I am not so sure this
has much to do with liberation so much as the natural outcome of social media
producing like-minded virtual clouds of young people in particular who are quite
willing to ignore social controls. In
the process, they put governments on notice that they do not control anything.
It also informs us that
the Arab spring is self-organizing underneath the overlay of the State. We have watched Egypt grind up the Muslim
brotherhood. Who knows just how long the
Iranian government can postpone real changes acceptable to the people
themselves? And to be quite fair, surely
China does not have long either to satisfy the people’s desire for political pluralism
and a visible say in all levels of governance.
Social media is
reengineering the whole political world that we live in. politicians must now understand that the
people will accept only honest effort and failure and not accept anything else.
Sexy spring: How group
sex will liberate Iran, China
SUNDAY,
JUL 28, 2013 04:00 AM PDT
It's
a neo-conservative nightmare: In Iran and China, Western sexual values are
bringing about real change
A
female guest at The Secession, a swingers club in Vienna. (Credit:
Reuters/Herwig Prammer)
When
Iranian American anthropologist Pardis Mahdavi first visited Tehran in the
summer of 2000, she expected to encounter the Iran she grew up imagining. Her
family remembered violence and extremism, and these were the images that stuck:
“women clad in black chadors, wailing and whipping themselves,” “black bearded
men with heavy hearts and souls,” arranged marriages, and the fierceness
of the “morality police.” But while she encountered this repressed side of
Iran, she also heard stories of and witnessed signs of what some friends and
informants called enghelab-e-jensi or enghelab-e-farangi, a
sexual or sociocultural revolution. Her interest in how an “insatiable hunger
for change, progress, cosmopolitanism, and modernity” was being linked to sex
by young Tehranians sparked the beginning of seven years of anthropological
study.
During
repeated visits, Mahdavi found that despite the strict moral policies of the
Islamic Republic, young Iranians were listening to music, dancing, drinking
alcohol, and socializing in new ways. Western dress and makeup were ubiquitous.
She attended parties where famous DJs played techno music, Absolut vodka and
Tanqueray gin were served, and female guests mingled with “western guys.”
Although house parties were common among the middle and upper-middle classes,
lower-class youth threw parties in abandoned warehouses or at secluded outdoor
locations, serving homemade liquor and playing music on “boom boxes” or car
stereos. Young Iranians also indulged in premarital and extramarital sexual
escapades. As a twenty-three-year-old man explained: “In Iran, all things
related to sex had a door, a closed one. Now we, this generation, are opening
them one by one. Masturbation? Open it. Teenage sexual feelings? Open that
door. Pregnancy outside of marriage? Open it. Now the youth are trying to
figure out what to do with all these opening doors.” Understandably, young
people experience confusion in the face of competing ideals and
desires—traditional expectations versus contemporary temptations—and the stakes
of personal decisions remain high. In 2004, despite nationwide attention to the
public execution of a seventeen-year-old girl suspected of having premarital
sex, Mahdavi nonetheless found many young women willing to lose their virginity
in order to participate in the changing sexual culture.
Like
youth in other countries who lack private spaces to retreat to, some Iranian
youth reported having sex at parties and in cars (which sometimes allowed them
to escape the morality police) out of necessity. But some also purposely sought
group sex. Shomal, in northern Iran, had a reputation as a popular destination
for these sexual explorations. One informant told Mahdavi that young men and
women “go there, deep in the jungle, and have lots of sex, with lots of people;
it’s really something to see. I love it.” Another young man said: “Have I ever
had group sex? Well, yes, with a few women at a time, but who hasn’t done that?
But I’ve watched really elaborate orgies too.” He had observed “a big group
orgy in Shomal,” after being convinced to attend by a girl he knew.
Although
Mahdavi did not visit Shomal, she attended other sex parties in Iran. One
evening, she accompanied her friend Babak to a party held in a huge garden with
beautiful hanging trees. “Welcome to the jungle,” a young man said as he
greeted her. After stripping off her Islamic dress, including her head
scarf and manto, she followed the men further into what felt like “the hanging
gardens of Babylon.” Babak squeezed her arm and whispered into her ear, “Take a
deep breath, Pardis.” As they walked closer to the swimming pool, she noticed
it had been drained of water. Voices drifted up from the bottom of the pool.
