Femen: Marking Bottoms

Recreating a remarkable and unique event which took place exactly one month ago, this special bumper Spank Statement was written and researched by Harry and edited by Valdor. The 255 images are hosted by Imageshack.

On a chilly mid-November Monday in 2009, a group of pretty girl students were publicly spanked by three ‘teachers’ in front of the Ministry of Education in Kiev.

The spankings were announced in the local press the Friday before, 13 November, so a heavy press presence was guaranteed. It was all a performance entitled A-ta-ta, laid on by the Ukrainian women’s group FEMEN as part of a protest demonstration. Founded in 2008, FEMEN has a growing reputation for mounting creative, distinctive and sexually provocative ‘actions’ to draw attention to political causes ranging from sex tourism to postponed elections. The focus of A-ta-ta was sexual harassment in universities.

This was a complex piece of street theater with a cast of fourteen, whose acting was commended by those who were present. The performance lasted just over ten minutes, and most of that was spanking. In fact, there were nineteen spankings in the course of the show, many of them taking place simultaneously, so it would have been hard to know where to look! Fortunately for us, there were also a lot of cameras, so many moments have been captured for us to enjoy at leisure.

With eleven girls to keep track of, the first thing we need to do is establish our cast of characters. So, ladies first, in order of appearance.

First up we have Alexandra Shevchenko, wearing high red boots and a traditional Ukrainian flower garland. She is one of the leaders of the FEMEN movement, and the one who fronts most of the demonstrations. She is certainly the star of this particular show, as we’ll see… Her placard, incidentally, translates as Oral sex for a pass-fail.

The next girl on the list is Kristina Novitskaya, a blonde in pink with a FEMEN logo drawn on her panties. Her placard reads Institute of Prostitution.

Next up is a girl in maid’s uniform named Olesja, though I haven’t discovered her surname.’

I haven’t been able to put names to the other eight girls, so we’re going to have to use nicknames instead. We shall call the fourth girl the Lady. Why? You’ll see when she gets spanked: her panties feature a picture of a lady in a red dress. Her placard says: Why in the mouth?

The next girl, seen here with Kristina, wears a denim skirt and bright pink panties with a design representing two smiling mouths – so let’s call her Lips.

Those first five girls are all regulars from FEMEN’s previous demonstrations. The other six seem to be newer recruits to the movement. The first of them, seen here behind the Lady, is another girl we shall have to name after her panties: Yellow. Her placard says Grading bottoms – but an apter translation might refer to something beyond academic grades: Marking bottoms.

The next girl is, for me, another of the stars: it’s a real treat to see her get spanked. She wears a plaid schoolgirl skirt and white panties, but we are going to call her Big Boots. By the time these two photos were snapped, she has taken the Institute of Prostitution placard that Kristina was carrying earlier.

The next girl is Smiley, nicknamed after the design on the bag she usually carries. Here she is on the left.

Behind Smiley in that last picture is Stockings. The reason for her nickname will again become apparent when her skirt is raised for her spanking. Her placard, with a FEMEN logo around the border, translates as Ukraine is not a brothel, which is the name of FEMEN’s ongoing campaign against sex tourism.

Another girl in a schoolgirl skirt next. If we were going to nickname her after her panties, she would have to be Cows, but let’s not be ungallant: we’ll call her Mouse instead.

Finally we have Red, named for her hair and seen on the left here carrying the Ukraine is not a brothel placard.

It’s exciting to be introduced to eleven girls knowing that very soon you’re going to see them get spanked, but first let’s spare a moment to acquaint ourselves with the three teachers who will be spanking them. We don’t need to give them nicknames: their identities are spelled out on the back of their chairs. Going from right to left (as they face us):

• The Dean, in the red shirt. Probably the most efficient spanker of the three, you’ll see him raising his hand high for maximum impact. He’s also the only one to make consistent use of his non-spanking hand to hold the girl down.
• The Rector, in the hat. He is working under a disadvantage: his right hand is injured and in bandages. But don’t get complacent, girls, because that’s a belt over the side of his chair…
• The Professor, in the trainers. He too has a disadvantage: he is clearly right-handed, but the staging of the scene requires him mainly to spank with his left. But he is also probably the least committed spanker of the three: at least, we’ll see him move on to other things as the performance goes on…

As with any performance, many things must be prepared: the girls have to get into costume, do their hair, ensure their panties are snug…

These girls are going to be taking an exam – with a difference! So a little last-minute studying might be a good idea too…

It’s time. The first three girls present themselves to their examiners.

