FREE RADICAL: MY OWN PUSSY RIOT

[[trigger warning for talk about rape culture, slut shaming, victim blaming]]

You’ve probably heard of Pussy Riot: The all-female punk band dressed in neon tights, dresses and balaclavas, wreaking havoc in Russia’s public spaces through their guerrilla performances.  Three of Pussy Riot’s members were arrested in March for performing and anti-Putin prayer at the Cathedral of Christ the Savior in Moscow, where they implored the Virgin Mary to become a feminist and cast out Putin.

Now what the fuck does that have to do with you?

It’s easy for us to sit there and pat ourselves on the back for being some awesome country with all these freedoms and shit when we don’t have a Pussy Riot sitting in jail for hooliganism and facing seven years in prison in what we would call a violation to their freedom of expression.

Despite the fact that the Cold War ended more than two decades ago, Russia is still viewed by Americans as the cultural and political Other.  Just take a look at any meme that starts “In Soviet Russia…” and it’s clear that we still look at the former Soviet Union as a current one, just with a different name.

Of course, there is a little truth to that extreme notion.  Russia has been referred to as a managed democracy or soft autocracy, which comes a lot closer to the truth considering its electoral scandal.

So we can look down our noses as the Kremlin makes one more ham-handed attempt to stifle free expression in their feigned democracy, but what can we really be proud of when politicians and judges in the good ol’ U.S. of A. fight to keep women silent, barefoot and pregnant?

Now I know that there are some of you out there who believe that women want access to birth control so they can “slut it up” and enjoy promiscuous sex.  I could tell you about all the other stuff people actually take this hormone treatment for (prevention of acne, treatment of ovarian cysts, alleviation of cramps and other PMS symptoms), but let’s get down to brass tacks and talk about what prohibiting access to birth control (namely, the pill) actually means for those doing the prohibiting:

Keeping women from fully participating in the workforce.

Now, Capitalism will never truly welcome woman as an equal to man, but until we smash that system, the outlawing of birth control will keep women from even the notion of equality.  As New York Times op-ed columnist Gail Collins said, “Before the birth control pill came along, a woman who wanted to pursue a life that involved a lot of education, or a long climb up a career ladder, pretty much had to be willing to devote herself to perpetual celibacy. That’s what contraception means to women.”

Of course there are many people who are choosing atypical familial structures—single women deciding to have children alone, for example—but they get to choose, they get to decide when, and with (or without) whom.  When you take away that choice, you are telling the vast numbers of females who have sex with males that they, unlike their male counterparts, must choose between a sex life and reproductive security.

All of this comes down to the disempowerment of women.

Robbing women of their reproductive rights is far from the only way this male-dominated country disempowers women.  A Kentucky teenager, for example, faces jail time because she named the two boys who sexually assaulted her after she had passed out at a party in 2011.  In 2007, a Nebraska judge banned the words rape, sexual assault, victim, assailant, and sexual assault kit from being used in a rape trial.  As Jessica Valenti of The Nation put it, “Something tells me mugging victims have never been ordered not use the word ‘rob’ when recounting the crime committed against them—but when it comes to sexual assault, logic and human decency always seem to go out the window.”

When I hear that there is a war on women, I have to agree, because at every turn we are shamed for our sex—we are the sluts who take birth control and get raped.

And when I hear Pussy Riot talk about the need to “mobilize public energy against the evil crooks of the Putinist junta and enrich the Russian cultural and political opposition with themes that are important to us: gender and LGBT rights, problems of masculine conformity, absence of a daring political message on the musical and art scenes, and the domination of males in all areas of public discourse,” I know that they are talking to me, and about me, even though I’m in America.

That’s why I stand in complete solidarity with Pussy Riot.

For more information and how to get involved, please visit freepussyriot.org.

Permanent Wave Boston will also be hosting a Free Pussy Riot benefit show.  For more information, click here.