With surprise, she realized that “a full-blown orgy was taking place.” As Babak
took off his shirt and “started to wade into the group of young people,”
Mahdavi perched herself on the diving board, which seemed like a safe place to
observe: “I continued to watch as bodies moved from one trio to another. A
group of five men and women huddled together below me. I couldn’t tell who was
kissing whom, and I couldn’t see how much oral or penetrative sex was taking
place, but it seemed that most of the people were completely naked, and from
the movements I could see, it looked as though half were having some kind of
sex.”
Another
sex party Mahdavi attended was held at a garden estate outside of Tehran,
hosted by a young woman whose parents had gone on religious pilgrimage to
Mecca. Upon arrival at the property, she heard techno music coming from a
bathhouse. She followed her friends inside. When her eyes adjusted to the dim
lighting, she saw “forty or so young people present, all naked or in
undergarments, kissing, touching, dancing, and some having oral, anal, and
vaginal sex.” She watched groups of men and women “engaging in sexual acts with
both genders,” until she felt faint from the heat. She began searching for the
friends she had arrived with, who had disappeared into the steam. The young
woman was “kissing and being kissed by three men.” Mahdavi was unable to find
the man who’d driven them; later, she learned that he had been in a back room
procuring Ecstasy.
When
talking about their weekend adventures, some of Mahdavi’s informants focused on
the recreational aspect of the parties: “[There is] alcohol, there is sex,
there is dancing, there is—it’s just fun! It’s what we do for fun!” Others
viewed the parties as a representation of “all things Western,” a way of
gaining status and claiming a cosmopolitan identity; some also expressed ideas
about sex as freedom that harked back to ideas underlying the sexual revolution
in the United States. Still others claimed parties offered escape and “eased
the pain” of living in Iran. As one man said, “Sex is the main thing here; it’s
our drug, it’s what makes our lives bearable, that’s what makes parties so
necessary.” “If we don’t live like this, we cannot exist in the Islamic
Republic,” a woman declared. “We hate our government, despise our families, and
our husbands make us sick. If we don’t look fabulous, smile, laugh, and dance,
well then we might as well just go and die.”
But
the new sexual culture in Iran, Mahdavi believes, is not simply an embrace of
Western consumerism and morality nor merely an escapist hedonism, a “last
resort.” Urban young adults, the focus of Mahdavi’s inquiry, made up about two-thirds
of Iran’s population; they were mobile, highly educated, underemployed, and
dissatisfied with the political regime at the time. Some were directly
involved in politics. Many used the Internet to make connections, blog about
their frustrations, and peer into youth cultures elsewhere around the world.
Willingly taking risks with their social and sexual behavior, as these Iranian
young people were doing, was viewed as a step toward social and political
reform—not just a means of escape and excitement. After all, the consequences
of partying in Tehran were different from in Los Angeles, despite similarities
in flashy dress, electronic music, and group sex. Iranian youth had “restricted
access to social freedoms, education, and resources (such as contraceptives or
other harm-reduction materials)” that might minimize the risk of some of their
behaviors. If caught, the punishments many young people would receive from
their parents would likely be harsh. The punishments meted out by the morality
police could be harsher. If caught drinking, for example, youth could be
detained and sentenced to up to seventy lashes. Premarital sex could be
punished by imprisonment and lashings; unmarried men and women caught in a car
together could receive up to eighty-four lashings each. Although physical
punishment has decreased in recent years, Mahdavi notes, young people are still
detained and harassed by the morality police.
Yet
stories of being apprehended and arrested by the morality police were sometimes
told with pride; occasionally, even parents were pleased that their children
stood up for their beliefs. Some young adults courted run-ins with the morality
police in the name of activism, boredom, or both. One couple caught having sex
at a party were arrested and forced to marry. When Mahdavi talked with the
twenty-two-year old woman involved, the woman explained that she and her new
husband were trying to annul the marriage. Despite her ruined reputation,
however, the young woman mused that her experience was “almost worth it”: “The
sex was great, and the excitement and adventure of doing what we know we aren’t
supposed to be doing, then being caught! Well, and it makes a great story.”
