July 24, 2018

"Oksana Shachko, one of the founders of the Femen feminist protest movement, has been found dead in her Paris apartment, the group has said."

"The 31-year-old Ukrainian was found on Monday with a suicide note next to her body, according to Femen activists," The Guardian reports.
Operating under the slogan “I came, I stripped, I won”, Femen quickly drew attention around the world with its bare-breasted demonstrations against sexism. Their protests also challenged authoritarianism and racism, with the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, a particular target, along with France’s far-right Front National party....

In 2011, Femen said Shachko was among three members “kidnapped” by security agents and forced to strip naked in a forest after staging a topless protest mocking the Belarussian president, Alexander Lukashenko. The agents poured oil over the three women, threatened to set them on fire, and cut off their hair, Femen said. Shachko was abducted again by unknown assailants during a visit by Putin to Ukraine, according to the group....
I found this video that went up in 2011. It celebrates Shachko (and nudity is blurred out):

56 comments:

Earnest Prole said...

Topless protests are the best protests, provided weight to height is reasonably proportionate.

Michael K said...

Crazy is all stocked up.

n.n said...

Equal in rights and complementary in Nature.

That said, discover your dignity. You are more than the sum of your colorful parts, organs, and cells.

tim maguire said...

I never really got the fascination with "shocking" through nude protest. Maybe the first couple times, but it's played out now. Trite and boring.

At least she was protesting something real, not like the idiots we have to put up with here. Too bad she gave up. Assuming, of course, that the signature was hers.

holdfast said...

Relatively attractive women flashing their boobs is not actually a protest that is going to intimidate or depress the average heterosexual male.

Full points for effort, but I feel like they never really thought this through.

Ingachuck'stoothlessARM said...

are bare breasts, like art, supposed to make us uncomfortable?

John Pickering said...

Surely another enlightening post from Ann, with her keen eye for prurience and her focus on the tangential. Why doesn't Ann mention the Russian honey pot story that's enmeshed the NRA and a few Republicans? What of the homo antics surrounding the former assistant Ohio state wrestling coach? That stuff bores Ann. Ivanka's line shuts down because some women seem to hate Trump? Nah. Ann's Playboy archive subscription seems to have run out.

buwaya said...

This is an apolitical story in fact.
And in its own way relevant.

After all, these were quite brave activists against Putin (and Lukashenko, and Yanukovych) well before Putin was the politically relevant public enemy that he seems to be at the moment.
We are talking of 2008-2014. Putin et al were not a US political issue.

They got plenty of publicity in their day. It is the rest of the story, in the Paul Harvey sense.

buwaya said...

Courage is independent of the rightness of their cause.
It took guts to do what they did, no matter its rationale, or form.
No current US political issue has protagonists taking such extreme personal risks.

Josephbleau said...

Pail Harvy... good day!

madAsHell said...

In Salem, she would have been branded a witch, and burned at the stake. Unfortunately, she couldn't find a jury to brand her a witch, and she took matters into her own hands. Also see suicide-by-cop.

Ray - SoCal said...

The funniest one I saw was FeMen protest was against some Islamic event, and for some reason, the people being protested seemed to enjoy the show.

I agree with the comment the first time it's shocking, after that, it's not very interesting.

YoungHegelian said...

Just because someone has got a "cause", or is a an activist, doesn't mean that their personal demons are under control any more than they are for the rest of us. Who springs to my mind, since I've lived in the DC area for so many years, as a case in point was Mitch Snyder, the homeless activist.

Assuming, of course, that Shachko wasn't "suicided" by the KGB, something I would consider to be an eminently believable possibility.

Ray - SoCal said...

Beautiful lady, it's a shame she decided to commit suicide.

rhhardin said...

You can't have feminism with blurred-out nudity.

walter said...

Victor Svyatski has curious recruitment standards..

n.n said...

She self-aborted as collateral damage to normalization of diversity (i.e. color judgments, denial of individual dignity including racism) and feminism (i.e. chauvinism) progressed by left-wing special and peculiar interests.

Etienne said...
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Jupiter said...

holdfast said...
"Relatively attractive women flashing their boobs is not actually a protest that is going to intimidate or depress the average heterosexual male."

Perhaps they are interested in persuasion, not intimidation. The sight of tits generally puts me in a fairly agreeable frame of mind.

It does seem weird, that someone making a tribute video would obscure the women's breasts. They went to a lot of trouble to get those breasts where lots of people could see them.

Big Mike said...
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Big Mike said...

@MadAsHell, the Salem witches were hanged, not burned. Not that hanging in that era was much of an improvement — the “short drop” method resulted in a very slow death by strangulation.

@YoungHegelian, the KGB doesn’t exist anymore, having been split in two. One part handles internal security, sort of like our FBI. You are thinking about the SVR, which handles foreign intelligence. Main reason for thinking they didn’t do it is that they don’t much care about covering their tracks (look up “Novichok”).

As for Shachko herself, she didn’t look like the sort of woman who you could ask to make you a sandwich, that’s for sure.

rcocean said...

IOW, another mentally ill Leftist.

rcocean said...

