Naked Protesters & Nude Activists

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:

From here: The woman (or “Tahrir girl” as she was called in the Egyptian media)

made headlines around local and international media after she was caught on video being brutally beaten by soldiers, who stripped open her dress, revealing her bra.

From Cryptome:

Naked Israeli women pose for a photograph in Tel Aviv, November 19, 2011, to show solidarity with Egyptian blogger Aliaa Magda Elmahdy, who put naked pictures of herself on the Internet, support free expression and protest against Islamic extremism. The banner reads: “Love With No Boundaries”.