Mahdavi’s
informants claimed that they were living the social and sexual
changes they desired, reminding her that their “revolution was not about
momentary acts” but was “a way of life.” This way of life included social
gatherings and behavior that “could be viewed as hedonistic” but were also “a
necessary part of constructing a world over which they had control, a world
they could live in rather than in the world of the Islamists, who would have
them stay home and obey.” As another young woman said before attending a sex
party:
It’s
all about laj bazi (playful rebellion). Here, when we go to parties, of course
our bones are shaking, but we go with shaking bones. And I’m telling you, we
are scared. Everyone is. No matter what they tell you, they are scared, from
the moment they leave their homes; and every time the doorbell rings, delet
mirize (your heart sinks). Could it be? You ask yourself. Could it be them?
It’s scary. But you know, we have to do something. Something to get back at
them, something to remind ourselves, Hey, we are alive! Hey, we have a say
in our lives!
But
although the social and sexual revolution in Iran has brought change,
especially in how young people express themselves, Mahdavi asks, if some of the
repression dissolved, “would young people still resist this way?”
Contemporary
sex partying is often thought to be linked to the spread of Western values and
practices even while taking on local forms and meanings. At times, even the
idea that group sex is a Western phenomenon becomes important to participants,
adding layers of meaning to the encounters as modern, fashionable, or evil.
After the Queen Boat scandal in Egypt in 2001, thirty-five members of the U.S.
Congress wrote to Hosni Mubarak to protest the treatment of the men, who were
tortured and subjected to examinations to determine whether they had had anal
sex. In response, the Egyptian newpaper Al-Ahram al-Arabi ran a headline that
translated as, “Be a pervert and Uncle Sam will approve.”
Some
sex partying is certainly related to processes of globalization, as citizens
from wealthy nations have the privilege of traveling to other locales to escape
restrictive laws or take advantage of cheap labor. Tourism is regularly
promoted as the answer to poor nations’ economic woes; beliefs about natives’
unrestrained sexuality in certain locales reinforce patterns of labor and leisure.
It is not surprising that Jamaica became home to the notorious Hedonism
resorts: “Unleash your wildest desires with open minds, open bars, and open
relationships.” Other well-known lifestyle resorts exist in Mexico and Spain;
lesser known, perhaps, are the resort in Pattaya, Thailand, or the swingers’
cruises offered off the coast of Turkey. Gay circuit parties have spread around
the globe; as these events can last for several days, many host cities find
them economically advantageous. The porn industry, similarly driven by the
desire for cheap labor and the erotics of otherness, has extended into Asia and
Eastern Europe (Warsaw, Poland, was the site of the Third Annual World Gangbang
Championship and Eroticon in 2004).
Sometimes,
sex partying draws on Western symbols, themes, or discourses regardless of
where it takes place. As I was finishing this manuscript, I had the opportunity
to talk with a Pakistani businessman at a rooftop bar in Los Angeles. We drank
mojitos while he told me about underground “key parties” in Pakistan. From what
he had heard secondhand, they sounded similar to the key parties of 1970s
American folklore—where couples supposedly deposited their car keys into a bowl
and each woman drew any set of keys except her own, leaving the party with the
man whose keys she selected. But in Pakistan, he told me, couples use hotel
keys; in the name of discretion, no one would actually go back to their own
homes or drive their own cars. Unfortunately, even though he provided a few
leads, I was unable to find participants willing to talk with me. Still,
the reappearance of the key party in such a context—whether rumor or
practice—is a fascinating example of cultural appropriation. The French
sociologist Michel Fize suggests that the interest in Skins shown by French
youth proves that they are casualties of pornography: “We’re living in a
pornocratic world where sex is everywhere, in thoughts, words, images, and
deeds. This is leading more and more young people into unconventional sexual
practices.” For some adolescents, though, the parties are described as a way of
expressing themselves and resisting authority, paying homage to the 1970s
United States in ethos as well as practice. As a Le Skins partygoer declared:
“We live in a society full of rules, control and conventions. Some people burn
cars to revolt but we don’t hurt anyone. We stand for eccentricity and free
love.”