But the girls aren’t going to be taking the exams in the conventional way. As they get into position, it is clear that their book-learning will not be the only thing they’ll be using to please their teachers…

The Maid is now on the Professor’s lap, Kristina is preparing to go down on the Rector, and God only knows what the Dean thinks he’s doing to Alexandra – though he does have the chance to land a few smacks on the seat of her prettily patterned panties.

The wind blows Kristina’s skirt inside out.

The Maid isn’t enjoying her Geography exam. (It’s a book about the Ukraine.)

But the Rector seems to be enjoying testing Kristina on her Philosophy.

Alexandra tries to concentrate on her exam, despite the fact that the Dean’s fingers are creeping where they shouldn’t…

… not to mention her precarious position!

Better adjust your balance a little, Alexandra!

Stage One of the exam is over. The Rector gives Kristina a pat on the cheek as he releases her. But it will be the first of many…

And now for Stage 2, when the girls are going to be (as one Russian language blog piquantly put it) ‘beaten on their soft parts’. In plain English, the examiners are going to spank them!

The Professor warms his hands, then holds the Maid’s book while she lowers herself across his knee. The Rector hands Kristina hers, and Alexandra, her skirt already adjusted for what is to come, retrieves her two books from the ground.

There’s a problem. With the three chairs in an even row, there isn’t room for three horizontal girls. So Alexandra directs the Rector to move back a few feet, allowing Kristina to get into position. Then she herself goes across the Dean’s knee.

For the girls, it’s still part of their examination, so they try to keep their minds on their books – though it seems as if Alexandra for one finds the spanking rather a distraction!

I said before that, with a line-up of three pretty girls being simultaneously spanked, it’s hard to know where to look. So let’s try concentrating on them one at a time.

One thing that’s impressive about Alexandra is her total commitment to the spanking scenario. She’s completely across the Dean’s lap with no chance at all of escaping until he lets her go free.

As the Dean spanks away, a television sound man slides a microphone along the ground behind her, getting as close to the spanking as he dares in the hope of getting a good, crisp recording of the impact!

Look carefully at the next two pictures and you may notice two things. It’s the middle of November, but Alexandra is one of a minority of the girls who have braved the climate with bare legs. (Most of them are wearing pantyhose.) As one Ukrainian blogger quipped, at least there’s one part of them that will be warm!

Look closer still and you’ll also see that she’s wearing TWO pairs of panties. We’ll see further evidence of this with some of the other girls. The reason is that this is a theatrical performance: the heart patterned panties are part of her costume, and she has her own panties on underneath.

Can you tear your eyes away? Don’t worry, we’ll see more of Alexandra later. But it’s time now to pan left, and pay attention to Kristina.

Kristina isn’t one of FEMEN’s barelegged brigade: look at her waist and you’ll see the top of her pantyhose.

And how does Kristina feel about being spanked – and about the camera taking her closeup?

How she feels about it is immaterial, of course! The Rector lifts her skirt out of the way and gets to work with a will…

Now let’s move right again to see how the Maid is doing in her session with the Professor.

She’s luckier than her comrades, because the Professor opts not to raise her skirt. But at the moment she has a hard time counting her blessings! Her yells were so impressive that one of the television companies covering the performance used them as the soundtrack over footage of a different spanking altogether!!

Back to Alexandra now. She raises a finger, seen here from three angles. Has she had a new idea for the exam, or is she signalling the end of the first round?

So the three spanked girls are released and the Maid makes her exit. But it’s not over yet for the others! Alexandra crosses to the Rector and directs Kristina over to the Professor. Meanwhile, one of the things you haven’t yet seen is the queue of girls to the right, all waiting their turn for the exam. The Lady is next in line and she takes her place across the Dean’s knee. Lips and Yellow are to follow her, then Big Boots (obscured in this picture) and Smiley.

There must have been at least twenty photographers covering the event, though their work is hard to trace. In the above picture, the three to notice are the two video cameramen and the gray-haired man in the center. Thanks to them, we can see the next moment from several different angles.

