News

Amina Tyler’s naked activism

Amina Tyler
Amina Tyler

Here’s the story of Amina Tyler, a 19-year- young woman who has brewed a storm of controversy in Tunisia. Tyler around 10 days ago posted two photos of herself topless on Facebook. The first image showed Amina with the words “F*** your morals” written across her chest. The second has the words “My body belongs to me and is not the source of anyone’s honor” written in Arabic.

Apparently, she told a Tunisian newspaper that she posted these pictures to make the voice of Tunisian women heard and stand up against oppression.

Tyler became the founder of the feminist movement FEMEN in Tunisia in February. FEMEN is a well-known activist group popular, as some readers will know, for protesting against Putin and former playboy Prime Minister Berlusconi. Amina has officially carried this movement to the Middle East.

Women played a huge part in rallying alongside their fellow male citizens to bring down the dictators ruling their nations. The main political beneficiary of this change, as we are seeing, is the rise of Islamic movements. Many are now saying that as a result of this trend the rights of women are under threat.

Rumors circulated around the web that Amina disappeared and was placed in a mental institute. A lawyer representing Tyler’s family then denied these rumors. Amina is apparently safe and back at home.

Millions of women around the Arab World are all supporters (if not participants) of protests for gender equality, especially in a countries like Tunisia where technically speaking the government in the 1950s stipulated equality of sexes. Discrimination still exists obviously, and protests that denounce an article in the draft Tunisian constitution that describes women as being complementary to men are ongoing.

The question is though, should posing completely naked and posting the picture to the general public be the way to go about any gender-equality protest? Amina evidently has a lot to say and women will stand stand by the idea that she has, but most Arab women will not agree with her methods. If she is against objectifying women posing naked is definitely NOT the right way to convey that message. This is especially true in nations where Islamic movements are gaining traction. Such acts will only become fuel to their fire. Protests that will be productive are those that encourage a moderate Islam that supports gender equality.

There is much to be done in the realm of gender equality for the entire region, but are methods like those of Amina’s the way to go?

51 Comments
Most Voted
Newest Oldest
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments

this smells like western agitprop, just like the farcical ‘pussy riot’. i mean who else could come up with this sh*t except for some semiotics major from Harvard now working for one or another ‘pro-democracy’ NGO, who hopes someday to write for ‘everyone loves raymond’, and who can only conceive of ‘feminism’ as a woman’s right to take back the property that is her body. (naturally, there will be a commercial imperative for these women to sell their liberated bodies, or at least rent them.)

This must be a surprise to neocons cum feminists-that there can be an indiginous feminist protest in a Moslem country without the assistance of an invasion, drone attacks, occupation, blockade, etc. from Western super powers.

These femen protests can so easily be used to provoke international tensions.

Those Russian activists were grotesquely obscene. If those acts were performed in a church in say Dallas Texas no one in the US would be surprised to see them sentenced to 18 months in jail. However, in England and the US a chorus of complaints were launched against the Putin government for violations of freedom of speech. This whole episode was one of pure provocation and the anti-Russian forces inside the West exploited as much as they could.

I see the Tyler gal playing the same role. Pure provocation designed to incite what we all know is a deeply conservative culture where some elements will be predictably respond. Then we will be deluged with anti-Muslim propaganda for a few weeks and if it hits the right chords, then maybe even another war in the ME.

Here is how the femen.org page, titled “Titslamism: free Amina! describes the struggle:

Amina’s act of civil disobedience has brought down upon her the lethal hatred of islamists inhuman beasts for whom killing a woman is more natural than recognizing her right to do as she pleases with her own body. For them, we now see, the love of freedom is the most dangerous kind of psychiatric illness, one demanding radical forced treatment in the spirit of fascist punitive medicine. The “Arab Spring,” for the women of North Africa, has turned out to be a frigid sharia winter … Stoning and flogging, kidnapping and rape, forced psychiatric treatment and other sorts of physical and psychological torture are what the new Sharia Caliphate has in store for women.

Now this was written by someone from the West schooled in Islamophobia.