We #sayulyu: The Body Is Not Pornography. Being A Woman Is Not A Crime

2023 Author: Henry Pass | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-11-27 21:12

Photo: Musée d'Orsay

This text could have started quite differently. With a listing of all breasts, pubes and members in the history of world art. From a close-up of the statue of David. From the hashtag #vagina for the investigator. But it will start like this: I am a woman, and I have breasts. Buffers. Boobs. I have a vulva. Vagina. Pussy. I have an ass. I have hair - not only on my head. It's summer in Moscow now, I sit by the window and watch a hair that has escaped from the razor gleams on my ankle. I have 150 different scars on my skin. I have my period.

I have always been sure that this is normal. So normal that there is nothing to talk about - the sea is wet, the sky is overhead, women basically have it all. The hair on my leg was not a banner of protest, and my chest was never a manifesto.

But it turned out that my body is pornography. I live - therefore I distribute it. And for the distribution of pornography in Russia can be imprisoned for up to 6 years.

This is the exact term threatened by the activist and artist Yulia Tsvetkova, who was recently formally charged under an article on the distribution of pornography. What are we talking about? About a series of pictures in VK with smiling women, pictures are very simple - like from notebook fields. Almost all women have bare breasts, - two arcs, at each point, - some of them have stretch marks, some have gray strands, one lifted a leg and sits, not embarrassed by either a black triangle between the legs, or fused to the bridge of the eyebrows. Each picture has a caption: “Living women have body hair. And this is normal!”,“Living women have fat. And this is normal! - etc.