The Dean is already at work on the Lady, and the Professor is settling Kristina into place. Alexandra flips up her skirt and lowers herself into position across the Rector’s knee. He gives her a light little fusillade and she slips out of role to give him a smile.

So it’s back to the spanking lineup. The girls have moved across right to left, so that Alexandra and Kristina are getting their second spankings – and Alexandra in particular seems to be rather uncomfortable!

So here’s the Lady, with bare legs and white panties. The Dean starts out with some conventional one-handed spanking, but then tries a two-handed ‘patty-cake’ style. And in the background, look at the impact the Rector is making on Alexandra’s ‘soft part’.

Let’s pan left for a closer look at Alexandra.

One thing that’s important to Alexandra is that the spanking should be obviously nonconsensual. She wants the cameramen to see her distress and her howls of protest. So it’s a little problematic that she’s also directing the show, and has to keep breaking out of her character to talk to the actor spanking her…

Now we move across once more to look at what Kristina’s suffering at the hands of the Professor.

One of the Professor’s spanking habits is starting to become obvious. Kristina’s skirt is so short that, in her right-angled position over his knee, her panties are going to show… but the Professor has decided against exposing them further, and, like the Maid, she gets spanked on her skirt.

This second round of spankings is coming to an end, and the girls are being released. In the background of the left picture, you can see Alexandra starting to get down from the Rector’s knee, with her right foot at last making contact with the ground. But in the foreground, the Professor seems to have something to say to Kristina as she rises. So when Alexandra moves across for her turn, there’s a delay: the Professor is still busy with Kristina while, in the background, you can just see the Lady as she presents herself to the Rector.

Is the Prof inspecting Kristina’s fingernails, or are those five fingers the grade he’s giving her? (In the Ukrainian system, a 5 is the equivalent of an A.) Either way, it leaves Alexandra momentarily stuck in traffic…

Back at the other end of the row, the Dean already has Lips over his knee, and is in the act of pulling up her short denim skirt as, in the background, the Lady lowers herself into position for her turn with the Rector.

Here’s the new lineup, and for the first and only time we get a hat-trick of panty spankings!

I like the spanker to be in complete physical control, so personally I don’t rate the way Lips lies in position, with her red high heels firmly planted on the ground. Others may like the way it elevates her bottom to be spanked. One thing this shows is that Lips is another of the girls wearing two pairs of panties, the pink ones for display and spanking, and her own mauve ones underneath.

Moving across, the Lady’s getting her second spanking of the day…

The Rector does his job with enthusiasm, and the closeup shows clearly how the Lady gets her nickname. Again, forensic scrutiny reveals a second pair of panties, but it’s harder to see because the Lady is evidently a girl who favors white all the way…

The only remaining mystery concerning Alexandra’s panties is why the Professor has broken with his usual habit and is spanking her on them. But in view of what we have already seen, maybe Alexandra gave him no choice…

One thing that started to attract the photographers’ attention about now was the line of girls to the left, all waiting in the anxious knowledge that very soon they will be the ones getting spanked. In the second picture, Yellow surreptitiously tugs her panties up tight, ready for what is about to happen. And out of all of them it is Big Boots who seems to pay most attention to her book. Is she doing some last-minute revision in the hope that it might save her?

For the Lady and Lips, this round of the examination is over, and they are set on their feet. Lips adjusts her skirt, though it won’t be staying down for long. But look to the right of the picture. Alexandra started late, so she’s still howling and kicking…

We now move on a few moments.

Alexandra has been released, and she and Kristina have gone across to the line and broken out their placards for the next phase of the demo. Yellow and Lips are now firmly across the respective knees of the Dean and Rector, but the Professor is running late after his little chat with Kristina, so he is only just settling the Lady into position.

And they’re off! Big Boots looks apprehensive as Yellow, helplessly over the Dean’s lap, starts to get her bottom spanked. And that really looks like an extra-sound spanking!

And here it is in closeup, which also shows how she’s put her pantyhose on over her panties. The slogan, incidentally, translates as I want to get married, or just…

Nobody seems to have taken any photos directly showing the Rector spanking Lips, though it’s clear that she is getting a second dose on the seat of her pink panties, and that she continues to adopt the feet-on-ground mode. So we pass straight across to the Professor and the Lady.

