Protesting Nudity

Three protests with nudity have received ample coverage in the Brazilian press over the last week. It's high summer, and also the start of the college year, which may be partly responsible.

• Sunday of last week in Ibirapuera Park in the center of São Paulo, South America's largest city, thirteen people preaching "peace and love" took off their clothes in support of the right to non-sexual nudity. The police received no complaints, and photos in the media received thousands of "likes" and hundreds of comments. 
• This Friday in the city center, a group of university students held a maracatu - an African-based drum and dance celebration - including shirtless members of both sexes. 
• In the upstate city of São Carlos, a freshman initiation ceremony to pick "Miss Freshman" attracted a protest by feminists, and a counter-protest by upperclassman, who took off their pants and simulated sex with an inflatable doll. 

Sunday in the park: escaping the naturist ghetto

Nudity has in recent years been embraced by anyone who can stretch it to fit their cause, and there have been some notable stretches. PETA tries to show that people are just another kind of animal, with "I'd rather go bare than wear fur" campaigns, and the bodies of attractive young people marked as cuts of meat with dotted black lines, and splashed with blood. The WNBR-World Naked Bike Ride says that bicyclists "feel naked in traffic", and in the part of the world a play on words is used - "Pedalada pelada" is a straight-forward if tongue-twisting way to say "naked bike ride". And FEMEN appears to protest anything and everything - the press account's I've read often don't go beyond the bare breasts.

Using nudity to draw attention to an unrelated protest, is a different matter than using nudity, in favor of nudity itself. The event in the park was in organizer Alfredo's words, to promote greater tolerance, "I think there should no longer be specific, restricted areas for naturism, as if they were cages, or jails." Naturism outside of naturist ghettos was the message of Alfredo's protest - and the means employed.

Rio + 20 protest - Pedro Kirilos/Agência O Globo

A very important aspect of the Ibirapuera event is that the organizers carefully secured permission from the park administration, the police, and the courts. That's something the WNBR has never done, and police repression has inhibited or prevented full nudity. Another significant point is that the 1988  Brazilian Constitution provided that all can meet peacefully, without arms, in places open to the public, no prior authorization being needed, so long as they don't interfere with another meeting previously convoked for the same location. We'll get back to that last.

The Coro de Carcarás group's description of their event in Facebook was as "a ritual-procession of liberation and consecration of the forces of life in the very center of São Paulo. An act of intervention in this sleeping reality. Devouring all fears and all taboos". The Folha de S.Paulo in a small text alongside a five-column photo said the event had "the climate of an out-of-season Carnaval", and bare breasts don't qualify as indecent exposure.

During the Rio+20 event in Rio de Janeiro last June, there were some nude protests. The Folha printed full-frontal photos; the message written across the bare bodies of three protestors was however illegible. As with FEMEN, the message was overwhelmed by the use of nudity to convey it

Protest in São Carlos

At first glance, the São Carlos event appears be different from the others, vulgar and intentionally offensive. The Folha's article starts, "A nude young man simulating masturbation, another exhibiting himself with his penis hanging out of his pants, and yet another pretending to have sexual relations with an inflatable doll." Illustrated with a pixelated photos of Young Man #1. Other news media include partial pictures of a pamphlet, "50 Strokes of a Belt".

Shocking, saddening, etc. But the actual situation is a bit more nuanced.

Event, protest, counter-protest

The young men's nudity was not a random aggression of mores and maidens, but a counter-counter-protest. Let's regress to the first event.