There are a lot of sad, mentally disturbed people in the world, and Leftist politics gives their lives meaning and purpose.

For a while.

rcocean said...

Oh Good Grief, the Salem witches again.

New England had VERY Few witch trials - the South almost none. And the remarkable thing about the American Colonies is we had about .00001% of the witch trials that England and Europe did.

Qwinn said...

Why do people keep bringing up Salem? There were less than 25 victims, some were men, and the main accusers were 2 young girls. By contrast, between 400 and 600 people have been killed in the US by female serial killers. Can we spend 16x to 24x the amount of time societally obsessing about the scourge of female serial killers as we have about Salem, given the relative number of victims? Ok, how about one tenth the time? A hundredth?

Darrell said...

Was she one of the ones who was putting chickens in her hoo hoo in a grocery store? She did get them all in, to her credit. I'm sure that made some point.

David Begley said...

Suicide? I doubt it. Vlad offed her.

If she was against Putin then good, but I don’t think she would be real fun on a date.

StephenFearby said...

From the Mirror, UK:

"...Oksana Shachko, 31, who had been suffering from depression for some time, was found in the French capital city of Paris.

It was reportedly her third suicide attempt."

From the Times, UK, April 21:

"In 1989, a trainee physician called Edward Bullmore treated a woman in her late fifties. Mrs P had swollen joints in her hands and knees. She had an autoimmune disease. Her own immune system had attacked her, flooding her joints with inflammation. This, in turn, had eaten away at Mrs P’s collagen and bone, noted Bullmore, who was 29, and whose real ambition was to become a psychiatrist.

He asked Mrs P some routine questions about her physical symptoms, and made a correct diagnosis of rheumatoid arthritis. Then he asked her a few questions he wasn’t supposed to ask. How was she feeling? How would she describe her mood? Well, said Mrs P, she was feeling very low – she was tired, listless and losing the will to live. She couldn’t sleep."

——————————

"Ed Bullmore is now 57, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Cambridge. Sitting in his office at Addenbrooke’s Hospital, he will, over the course of an afternoon, tell me some extraordinary things. He will say that Mrs P was probably depressed because she was inflamed. He will say that he believes inflammation in the body can cause depression in the mind. This is the subject of his new book, The Inflamed Mind."

"...Bullmore says that inflammation causes depression. And stress causes inflammation. And the modern world is full of things that make us stressed."

Since a PubMed abstract search of (depression AND inflammation) yields 6,198 hits going back to at least 1964, Bullmore's insight isn't going to win him the Nobel Prize in Medicine.

There are all kinds of clinical trials underway to identify stuff that will safely enhance immune system competence even with a genetic predisposition to increased levels of oxidative stress and inflammation.

The talk therapy route only offers mixed results:

Aust N Z J Psychiatry. 2017
Cognitive behaviour therapy and inflammation: A systematic review of its relationship and the potential implications for the treatment of depression.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28382827

WWIII Joe Biden, Husk-Puppet + America's Putin said...
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WWIII Joe Biden, Husk-Puppet + America's Putin said...

I'm not sure what you are going to accomplish with all that anger. Writing FUCK in bold black across your chest and getting into pissing matches with nasty sorts.
I'm not sure if she killed herself of if something caught up with her. Why bother killing a feminist hiding out in France? Who knows.
Was she involved in something bigger? who knows.

We have no idea what it's like in some parts of these Eastern European/ Russian anti-free speech hell-holes.
Everyone wants to come to America. Leftists hate America. I'd be happy to do an exchange. Not that I want more angry leftists, but people who appreciate our freedom would be a nice change of pace.
I met some Russian girls who were at a CO ski resort last summer. I didn't ask and wish I would have asked but they must of been on some sort of work permit. Somehow they managed to sneak into the pool area at the hotel where I was staying. Anyway, we chatted and they were not really anti-Putin, (I did ask) but they did want to move here. "oh we love America" they said over and over.

steve uhr said...

She seems like she was a fighter for the right causes. I'm sure she will be missed by many lovers of fredom.

n.n said...

rocean, Qwinn:

A political myth: witch hunt, witch trial, with progressive returns assumes a life of its own. We can begin remediation with an end to the semantic games that sustain the myth in popular culture over generations. Its persistence really does not have a redeeming value to society or humanity.

n.n said...

another mentally ill Leftist

Driven to self-abortion through a progressive cognitive dissonance forced by extrapolation from exceptional and anecdotal evidence (and reality) to liberal extremes.

The tell-tale hearts beat ever louder.

etbass said...

Salem witch trials. It’s an anti-Christian thing.

William said...

I only know her from this video snippet. She was attractive but way too intense. Her courage was perhaps a form of mental imbalance, but it was, nonetheless, courage. People do wrong things for wrong reasons. It's good that someone occasionally does a righteous thing for a wrong reason..... France, what with Marianne and all, is the land of the politically conscious nipples. France was her proper resting place.

William said...

Interesting footnote: Cotton Mather, although he later regretted his participation, presided over one of the witch trials. He was also an early advocate for smallpox vaccination. Benjamin Franklin, although he later rethought his position, was opposed to smallpox vaccination. His beloved child died of the disease and that was the keenest regret of Franklin's life........You get some things right and some things wrong. And it's surprising and unpredictable who gets it right.

fivewheels said...