He’s gone back to his usual habit of spanking on the skirt. Maybe that’s why the Lady doesn’t look too unhappy about it…

Here’s something that makes her unhappy, though. With the spanking coming to an end, the sleazeball tries to force her to kiss him…

Now it’s the moment that Big Boots has been dreading, when all her studying fails to save her from being soundly spanked. So soundly that, as the video footage shows, her whole body bucks when the Dean lands a solid smack across her white panties.

And that’s through three layers: panties, pantyhose, and her own white panties too. Look closely and you’ll see that they are ‘days of the week’ panties, and that she’s wearing the wrong day: it reads ‘Friday’ (in western script), but the ‘action’ took place on a Monday. Not a language student, then, Big Boots…

Moving on, here’s the Rector giving Yellow her second spanking…

… but what’s that pesky Professor up to? He seems to have decided on a completely new method of examination! And what’s more, Red seems to have jumped the queue to join in. In the background, Yellow is still getting the more traditional treatment from the Rector.

From this point on, the performance becomes harder to reconstruct. Partly this is because the Professor has now broken the neat cycle of successive spankings, so that what happens next is harder to predict. But the main reason is that the cameramen’s attention is now going elsewhere: they are photographing the demonstration in the background, so they take fewer pictures of the spankings.

That’s a pity, because there are still five more spankings to go after the Dean finishes with Big Boots. In the foreground you can see Mouse, Stockings and Smiley waiting their turn. Just don’t expect to see too much of them…

The Rector has now finished with Yellow, and he releases her. But the Professor’s lap is still occupied with Lips and Red, so Yellow walks on by, spared the anticipated third spanking.

Lips is released, but the Professor still needs a final word or two with Red. Unfortunately it doesn’t seem to involve turning her horizontal… In the background, Smiley is presenting herself to the Rector, bypassing the Dean who is presumably still spanking Big Boots.

Big Boots is now free and leapfrogs the Rector to go to the right. She chats with Lips while the Professor finishes off with Red. But why has the Rector not turned Smiley across his knee? Meanwhile the Dean has summoned Stockings, the last girl in line, and has begin to deal with her. On the far left of the picture we see that Yellow has picked up her placard and is about to join the demo. It looks as if that third spanking really has passed her by…

The spanking of Stockings seems to catch the photographers’ imagination, maybe because of the sudden appearance of stocking tops. Whatever the reason, the coverage temporarily improves, so we get not only a decent look at the day’s penultimate white panty spanking, but also some clues about what else is going on.

The Rector appears to have been very lenient with Smiley. From the sequence of the action in what photographs we have, it is clear that he doesn’t put her across his knee at all. He seems to have hitched up her polka dot skirt to give her a token smack on the bottom, which is nothing compared with the fullscale spanking Stockings is getting in the foreground. The reason for this may lie under her skirt. We shall see later that Smiley has come to her exam wearing only pantyhose and a thong…

While Stockings continues to get her first spanking, the Rector adjusts his hat and then summons Mouse. Smiley waits behind his chair for a moment, but the Professor is about to deal with Big Boots. With no other examiner free to see her, Smiley picks up her bag and makes her way off stage. Promisingly, Mouse presents herself to the Rector’s left…

Meanwhile, Big Boots bows low to the Professor, and he puts her across his knee.

But before we move on, look in the background of the right photograph. The Rector is about to spank Mouse, but she is resisting going over his lap with an arm around his neck. He is clearly adjusting her skirt… but that is all you’re going to see of this particular spanking! To the cameramen it was probably just one more spanking, the seventeenth of the day, and sadly, no photographs have been found to show how Mouse reacted when the Rector’s hand struck down hard across the seat of her red panties.

You’ll have noticed that the Professor is doing something a little different with Big Boots. So far, he has administered four lefthanded spankings, but now he has found his true self as a righthander. And there’s more: he tries to raise her skirt, though she seems to be trying to stop him by holding the hem down.

It looks as if he wins, because in the video footage showing her being released after the spanking, he seems to set her skirt straight before he lets her up.

By now, the Rector has already finished with Mouse: with the Professor still spanking Big Boots, she presumably just goes to join the demo, where we next catch sight of her. The Dean too is finished with Stockings, and she adjusts her skirt as she walks resolutely over to her date with the Rector.