But
sex parties aren’t just Western creations. Group sex has been
depicted in art and literature for centuries, and some of those portrayals are
celebratory. Some symbols and meanings loop back on each other—even portrayals
of orgies as “tribal” or “Roman” can’t easily be traced to a singular origin at
this point in history. Over the years I researched this book, I also heard tales
about secret group sex parties for men in the South Pacific and rental houses
in Dubrovnik serving as temporary, mobile sex clubs. Films about swinging in
Israel and India appeared. The electronic dance music scene, with its focus on
multiple sources of sensory intensity, has spread around the world. Three-day
events, club drugs, and sensation-seeking youth seem to beget after-parties and
group sex wherever they coalesce. Unfortunately, it remains difficult to find
participants from non-Western countries willing to talk about their
recreational experiences with group sex. Mahdavi’s scholarly account is a rare
find.
Baudrillard
claims we live in a post-orgy world. What he means is not that orgies no longer
occur but that the deep referential meanings they once had have been vacated,
beginning with the political events of the 1960s and accelerating as the global
spread of capitalist consumerism ensured that homogeneity and surface desires
would win over authentic difference and pleasure. “The myth of sexual liberation
is still alive and well,” he claims, but the state of ecstatic transcendence
once possible through transgression has become mere simulation, just another
form of pornography. We haven’t been liberated by our revolutions, sexual or
otherwise, but rather, the linear progression of history has concluded. There
is no longer any end game to believe in—no salvation, rapture, utopia, or
apocalypse. Postmodern culture has become based on an endless play of surface
signs, and meaning has sold out to capitalism: “Closing down, closing down!
It’s the end-of-the-century sale. Everything must go! Modernity is over
(without ever having happened), the orgy is over, the party is over—the sales
are starting. . . . But the sales don’t come after the festive seasons any
longer; nowadays the sales start first, they last the whole year long,
even the festivals themselves are on sale everywhere”
Baudrillard’s
reference to the orgy, then, recalls a lost world of possibility, mystery, and
even deep passion. Ma Yaohai, a fifty-three-year-old college professor from
Nanjing, China, was an accidental orgiast. After two divorces, he decided to
try meeting women online. He began dating a twenty-three-year-old woman who
used the screen name Passionate Fiery Phoenix and identified as a swinger. They
went to their first swinging party together on New Year’s Day in 2004. Although
Ma suffered from performance anxiety that time, he soon became accustomed
enough to group sex—his largest party was four couples—to begin offering advice
to others online. For the next two years, he also recruited participants online
for sex parties, using the screen name “bighornyfire” (or, depending on the
translation, “Roaring Virile Fire”). He organized eighteen orgies, some of
which were supposedly held in the apartment he shares with his Alzheimer’s
disease–stricken mother.
Ma’s
adventures took a sour turn in 2010 when he was charged with “group
licentiousness” under China’s Criminal Law 301. Twenty-one other participants
at his parties were also charged.60 “Group licentiousness” was originally a
subclause under “hooliganism,” which included all extramarital sexual behavior
and treated offenders harshly, potentially with the death penalty. In 1997, the
hooliganism statute was repealed in China, meaning that extramarital sex was no
longer illegal; “three or more people having sex,” however, remains a criminal
offense, as does being a “ringleader.”
In
early 2010, Ma Yaohai was sentenced to three and a half years in prison.
Debate
over Ma’s conviction was heated. One commentator, Ming Haoyue, insisted that
group sex is “decadent behavior” that challenges social morality and adversely
affects “the normal social order, thus hindering the pursuit of the majority of
people for good behaviors.” Haoyue further observed, “Chaotic, indulgent sexual
activities may fuel other evils.” A blogger charged Ma with inciting “social
chaos”: “You led a 22-person orgy. You have destroyed ethics and morality.”
Chinese sexologist and activist Li Yinhe protested the verdict in the media,
however, arguing that criminal laws against “group licentiousness,
prostitution, and obscene products (pornography),” all victimless sexual
crimes, were draconian remnants of the Cultural Revolution. Experts estimate
that fewer than one hundred thousand Chinese participate in group sex, although
a chat forum dedicated to swinging on the website “Happy Village” has more than
380,000 registered members. Citizens increasingly seek out porn, buy sex toys,
and visit brothels. Consensual sexual behavior between adults, Li Yinhe
maintained, is a “private matter.” Ma Yaohai agreed, although some believe his
sentence might have been lighter if he’d shown remorse instead of defending his
actions in the press: “Marriage is like water: you have to drink it. Swinging
is like a glass of fine wine: you can choose to drink it or not,” he stated.
