Radical group Femen is mainly known for staging topless media stunts to protest oppression. And while they’ve been presented as a feminist female empowerment group, a new documentary revealed that the group is actually run by a man who happens to love hot topless women.
Victor Svyatski is listed as a consultant for the group, however filmmaker Kitty Green — who just completed the documentary “Ukraine is Not a Brothel” about the group — says that Svyatski is more of the mastermind behind the stunts.
Green told The Independent, “It’s his movement and he hand-picked the girls. He hand-picked the prettiest girls because the prettiest girls sell more papers. The prettiest girls get on the front page… that became their image, that became the way they sold the brand.”
While the public persona of the group touts female empowerment, Svyatski seems to believe the opposite. In the film he says, “These girls are weak.” He adds, “They don’t have the strength of character. They don’t even have the desire to be strong. Instead, they show submissiveness, spinelessness, lack of punctuality, and many other factors which prevent them from becoming political activists. These are qualities which it was essential to teach them.”
One of the members of Femen describes their relationship to Svyatski as being akin to Stockholm Syndrome. She told Green, “We are psychologically dependent on him and even if we know and understand that we could do this by ourselves without his help, it’s psychological dependence.”
Their slogan is, “Our mission is protest, our weapons are bare breasts.” So is it really that far fetched to think it was a man who decided a good form of protest was having hot girls take their tops off?
