W hen a young woman bares her breasts in public to protest something—a breast-feed ban, cruelty to animals, spousal abuse—people get really angry. Some find it distasteful, others think it's sexually exploitative, and others are just against the idea of protesting in general. But the obvious trick is that everyone talks about it, so the protest works, and so the cycle continues. Ukrainian feminist activist group Femen made it their signature move back in The manifesto that opens their new self-titled book specifies: "Femen is an international movement of bold, topless activists whose bodies are covered with slogans and whose heads are crowned with flowers. So now that they've got your attention, what does Femen stand for? In the manifesto, they claim an objective of "total victory over patriarchy. Femen is a collaboration among the four founding members of the group and journalist Galia Ackerman. It opens with a meet-the-Beatles introduction to each of the four members with chapter titles like "Anna, the Instigator" and "Sasha, the Shy One" and continues with an account of Femen's major actions, in roughly chronological order.


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I do not normally agree with self-appointed media censor Ezekial Mutua, who gained notoriety recently for banning the film Rafiki because of its homosexual content, but I think we should not dismiss his claims that some Kenyan music videos are so crude and offensive that they should not be viewed by the public, especially the youth. Mutua says that videos showing explicit sexual acts promote immorality in society. As Christine Mungai argued in a recent article , Kenyan society is immoral at so many levels that confining immorality to sexuality obscures the many ills that bedevil the country. Let me explain why. I have stopped watching music videos of Kenyan, Congolese and black American hip hop and rap artists because I find them offensive to women. As a woman who has spent a lifetime fighting the notion that women should be judged by the size of their breasts or buttocks, I find the hypersexualisation of women and girls in many of these videos to be an assault on womanhood. In the majority of these music videos, the men are fully clothed; I have yet to see a man dangling his penis in front of the camera, yet women are expected not just to dangle but to wiggle their nude or semi-nude private parts. Many people believe that the anti-pornography movement denies men and women the right to freedom of expression and has prudish and out-dated views on sex and sexuality. They are not against women and men having sex; they are against the debasement of the sexual act and the degradation of women in most porn films.
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Chat with us in Facebook Messenger. Find out what's happening in the world as it unfolds. Story highlights Author Naomi Wolf says recent controversies reveal biased views toward women's bodies The Pussy Riot trial and Arab Spring protests showed women stripped of autonomy Women's bodies are battlegrounds used to wage culture wars, Wolf says It's scandalous when women take ownership of their own bodies, Wolf contends. It seems as if we are in a time of unprecedented struggle over the meaning of women's bodies and sexuality.
Things happen between surgery and treatment that alters a woman forever. That's just the sad fact. The thing is, most of what happened to me, my medical team had told me to anticipate. Chemotherapy and some anti-cancer drugs like Tamoxifen—which I was put on to prevent a recurrence—can trigger what they call Chemopause, or medically induced menopause.