“What we did, we did for our own happiness. People chose to do it of their own
free will and they knew they could stop at any time. We disturbed no one.”
In
August 2012, another sex scandal rocked China when “orgy” photos supposedly
featuring several high-ranking government officials were posted online. Couples
have been arrested, tortured, and imprisoned in Egypt and Iran for organizing
sex parties. Gay men have been arrested and sentenced to death for group sex
across the Middle East; at times, the accusation of orgy hosting is used as a
justification for police raids on homes and businesses.
Even
attempting to educate about or conduct research on sexual behavior can put an
individual at risk. Since Mahdavi’s ethnography was published in 2009, she has
received e-mail every week from around the world thanking her for writing
honestly about contemporary Iran. She has paid a high price for her work,
however. In addition to praise, she receives hate mail, faces hostile
audiences, and has been accused of everything from sexual impropriety to
falsifying her data by Iranian critics. More significantly, even though she
took extreme measures to conceal the identity of her informants and protect
them from government retaliation, she was unable to shield herself from
political scrutiny. Mahdavi is no longer allowed to visit Iran for either
personal or professional reasons. Still, she considers herself “one of the
lucky ones”; another scholar she knew was incarcerated and spent time in
solitary confinement for her research and political views.
Western
swingers don’t risk hard labor in prison, death by hanging, or exile. Perhaps
this is part of the reason swingers have a reputation for being fairly
politically conservative. Outside of radical utopian communities, early social
science literature on swinging in the United States found participants to hold
“general white suburban attitudes.” Modern American lifestylers are believed to
be more interested in staying under the radar and maintaining the status quo
than contesting it. One writer suggests, “The point of swinging is not to
challenge gender roles, nor to question heterosexuality. People in the
lifestyle enjoy being married or partnered and simply want to supplement their
sex life by including intimacies with other couples like themselves.” In 1999
and 2000, Bergstrand and Sinski revisited the issue with a survey of
approximately 1,100 self-identified swingers. By including questions taken from
the General Social Survey, or GSS, they could compare swingers with the general
population. As in previous studies, the majority of their respondents were in
their thirties and forties, primarily white and college educated. They placed a
high importance on marriage and marital satisfaction, valuing companionship
more highly than personal freedom, the same as the general population. But
swingers were also “more likely to favor gay marriage, less likely to condemn
premarital or teen sex (fourteen-to sixteen-year-olds), more likely to reject
traditional sex roles in their relationships,” and “were less racist, less
sexist, and less heterosexist than the general population.”
While
Western lifestylers may not currently be rallying around an identity or
political issue, there may be a time when they do, despite their relatively
privileged social positions. Bergstrand and Sinski note that there have been
fourteen legal cases challenging the closing of swingers’ clubs in the United
States, not counting clubs that closed because the owners didn’t have the
finances or ability to fight. Courts have consistently not found such
establishments to be protected under the First and Fourteenth Amendments, which
secure “constitutional rights to privacy, free speech or association.” Free
speech doesn’t protect “purely physical conduct that lacks any
corresponding expressive element,” and swingers’ clubs have been
considered public places. These decisions, Bergstrand and Sinski maintain, are
“part of an elaborate moral architecture of monogamy that has been constructed
by the Supreme Court over the past century and a half.” The stage has been set
for this particular vision of sexual, emotional, and practical monogamy to
affect legal decisions pertaining to sexuality, obscenity, and “a wide range of
behaviors having to do with how we view community, public and private spheres
of activity, and the construction of personal meaning in our lives.”
Highly
publicized busts of swing clubs have occurred in the United States and Canada,
and photos of “outed” couples have appeared in newspapers. Four of seven people
featured in the documentary Sex with Strangers lost their jobs when employers
learned of their practices. In 2010, a couple was fired from their jobs at a
theater in Spokane after being outed as swingers when an anonymous source sent
copies of e-mails they’d exchanged with couples on Craigslist. The couples from
Swing have been more insulated— if you’re going to openly deviate from
mainstream norms, it helps to run your own business (even more if it’s a
lifestyle website). Perhaps writing political slogans on your body before
visiting a swingers’ club would be a good idea, or maybe it’s easier to just
follow the trend toward private or temporary venues. Will there even be a need
for identity politics or a “community” if “sexy naked” parties are just part of
a regular weekend for many groups of young adults?