• "Miss Bixete", or "Miss Frosh", is a "beauty contest" for freshman girls at the São Carlos campus of the University of São Paulo. They are urged to climb up on a stage, and "show their bodies in a parade", the audience calling on them to flash their breasts. It's a thirty-year tradition, and takes place at the student union building, called CAASO. The student union leaders have in recent years opposed "Miss Bixete".
• The protest by the "Feminist Front of São Carlos" took place in front of CAASO, as "Miss Bixete" was taking place. The CAASO doors were open - São Carlos is even hotter than São Paulo, and air conditioning is far rarer in Brazil than in the United States, especially in such places as student associations with limited budgets. The protest included a "batucada", that is, playing drums and other percussion instruments. Signs and banners at the protest included one saying, "We are not inflatable dolls!"
• The counter-protest spilled out the open doors of CAASP, and spilled beer, as shown in a video posted online by one of the feminists. It did include an inflatable doll, with which one of the counter-protestors, dressed in a Spiderman costume, simulated intercourse. Photos show that one counter-protester removed his pants, climbed on a bench, and danced. The video doesn't show that, but it does show other counter-protestors swaying to the beat of the batucada. Other supposedly pulled out his penis, but since both he and his trousers are black and the photo is pixelated, we just have the protestors' word for this.

What is violence?

Is drowming out someone else's speech "nonviolent"?

The protestors primly declared,  "The demonstration was peaceful and included percussion instruments, music, banners with slogans and pamphlets."  Peaceful and non-violent? Bullshit. They came not to protest but to interfere with a previously announced event, which they did with noise. Closing the doors of a packed CAASP in tropical heat was not an option, and in any event since Brazilian doors rarely need to seal off the escape of heat, they're not effective sound barriers, either.

A couple of weeks ago a Cuban blogger, who on her 20th attempt had received permission to leave that island, was shouted down at a number of events in Brazil by young Communists with old Stalinist attitudes. Was their shouting to silence an anti-totalitarian voice, "non-violent"? Was the "batucada" during the Miss Bixete contest, any less violent? Does violence against sexual liberty, differ from violence against political liberty?

Perhaps the feminists should explain that "noise is nonviolent" to anyone who lives next to a bar that plays country music till 3:00 AM on weekends, or to anyone whose neighbor has a barking dog.

Prisoners of rhetoric

Brazilian feminists, like their North American sisters, and often prisoners of rhetoric. Some years ago Harvard students took advantage of a heavy snowfall to during several hours construct a large snow penis. "Feminists" saw it, thought it "offensive", and took a couple of minutes to knock it down. They later claimed to the press that they had "dismounted" it.

Dancing to the protestors' beat

If the feminists were truly offended by a snow penis in Harvard Yard (and one sometimes has the impression that some feminists are offended by any penis, in any situation) there were a number of responses they could have made. Perhaps a snow vagina would have conveyed only an equivocal message, but .. trash bags to make a large condom? A large pair of cardboard shears? An almost-to-scale ruler, showing the large snow sculpture to represent 3"? There are a number of possibilities, but they all require creativity and effort and some time in the cold, which the male students invested, and the feminists did not. They used violence to silence a message they disagreed with. Breaking someone else's work is still breaking someone else's work, and the rhetoric of calling it "dismounting" doesn't change that.

Participation in the Miss Bixete event is voluntary - no girl is required to get up on stage, nor to remove her shirt if she does so. The feminists complain that women who may not want to participate do so for fear they will be considered "stuck-up" during the rest of the year. Somehow, though, I find the idea that events should be banned so that non-participants don't feel bad for not participating, unconvincing. I always thought voluntary activities were up to the participants, and that non-participants had the option of staying away, not the right of veto.

There is a distinction between a voluntary, public, nonviolent, and non-hazardous activity, and hazing freshman. About a decade ago a pre-med drowned in a swimming pool during freshman hazing in São Carlos, and they have been careful since. But nothing at Miss Bixete offered any physical hazard, though had they closed the doors in a futile effort to escape the batucada,  heat stroke could have been a possibility.

Your too-friendly neighborhood Spiderman?

Not their party?

One of the named feminist protestors was Airton Ferreira Moreira Júnior, identified as a professor. A look at his resumé shows that he's a professor not at USP São Carlos, but at another university in the same city, the Federal University of São Carlos. While USP's São Carlos campus specializes in engineering, chemistry, physics and mathematics, Ferreira Moreira's highest academic distinction is a master's degree in sociology.