The story about being abducted, stripped, doused with oil and left in the forest is ... something. Belarus is far from a free country, as I understand it, and such things are imaginable, but you're also talking about attention-seeking activists here. And Ukrainian officials, who may have had no dog in the fight against Belarus' Lukashenko, could not confirm that anything like that happened. Nor can anyone else, of course. But that's just how a black-ops mission would work!

Hrrrmmmm.

LordSomber said...

“I came, I stripped, I won”

Is there some value added in this process that I fail to see here?

Please help me out.

mtrobertslaw said...

She thought radical feminism would give meaning to her life. It didn't. Very sad.

Drago said...

It is my belief that the "Fremen" exist in vast numbers and one of their kind is The Sleeper Who Will Awaken....

Or not..

Ray - SoCal said...

If she had only learned how to survive, as Muad'Dib does.

"Muad'Dib is wise in the ways of the desert. Muad'Dib creates his own water. Muad'Dib hides from the sun and travels in the cool night. Muad'Dib is fruitful and multiplies over the land. Muad'Dib we call 'instructor-of-boys.' That is a powerful base on which to build your life, Paul-Muad'Dib."
―Stilgar

Muad'Dib is the small mouse of the desert.

PhilD said...

'Oh Good Grief, the Salem witches again'

Yes, looking from the outside I 'd say that the fact that it is the only incident in American history (and the fact that the trials are now +300 years in the past) is something to be proud off instead of being ashamed. But it is like those nitwits who use the Galileo affair (1633, +350 years ago) as proof that the CC is against science or something.

But then, propaganda doesn't need to be intelligent or factual, it just needs to work.

Michael Fitzgerald said...

Psycho chick checks out.

Oso Negro said...

Dickin’Bimbos@Home said “We have no idea what it's like in some parts of these Eastern European/ Russian anti-free speech hell-holes.

To the contrary, some of us have quite a good idea. My apartment in Odessa looks down on Arkadia and the Black Sea. People here live a lot closer to the bone and tolerate privation much better than Americans. They are still recovering from the Soviet years, so money is a problem for a lot of people. A typical Ukrainian salary is maybe $250 U.S. per month. But they aren’t a bunch of whiny bitches like Americans. They know their politicians are corrupt and they get in with life. The women are stunning in appearance. I would guess the average Ukrainian 25 year old woman weighs 10-15 kgs less, on average, than her American counterpart. And they take care of their men! My wife went to Kiev for a couple of days and insisted on cooking enough food for me to eat while she is gone. In essence, the cancer of feminism never ruined their culture. The Femen chicks are not typical. They aren’t big into multi-culturalism either. A few Africans and Indians in the university, but otherwise white people as far as the eye can see. There aren’t police all over the place pouncing on everything you do, either. The people I know speak their minds quite freely. But if you want to think of it as a hell-hole, fine. Please don’t visit and don’t send any fucking NGO do-gooders to fuck the place up.

jaydub said...


" I 'd say that the fact that it is the only incident in American history..."

Um, no. Grace Sherwood was convicted of witchcraft in 1701 in what is now Virginia Beach, VA. Her trial involved strapping her into a chair and then dunking her into the water so see if she floated or sank. Unfortunately, she floated, was convicted and spent 8 years in jail. Witchduck Point on Lynnhaven Inlet where I used to live is where it occurred. She was the last one in Virginia, though.

FIDO said...

Witch trials always seem to involve hysterical young lady accusers...at least in America.

Case in point...today

WWIII Joe Biden, Husk-Puppet + America's Putin said...

"Some parts"

I cannot imagine why so many want to escape, then? Thanks for the insider glimpse into your experience in Odessa, Oso.

WWIII Joe Biden, Husk-Puppet + America's Putin said...

Maybe Trump killed her? CNN made the connection, so it must be true.

Oso Negro said...

@Dickin'Bimbos@Home - Not so many want to leave as did before. Those who do want to go for economic reasons. But they are usually going to some other part of eastern Europe, such as Poland, which is also quite nice.

Oso Negro said...

@Dickin'Bimboor - and for the record, I have pretty much been all over Ukraine except for the breakaway regions. I like the smaller towns even better than I like Odessa. And I love Odessa.

SGT Ted said...

Bare boobs to fight sexism are awesome, except for the obvious mental illness part..

rcocean said...

"But then, propaganda doesn't need to be intelligent or factual, it just needs to work."

You got that right. Its like the Scopes Trial where the facts were turned upside down for the "Inherit the Wind" Movie.

Char Char Binks, Esq. said...

Nice boobs. Too bad about the face.

n.n said...

This Femen's Choice has a distinct karmic irony.

Aussie Pundit said...

It does seem weird, that someone making a tribute video would obscure the women's breasts. They went to a lot of trouble to get those breasts where lots of people could see them.

That's actually a good point.
Blurring her breasts diminishes her legacy, such that it is, because she obviously didn't believe in blurred breasts.

Bad Lieutenant said...

She had that lack of affect thing going like the Iranian murderess. Maybe it's better this way.