Sexual
practices have been linked to ideals of personal and social transformation in
societies throughout history. Sex, as play, can become a way of learning about
oneself and others. It can become a way of reimagining oneself. In certain
contexts, sexual practice can also become a way of reimagining the world,
sparking revolutionary hopes. As group sex involves relations of witnessing and
being witnessed, it is uniquely and powerfully positioned to serve such
purposes. Group sex is ripe as transgression and often promises
transcendence—although it does not always deliver either. Is congregating for
an orgy in a dry swimming pool, in a country where wearing open-toed shoes
might land one in jail (and a miniskirt might earn lashes with a whip) more
revolutionary than entering a “sexy buns” contest at a lifestyle event in Las
Vegas? Perhaps it depends on whether you work at a conservative banking firm
and your superiors are now asking for your resignation after seeing pictures on
Facebook—perhaps you’d take the whipping if you could keep your salary?
Participants in these events are obviously positioned differently in global
networks of privilege—social class, ethnicity, religion, gender, labor, and so
on. In terms of subjective feelings of jeopardy, however, there may be
something commensurable about their experiences, at least some of the time.
Just consider: If a twenty-two-person orgy can “destroy” the ethics and
morality of a country with a population of more than a billion, it’s
a powerful weapon of social change. Or, at least, it feels like one to
some people.
In
a political address on Iranian state television from 2005, the supreme leader
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei warned of the conceivable success of a “velvet”
revolution:
More
than Iran’s enemies need artillery, guns, and so forth, they need to spread
cultural values that lead to moral corruption . . . a senior official in an
important American political center said: ‘Instead of bombs, send them
miniskirts.’ He is right. If they arouse sexual desires in any given country,
if they spread unrestrained mixing of men and women, and if they lead youth to
behavior to which they are naturally inclined by instincts, there will no
longer be any need for artillery and guns against that nation.
Conservative
fears that desires for greater sexual freedom among a populace will beget
desires for other social changes are not completely unfounded. Mahdavi, for
example, traces the emergence of Iran’s Green Revolution of 2009 to the social
and sexual changes she witnessed during her fieldwork. Youth who had begun
rebelling by sneaking out of their homes wearing makeup, listening to illegal
music, and throwing sex parties eventually became more explicitly critical of
repression. They began organizing and actively challenging their leaders. The
Green Revolution erupted after the election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, with
protestors literally taking to the streets. Sexual experimentation alone,
Mahdavi cautions, does not automatically transform society. But the
disenchantment that had been building in Iran, along with the fact that people
had begun stealing moments of freedom and pleasure, created changes in their thoughts
and actions—not just around sex, but toward everyday life more
generally—that did spread to the political realm.
The
Arab Spring—a wave of political demonstrations spreading over the Arab world—
officially began on December 18, 2010, the day that a twenty- six-year-old
Tunisian street vendor named Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire in front of
the governor’s office in Sidi Bouzid to protest mistreatment and corruption.
Bouazizi’s action sparked other protests throughout the country; news of the situation
spread rapidly around the world through reports on Facebook and other websites.
Although police attempted to squash the demonstrations, unrest grew. Within
weeks, the Tunisian president fled the country after twenty-three years in
office. Protests and uprisings have since followed in other nations, including
Egypt, Libya, Syria, Morocco, and Yemen. Each of these political movements is
unique, with its own history and complexities, and the outcomes have varied.
Scholars see common threads across the uprisings, though, such as slow
escalations of discontent, marginalized youth, and the multifaceted use of
social media sites and the Internet. Beyond kindling new visions and desires,
the Internet allows for rapid information flows and international connections
never before possible. A 2011 study found that nine out of ten Egyptians and
Tunisians reported using Facebook to organize protests or disseminate
information during recent political struggles. Whether increasing openness
about sexuality is best seen a precursor to the Arab Spring or a consequence of
the ensuing regime changes is debated, but sexuality is linked to visions of
change put forth on both sides of the struggles.
In
November 2011, a twenty-year-old Egyptian woman, Aliaa al-Mahdy (or Elmahdy),
posted a nude photo of herself on Facebook. After Facebook removed the image,
she allowed a friend to repost it on Twitter, using the hashtag
#nudephotorevolutionary.
