Before Bush began the Iraq war, when many people naively thought there might be a way to prevent it, people who opposed the war used a variety of approaches to draw attention to their messages, inluding nudity. Here are just two examples:
From here.
From here.
It seemed funny and harmless (assuming no one caught a cold!) and mostly it probably was. But note this story from Feminista!
Barely a week before US troops began their procession towards Baghdad, a small website was unveiled at Nudeforpeace.org. Capitalizing on previous examples of anti-war activists gaining media attention through nudity, the Australian website invited visitors to submit their own nude images to the project. The vast majority of the existing pictures were of young women — some very so — who were photographed in a peculiarly clinical way, despite the juvenile nature of the sayings written on their bodies. One woman stood as a statue, staring blankly, as she held a razor to her pubic bone, pointing her other hand to the words, “No Bush,” scrawled in makeup across her abdomen. Two men were also photographed, though both appeared older and were demurely shot from the waist up. Strangely, of the first dozen or so images, five women, claiming to be from nearly as many nations across the globe, were each shown standing before the same painted-brick wall.
News of Nudeforpeace.org spread quickly across the Internet. Few seemed to notice the more curious aspects of the website as untold numbers of visitors descended upon it, rushing back to their own forums and web logs to share their opinion of what they saw. The immense traffic momentarily put Nudeforpeace.org out of commission, leading many to theorize that the site was hacked by pro-war activists, though most eventually conceded that it was likely just experiencing technical difficulties. Despite the austere “server bandwidth exceeded” message that was displayed on the front page of the website, many secondary pages and images were still available to viewers: something that should have again indicated that all was not as it seemed. …
…The exact specifics of these events remain unknown and are largely irrelevant. Whether those involved with the website were perpetrating an elaborate hoax or were genuine activists who fell victim to opportunism — given their line of work — it seems unnecessary to grant them yet another editorial platform given their behavior in either case. Pornographers are certainly entitled to hold anti-war views and there is certainly nothing novel about them doing so: reading Playboy for the articles is a longstanding cliche and, to this day, many male liberals defend its sexism by citing its anti-war stance during the Vietnam era. Whether the initial models of Nudeforpeace.org were activist volunteers or paid employees is certainly a cause for feminist concern, as is the exploitation of those who freely submitted their own images to the project, not knowing that it was conducted by those who routinely profit from such imagery. However, such ethical lapses on the part of pornographers are to be expected; more disappointing is how easily they were able to both deceive and exploit the male progressive community, who eagerly accepted the website at face value. …
The popularity of Nudeforpeace.org was fueled by derision, largely by men who have embraced the brand of neo-libertarianism espoused by magazines such as Maxim; the glossy combination of capitalism and sexism complementing their meteoric ascensions within the Information Technology industry and the rewards that have come with it. Given their aptitudes and free time during working hours, they often set the pace for the Internet at large. Fark.com, one such news portal for the demographic, brought roughly 89,000 “click-through” sessions to Nudeforpeace.org within just a few days. Although many of those were surely duplicate visitors, it was not the only large site linking to it and a good portion of its participants maintain their own smaller web pages and journals, making the news of the project proliferate quite rapidly amongst those who were opposed to it politically — much more quickly than it filtered through the far more rudimentary channels employed by activists. Among the men responding to the website, most were quite vociferous in both their pro-war stances and in their attacks upon the models, whom they deemed undesirable in the most rabid of terms. Nudeforpeace.org symbolized everything that they had to come to expect from liberals: trivial actions, futile in significance. The method in this case, female nudity, only served to bolster their misogyny, giving them the opportunity to insult the women both in body and in mind.
Beyond the basic irony that many men, not at all unlike those above, continue to pay a fair amount of money to view those same women in more flattering images, it would appear that the bland photography and the painted-brick wall each served their purpose well, disguising the true agents behind the project. Many anti-war activists who had submitted pictures to Nudeforpeace.org felt dejected after the website imploded — unhappy that their participation was in vain — and quickly began to organize themselves to pick up where the defunct organization left off. They created a small online community using popular journaling software for the express purpose of posting of similar imagery. The overwhelming majority of such pictures were far more sexualized than their progenitors. This, of course, is to be expected to a great extent: no one wishes to be seen in unflattering terms and aping the conventions of popular media, from the advertising industry to pornography, is largely unavoidable. Indeed, none of these contributors would have had cause to actively work towards not looking like a porn star. Although Nudeforpeace.org was never picked up by the mainstream media in any significant fashion, given its late introduction and early demise, the work of these people has made what was likely a short-lived hoax into a historical reality, working to solidify public perception of the anti-war effort. While the number of protestors in conventional demonstrations were routinely downplayed by the press, the millions of Europeans taking to the streets ignored by the American media, nudity based activism received a disproportionate amount of attention.
Read the full text of the essay here.
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