Things are winding down now, with most of the girls chanting in the demo, and Stockings the only one being spanked. The Rector doesn’t even bother to lift her skirt. Unoccupied for the first time in the examination, the Dean looks back at the spanking with a smile on his face. The Professor just checks his watch…

But Stockings still has one more spanking to undergo, and the Professor gives it to her. It’s the nineteenth of the day!

So, the spanking leader board reads like this:

• 1st Alexandra she got three spankings, all of them on her panties.
• 2nd Lady, who also got three spankings, two on her panties and one on her skirt.
• 3rd Stockings with three spankings, one on her panties and two on her skirt.
• 4th= Lips, Yellow and Big Boots, who all got two spankings on their panties.
• 7th Kristina with her two spankings, one on her panties and one on her skirt.
• 8th Mouse is in eighth place. She got one spanking, apparently on her panties.
• 9th Maid for her one spanking on her skirt.
• 10th Smiley is in tenth place only because it appears that she did have her bottom smacked, even though she was never actually spanked across anyone’s knee.
• And finally, Red doesn’t appear to have gotten spanked at all. Last place for her!

Despite that disappointment, it has been an impressive show by any standards. But it’s not over yet!

As the Professor releases Stockings, Alexandra presents herself to the Rector and lies down across his knee. It seems she is going to be spanked again – but this time with his bad hand!

With a waggle of her bottom, Kristina presents herself to the Professor. Meanwhile Smiley lowers herself across the Dean’s knee – but face up!

Down Kristina goes over the Professor’s knee, and he lands a preliminary smack on her bottom. But Big Boots puts herself into spanking position on top of Kristina. In the background, likewise, the Lady is facedown on top of Alexandra, and out of camera view Yellow makes herself the next tier on the Dean’s lap.

Another layer of girls builds up. Lips is on top of Big Boots, Red piles herself onto the Lady, and the Maid bends over Yellow. The Rector has managed to get the Lady’s skirt up, but he’s handicapped by the sheer volume of girls. Finally Stockings and Mouse lean over and the pileup is complete.

The Professor is almost completely incapacitated. The intended spanking of Kristina has been defeated by collective action: FEMEN power!

All he can do is give a few token smacks to the closest available bottoms, which belong to Stockings and Lips.

Panning across, the Lady is kicking her legs attractively, and a man in the crowd is laughing uproariously… but with no swing in his arm, the only damage the Rector can do to her exposed bottom is to pinch it.

Look at Alexandra. From the way she’s carrying on, you’d think she was being spanked – not that she’d just been rescued from a spanking by her FEMEN sisters!

Across again, and the Dean has managed to get the Maid’s skirt up, giving us our first proper sight of her big black panties.

With only three girls on top of him. he’s slightly less encumbered than his colleagues, so he manages to land a few smacks. No substitute for a proper spanking, but better than nothing in the circumstances!

And there we are. Three wicked teachers overwhelmed by a gang of pretty girls, their final spanking attempts reduced to near futility. With that, the theatrical event is coming to an end.

The girl bundles have to be dismantled now. Stockings and Mouse have got off the top. Red seizes the chance for a last bit of revenge on the Rector: she bites his hand. Maybe it’s to discourage him…

…because look at how the Professor tries his luck once the other girls are off Kristina’s back!

The spankers’ chairs are removed. The girls have taken the name cards off the back. ‘Dean’, ‘Rector’ and ‘Professor’ are torn into little pieces and thrown on the ground. The performance is over now, and it’s time for the politics to kick in…

Much of the internet and press reaction to the demo was predictable. Louts called the girls prostitutes and sniggered about taking teaching jobs in the Ukraine. Some speculated about how difficult it was to find volunteers to take part, and whether the girls got spanked harder than they had expected. The newspapers mainly treated it as an oddball ‘man bites dog’ story: in effect, ‘militant feminists spanked in support of women’s rights’. But it was a lot more sophisticated than that.

FEMEN evidently don’t subscribe to the joyless Andrea Dworkin school of feminism, which postulates that men demean and oppress women by looking at them with a sexual eye, and that erotic representations of women are the root cause of sexual abuse and rape. Those of us whose kink is nonconsensual spanking know just how silly that is. So do FEMEN. That’s why snide remarks about ‘trying to put out the fire with oil’ miss the mark.