Al-Mahdy
took the photo at her parents’ home, using a self-timer on her camera. The image
is black and white, although her flat shoes and the flower in her hair are red.
Except for black thigh-high stockings and the flats, she is naked. There is no
arched back, centerfold makeup, or pursed lips; she looks straight into the
camera without smiling. Whether her gaze is interpreted as innocent or defiant
depends on one’s perspective; she does not, however, appear ashamed.
The
photo, she claims, was taken and posted online to protest sexual
discrimination, harassment, and inequality.
Since
then, the young activist and blogger has been called deviant, mentally ill, and
destructive; even liberal groups have distanced themselves from al-Mahdy and
her boyfriend, another controversial blogger, out of fear that she damaged
their cause by going too far. Despite receiving death threats and being accused
of prostitution, al-Mahdy has vowed to remain in Egypt. In an interview with
CNN, she stated, “I am a believer of every word I say and I am willing to live
in danger under the many threats I receive in order to obtain the real freedom
all Egyptians are fighting and dying for daily.”
For
International Women’s Day in 2012, feminist activists posed nude for a calendar
in honor of Elmahdy, titled Nude Photo Revolutionaries. “Free thought in a free
body,” one of the captions reads. “Our naked body is our challenge to
patriarchy, dictatorship, and violence. Smart people we inspire, dictators are
horrified. Women all over the world—come, undress, win,” reads another. Critics
see the calendar and al-Mahdy’s approach as subjecting women to even more
objectification. Supporters claim the issue is about freedom of expression and
that “nudity is the antithesis of veiling”—“when a tool of oppression can be
turned into an assertion of power, it is a beautiful thing.”
Because
it involves the use of the body, nudity has been compared to self-immolation
and hunger strikes. The revolutionary impact of nudity, sex, and transgression
can be quite a slippery matter, however.
Instead
of finishing her final year at Moscow State University studying philosophy,
twenty-three-year-old Nadezhda Tolokonnikova will potentially spend the next
two years in prison. In February 2012, the punk-rock activist group Pussy Riot
staged a performance at the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in Moscow. Donning
colorful dresses, mismatched tights, and balaclavas— woven facemasks that are
practical in Russia because of the cold but that also work well for guerrilla
activists—a group of women stormed the stage near the altar. First they bowed
as if in prayer and then began singing and dancing, “air karate” style. Their
performance was brief, as security guards escorted them outside shortly after
they appealed to the Virgin Mary to take up fem nism and oust Prime Minister
Vladimir Putin. No one was actually arrested until after a video of the
performance appeared on YouTube, titled “Punk Prayer—Mother of God, Chase Putin
Away.”
Were
the women’s actions art? Crime? Political speech?
Tolokonnikova
and two other known members of Pussy Riot, Yekaterina Samutsevich and Maria
Alyokhina, were charged with hooliganism—“deliberate behavior that violates
public order and expresses explicit disrespect toward society.” The other
members fled into hiding. The trial began in July 2012. Pussy Riot defended
their performance as dissident art and political action, while Putin compared
it to a “witches Sabbath.” Witnesses called by the prosecution accused the
women of “sacrilege and ‘devilish dances’” in the church. In August 2012, the
women were found guilty of “hooliganism motivated by religious hatred,”
believed to stem from their feminist beliefs, and sentenced to two years in
prison.
Although
there was no sex or nudity in “Punk Prayer”—blasphemy was enough—Tolokonnikova
already had an activist history. In February 2008, as part of another radical
group called Voina, Tolokonnikova participated in an orgy at the Timiriazev
State Biology Museum in Moscow that was photographed and filmed. The orgy, held
to protest the “farcical and pornographic” election of Dmitry Medvedev, was called
“Fuck for the Heir Puppy Bear!” The root of Medvedev means “bear” in Russian.
