What's new, Pussy Riot?

 
There's more than meets the (public) eye, it appears.

In 2007 I wrote about the social and political, pervasive and persistent, institutional oppression of women in Russia. The change in regime, from diluted Stalinist communism to criminal corporative and oligarchy-driven capitalism has not improved the living circumstances of women. It's the same-old same-old patriarchy, in a different guise.






It would seem gynophobia rules within organizations pledged to denouncing Putin's neo-totalitarianism. For example, Voina that spawned Pussy Riot.

This French abolitionist feminist organization is very critical of les rapports de force between the male and female artists that founded Voina. It deconstructs and savages its protest performances.

You can measure the degree of feminism of an action by how men react to it, and if men collectively cheer and celebrate it, then you can be pretty sure there’s something wrong about it, or that it doesn’t somehow support our liberation from men. And as far as I can recall, even the slutwalks didn’t get as much coverage or public appraisal. What was it that men liked so much about Pussy Riot?


Well, under closer inspection I discovered that the high level of coverage was related to – though indirectly – promoting men’s right to women’s sexual subordination and the pornification of our movement. The arrested women actually form part (and are victims of) a mixed anarchist group called “Voina” (meaning “war”), founded in 2007 by two men called Oleg Vorotnikov and Leonid Nikolaïev, who regularly engage the women in extreme and degrading women-hating pornography as part of their public “political stunts”. Some of Voina’s men have actually already been incarcerated in 2011 for hooliganism – which is punished for 7 years of prison in Russia, but their bail was paid for by an artist named “Banksy” four months after their imprisonment. (More information can be found here and here)

Included in their anti-government actions are a “public orgy” in the national museum of biology in a room full of stuffed bears, where several men anally penetrated their female partners in a position of submission, including one heavily pregnant women, as a metaphor to “bugger/fuck Medvedev”. “Medved” means “bear”, hence all the stuffed bears – this was meant to be symbolic, artistic and revolutionary according to the activists. Here the male anarchists literally used women as dead bodies or receptacles through which to make a political point to other men. Violating women as a means to offend other men is nothing else but an age-old patriarchal mechanism – behind which the intended target are us, for men to bond over our annihilation.

Another planned stunt in the name of “sexual freedom”, inspired by extreme forms of pornography such as zoophilia/ necrophilia, includes a member of Pussy Riot masturbating with a dead chicken in a supermarket under the watch and camera of the anarchist males, after which she inserts the dead chicken entirely into her vagina and hobbles with the chicken inside her out of the supermarket.

More about Voina, and its high-profile, confrontational media events from Libération (google translation provided).

Isn't it tediously predictable that the female members of Voina would be assigned submissive roles?

Think how much more visually transgressive the anti-Medvedev event would have been, had Voina women, equiped with strap-on godemichets, sodomized its men. A MASSIVE role reversal and gender fuck for misogynists. Signify THAT!

Unlikely it would happen though. It's evident that the weeny-waggers in Voina are controlling, macho chauvinists. They're unwilling to abandon their sexual fetishization of women - purportedly their equals - and their position of phallic privilege, particularly in their deliberate choice of agonic-imbued actions fuelling their campaign of provocations aimed at Putin and his male-dominated bureaucracy.

DJ! earlier posts about Pussy Riot, here and here. Perhaps the event staged in the Moscow cathedral was not only directed at Putin and Kirill, but also a statement of feminist revolt and revulsion against the Voina misogynists. I would hope so.