The organizer of the protest is the "São Carlos Feminist Front", which doesn't seem to be the "University of São Paulo-São Carlos" Feminist Front. They came to impede someone else's party.

Alternative protests

The "Feminist Front of São Carlos" could have with a bit of creativity and humor come up with far better protests. They could have held "Mr. Bixão", either grading the candidates on the same "degrading" bases as the misses are grades, or by the more noble standard they propose, ideas. Well done, either would be effective and funny - though perhaps asking feminists to produce, or even to recognize, humor is akin to asking them to fly over the moon.

Cloth banners and paper dolls

The Inflatable Woman

The counter-protesters brought an inflatable woman. Offensive? Photos of the event show that the feminists had a banner saying, "We are women, not inflatable dolls, we have ideas, we are not manipulated", and along with it, a cardboard model of an inflatable doll. It was the feminists who introduced the idea of inflatable dolls to the event. Is a paper doll less offensive than a vinyl one? Or merely less expensive?

As to the young man who simulated introducing himself into the inflatable doll, well, "Make love not war" conveys the same message, though with words rather than actions, and is clearly protected speech - indeed, it's almost traditional.

"Fifty Strokes with a Belt"

Another of the feminists' objections was to a pamphlet distributed by some of the USP students, claiming it supports physical violence against women. The title "Cinquenta golpes de cinta" is an obvious reference to "Cinquenta tons de cinza", the Portuguese translation of "Fifty shades of gray", and where the local edition describes the real book as a New York Times best seller, the parody has : "The cure for the hot pants of these women who aren't getting any - The New York Times."

Offensive? Certainly, and so was "A Modest Proposal". But to say the students are proposing beating women in like saying Dean Swift was seriously proposing eating Irish children.

Converging on "Slutwalk"

Interestingly, both the park event in which women were nude in public, and the protest in São Carlos which objected to women being denuded, point to "Slutwalk" as kindred in spirit to what they were attempting. The Feminist Front's manifesto said:

"We repeat that the Slutwalk's objective in displaying the body is totally contrary to that of Miss Bixete. In Miss Bixete, the bodies are displayed to satisfy the desire of a specific gender. And not just any bodies, they are bodies chosen according to the reigning standard of beauty. In the Slutwalk, we display our bodies to protest against this oppressive standard. We display our bodies, whether they are white, black, thin, fat, perfect or imperfect. We display our bodies not for the pleasure of others, but to affirm our freedom of choice."

We have here, I think, not an argument about liberty, but an argument about control. The Feminist Front wishes to replace the male chauvinist rules for the display of women's bodies, with their own female chauvinist rules for the display of women's bodies.

The event in Ibirapuera sought to free nudity from naturist ghettos, making nudity acceptable, unremarkable and insignificant. The Feminist Front sees women's bodies as a battleground, and wants to win the battle.

The right of free expression

The "Feminist Front of São Carlos" crossed a line - a Constitutional line, even - when they decided on disruptive noise as their tactic. They could have protested quietly, or they could have picked another time, or another place. They purposely provoked college students who they knew would be drinking, and when they provoked incivility, used it to claim that the reaction to the disruptive protest just confirms that the e original event was "disrespectful and violent."

It was the Feminist Front's demonstration that was "disrespectful and violent". The Ibirapuera protestors were told it was fine to take their pants off, but not to disrupt a previously scheduled event. The feminists chose to disrupt with noise, a previously scheduled event. Both  English idiom and American law recognize the concept of "fighting words": provocation that invites a reaction, and a reaction that is justified by provocation.

The feminists provoked, they got a reaction: they brought a paper inflatable doll, the counter-protesters brought a vinyl one, which they used to act out what the feminists implied. The response is direct and not out of proportion. The feminists played music in a public place, and how can the object if someone chooses to dance to it?

Certainly the men displayed a lack of class - and the women displayed a lack of humor. Between the two groups, I for one prefer the company of those who have humor.