Blogger and Voina member Alexei Plutser-Sarno claimed that the orgy denoted how
“in Russia everyone fucks each other and the little president looks at it with
delight.” In the video, available online, participants quickly undress near a
taxidermic bear. Four couples, including Tolokonnikova, visibly pregnant and on
her knees with her underwear pulled down, begin having sex doggie style. A
fifth couple has oral sex. Several of the men appear to have performance
issues—not surprising, as group sex is intimidating enough without visions of
Siberian labor camp flashing before one’s eyes. In the background, a bearded
Plutser-Sarno in a tuxedo and top hat holds a banner reading “fuck for the
heir-bear.” Tolokonnikova gave birth just a few days after the orgy, a detail
rarely left out of Western media reports.
In
a 2010 Voina performance, “Dick Captured by KGB,” the artists painted a
sixty-five-meter long, twenty-seven-meter wide outline of a penis on a
drawbridge in St. Petersburg. When the bridge was raised, the
penis appeared erect. The bridge, incidentally, led to the headquarters of
the Federal Security Service (FSB), the successor to the KGB and the agency
that sent twenty-five to thirty “men in suits with guns” to arrest
Tolokonnikova and her husband after Pussy Riot’s “Punk Prayer” hit the
Internet.
The
Pussy Riot trial attracted international attention as a case about government
infringement on freedom of expression and the suppression of political speech.
Protests were held in numerous countries, and musicians such as Madonna, Sting,
the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and Paul McCartney offered public support. British
and American officials claimed the sentences were “disproportionate” and urged
the Russian government to reconsider. Within Russia, though, polls suggested
far less support for the band members, whose actions were seen as hateful,
disgusting, shocking, and without political merit. Ironically, Medvedev—the
namesake of the 2008 museum orgy—called for the women’s release in
mid-September, possibly in response to international pressure. In October 2012,
Yekaterina Samutsevich’s sentence was suspended because she had been prevented
from actually dancing on the altar by a security guard, but Tolokonnikova and
Alyokhina were sent to labor camps. On November 1, 2012, Medvedev again
suggested the women should be freed.
Some
bloggers claimed that the focus in the Western media on defending the women’s
right to “freedom of expression” was a self-serving contortion of Pussy Riot’s
message, which is more radical than most Americans or British would swallow if
they truly understood it: the need to overthrow “patriarchal” society,
“including capitalism, religion, moral norms, inequality of all forms, and the
corporate state system.” The women in Pussy Riot, one writer argues, have “more
in common with insurrectionary anarchists than with the bland pop-culture
‘icons’ who so vocally support them.” On the cartoon show South Park, Jesus
appears to a community wearing a “Free Pussy Riot” T-shirt under his robe; the
episode critiques American tendencies to jump on a popular bandwagon without
excavating the entire issue.
In
terms of accumulating American supporters, Tolokonnikova is probably lucky that
she landed in jail for challenging the intermingling of church and state with
Pussy Riot rather than for her Voina museum capers. Although “Punk Prayer” and
“Fuck for the Heir Puppy Bear” might indeed be protected speech in the United
States, performers could still have initially faced arrest and charges for
trespassing or lewd conduct. When Al Gore lost the presidency to George W. Bush
despite winning the popular vote, his supporters protested, but a staged and
videotaped orgy in the United States Botanic Gardens in Washington, D.C.,
probably wouldn’t have gone over so well. Freemuse.org tracks the torture and
imprisonment of artists in countries around the world. Few gain an
international spotlight like Pussy Riot did, and doing so has as much to do with
the political moment and the message being delivered as with people’s
commitment to abstract concepts such as “freedom.” Certainly, it helped that
these women were pretty, had young children, and had chosen a band name like
“Pussy Riot.” Who doesn’t want to talk about “Pussy Riot” while waiting in line
at Starbucks? Suddenly, people who’d never even said the word “pussy” could
toss it out brazenly in public. But more importantly, it is far easier to
defend transgression when it isn’t your cherished beliefs being transgressed.
The performance in the cathedral wasn’t emotionally upsetting to Americans or
Brits who already believe in— or at least give lip service to—the separation of
church and state. The message of “Punk Prayer” made sense, even if the singing
was dreadful. And if evidence was sought that Russia hasn’t really become a
free, democratic nation after all, the government’s defensive response to “Punk
Prayer” served as a timely example.
Excerpted
from “Plays
Well In Groups: A Journey Through The World Of Group Sex” by Katherine
Frank. Published by Rowman & Littlefield. Copyright 2013 by Katherine
Frank. Reprinted with permission of the publisher. All rights reserved.
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