Feminists will never force a fundamental change in men’s sexuality by wearing overalls and scowling. Instead, FEMEN actively celebrate femininity and use their own sexual attractiveness for positive political ends. It’s the sexiness as well as the originality of their protest ‘actions’ that helps get them noticed (the spanking protest in particular seems to have caught the media’s imagination), with the aim of raising awareness of the issues. And that means it’s time for a message from our benefactresses…

The A-ta-ta action came about after Vasily Mikhailov, the Rector of one of Kiev’s institutions of higher education, was jailed as a pedophile. The authorities insisted that this was a single, isolated case of sexual misconduct by a senior academic, but the FEMEN girls, many of whom are students, had grassroots knowledge to the contrary: there is a wider problem of sexual harassment by some teachers, and the victims are often too frightened and embarrassed to complain or go to the police, lest they be expelled or thrown out of student housing.

FEMEN’s demonstration was intended to call attention to the problem and demand action from the Ministry. The performance, purporting to show how pretty girls can pass their exams in the Ukraine, was a potent metaphor, not necessarily a literal enactment of the cause for complaint: teachers who demand sex for grades are abusing their students, so the spankings made a witty representation of both sides of the coin.

FEMEN were asking the Ministry to set up a formal investigation of the problem, establish an anonymous helpline for victims of abuse and automatically suspend academics from duty should they fall under suspicion. Back now to Kiev to see how they got on…

After shouting some more slogans, the girls attempt to force their way into the Ministry to deliver their demands in person to the Minister of Education. The redhead in jeans on the left is Anna Gutsol, FEMEN’s founder.

They weren’t allowed in, but eventually the Deputy Minister, Taras Finikov, came out, had an impassioned discussion with Alexandra and accepted a letter outlining their demands. This was about ten minutes after the spanking performance had ended.

The most piquant part of that discussion came when Alexandra insisted on showing him her bottom. ‘Look,’ she seems to be saying, ‘I’ve been spanked!’

In fact, bottoms were a center of attention all the way through the demonstration, not just while they were upturned for spanking. Look at the demo going on in the background and you’ll notice that Alexandra and Kristina began the protest with their skirts hitched up at the back, though Kristina’s flimsier pelmet managed to stay up for longer.

When it came to wrapping up at the end, the girls gave the photographers some last chances for pictures. Kristina ruefully fingers her spanked bottom.

She shows if off to the cameras, and the other girls get the idea. Lips brings her pink panties into view, and the Maid hitches her skirt up too. Even Red puts a rueful hand on her rear – even though it was never spanked!

Now Stockings and Smiley join in, and as Smiley’s skirt comes up, we see the likely reason why the Rector didn’t take her across his knee!

Finally Mouse comes on the scene, and the photographers get a lovely lineup of soundly spanked girls.

Last of all, Alexandra arrives, fresh from some television interviews, and she leads the girls in a conga line of spanked bottoms.

They were spanked in a very good cause. Students should be awarded grades in accordance with the quality of their academic work. If anyone awards or accepts a high grade for any other reason, they are cheating. The Maid’s placard reads: I am a 5+ student. Obviously she is – but only because the Professor got to spank her!

The realities of the system mean that a small minority of unscrupulous professors are able to blackmail their students over grades. With their proposals for an anonymous hotline and automatic suspension of suspects, FEMEN wants to alter the balance of power.

The risk is that this would create a corresponding opportunity for a small minority of unscrupulous students to blackmail their professors – so any new system also needs to have a safeguard against abuse. So if a student is found to have made a false accusation, maybe it would be appropriate for her to be publicly spanked in front of the Education Ministry…

The photographers whose work is presented here include: Sergey Anishchenko (Ukrinform), Mary Chernish (Mignews), Andriy Davis (Ukraine Business), Gleb Garanich (Reuters), Vladimir Gontar (Unian), Yuri Krivenko (Photokubik), Constantine Melnitsky (Photolenta), Valentin Ogirenko (Ukranews), Igor Pirozhik (Delfi), Taras Podolan (Gazeta), Taisii Stetsenko (Novynar), Sergei Supinsky (Getty/AFP), Andrey Umansky, Grigoriy Vasilenko (Visualrian).