, al-Sharif filed a suit in November against the General Directorate of Traffic Police for not issuing her a driver's license.
A second female driver also sued four months later and the cases were referred to an unnamed special committee in the Ministry of Interior. Both suits were announced in February and the movement's name was changed to My Right to Dignity.
Al-Sharif became the center of international attention in May 2011 when she posted a video on YouTube of her driving a car in Saudi Arabia. The following month, she was a key organizer of a June 17 protest when more than 100 women and male supporters drove cars publicly. In January 2012 she was a featured speaker at a Cairo conference for Arabic women who had used social media tools to foment social uprisings. Some YouTube users have downloaded the original video from the Oslo Freedom Forum's YouTube channel and re-posted copies with misleading subtitles and commentary, portraying her as a traitor to Saudi Arabia and an enemy of Islam, Pedro Pizano of the Human Rights Foundation wrote on the Huffington Post June 6. Sheikh Abdul Aziz al-Tarifi recently issued a fatwa declaring al-Sharif a "hypocrite," Pizano wrote. Al-Sharif says she is now the target of a new onslaught of thousands of insults; online and in print news media. Some messages threaten sexual assault and death. She also sustained enormous financial punishment for going to Oslo.
Al-Sharif was invited by Tina Brown, editor of Newsweek-Daily Beast, to appear in March at a splashy annual New York conference, the Women in the World Summit. Her request for time off to accept the honor was one of the three denied. In April, Time magazine named her one of the 100 most influential people of 2012. "Saudi women will get their rights when they want, they just don't realize it yet," al-Sharif wrote in a June e-mail, amid the barrage of threats that dissuaded her from going to Washington, D.C., to receive her Vital Voices Leadership Award. "The movement is the first drop that starts the rain," she said, "but without more aware women who believe and are willing to pay the price, and without civil society organization to embrace this movement, the struggle will stay for long." Read the full story here.

Updated: Saudi women postpone driving protest.(AA).Saudi female activists who had been expected to brave a driving ban have postponed a planned day of action for Sunday following the death of Crown Prince Nayef bin Abdulaziz, a member of the group said. “The campaign has been postponed until Friday,” said Hind al-Zahid of the Women2Drive group that had urged women to get behind the wheel on Sunday for the first anniversary of a campaign that has seen several defiant women arrested.Read the full story here.