The constructive feminism of Manal Al Sharif and the destructive feminism of Femen topless activists

The story of Manal Al Sharif, a 32 years old Saudi woman  jailed 10 days for defying the driving ban in her country, is a perfect illustration of the extreme repression endured by Saudi women. Her act – being filmed while driving and uploading the video to promote the Women2Drive campaign – was courageous and thus inspired other women in the Kingdom to follow her example. She expressed in the video the wish that she would be only the beginning of the revolt of women like “the first drop is the beginning of the rain”.

She enhanced a movement that had repercussion far beyond Saudi Arabia: many feminist associations, many NGOs, many papers talked about the event and certainly contributed in the global awareness on the terrific situation of women rights in the Gulf. Meanwhile, Femen, a feminist association in Ukraine organized a solidarity protest protest in Kiev around the Saudi Embassy where several of the protestors showed up topless.

So what is the outcome of the Manal Al-Sharif case?

1. Manal Al Sharif encouraged women (and men!) in her country to stand for their rights. Several dozen of people follow now her example to break the unfair rules. She showed that Saudi  women are courageous enough to take themselves the initiative. What is interesting is that she cares more aboout driving than about, for example, wearing or not the veil: she wants to achieve men/women equality through equal rights to act (drive, express, vote, work, etc), not just through her appearance. Thus her contribution to women cause is positive.
2. Femen activists  exhibited their own bodies and contributed in nothing neither for Manal Al Sharif, neither for Saudi women, neither for Ukranian women. They finished doing exactly what sexists do: use women’s body as an object. What message did Femen send to the world? “We, women, we can’t do anything, we can’t draw attention unless we exhibit our breasts”. Thus, their contribution to women cause is negative.

The feminism of Manal Al Sharif is constructive because it breaks the prejudice about “women consisting only in an empty body”, while the feminism of topless Femen activists is destructive because it does nothing else than enforcing this prejudice. Manal Al-Sharif uses provocation as a tool to change the law, Femen use provocation for the sole purpose of having the feeling to exist. The sad thing is that certainly Femen wants to act to improve women’s rights: but just type “Femen” in a search engine, all you will find is hundreds of entries about the “topless protests”.

At the end of the day, Femen may be very active, the world associates Femen to nothing else than to naked women, while Manal Al Sharif  became a model for women not because of how she looks, but because of how she acts. And that makes a huge difference.

Mohammed Bouazizi would have turned 27 today

He was 26, graduated in computer science. He couldn’t find a job, so he was fruits and vegetables seller in the streets of Sidi Bouzid, a provincial little town of Tunisia. Mohammad Bouazizi didn’t immolate to protest against poverty or unemployment, but against that system that was denying him to exist by denying him the right to survive with dignity by his own very limited means. His last known words were directed to his mother, through facebook:

I am leaving mom, forgive me, Reproach is not helpful, i am lost in my way it is not in my hand, forgive me if disobeyed words of my mom, blame our times and do not blame me, i am going and not coming back, look i did not cry and tears did not fall from my eyes, Reproach is not helpful in time of Treachery in the land of people, i am sick and not in my mind all what happened, i am leaving and i am asking who leads the travel to forgive.

We have a word in arabic, “hogra“, which sense is difficult to translate. It means, roughly, this denial of the dignity of others, this denial of their right to live and to resist to oppression, this denial of their humanity by sweeping away their last chance to have the slightest control over their destiny. It is this generalized feeling of hogra of the authorities towards the people that united the citizens of Sdi Bouzid; where you reach that point where you understand that you have nothing to lose since everything including dignity has been taken from you, you become by befinition subversive by the very fact that you still try to exist. We know the chain reaction: from Mohammed Bouazizi to Sidi Bouzid, to the whole Tunisia, to Egypt and to other arab countries including Libya, Yemen, Bahrein, Syria.

It is relevant that what united people was not a human rights activist tortured by the regime, the massive and usual frauds of the “elections” or some Intelligence Agency treachery, but the suicide of the street vendor caused by the hogra. The popular icons have generally this ability to embody the whole contestation in one attitude. So was Bouazizi, so was also Rosa Parks, so were Tien An Men students. They sound like an allegory of the whole people struggle for justice and freedom and that is why they achieve to unite them to face the same enemy. The deep wish and dream of tyrannic regimes is to be able to create this unity of people for their own purposes, to direct it towards something external: some foreign menace, one specific minority (the Jews, the Gipsies, the migrants, etc), one specific ideology (communism, etc). But History shows that whatever, propaganda, censorship, mind formatting, there is always a way mind uses to access to freedom, and the free mind leads into resistance against oppression, sooner or later. In the end, the only viable existence for a system is to be fair.

Maybe the day where Mohammed Bouazizi would have turned 27 is a day each of us should use on thinking about what oppresses them, what treats them with hogra. And resist. Let it be with thoughts, words or acts, resistance is what is most widely spread all over the world, for it defines, after all, what is to be human: to be those who where given free will.