Describing an odd public indecency ruling, a Canadian roommate of mine remarked, “Americans have the right to bear arms, Canadians have the right to bare breasts.” Bare breasts are turning out to be a better political weapon.

During the Olympic lockdown of our capital, there was a moment of excitement when the police wrestled four topless women to the ground and into police cars.  They were members of the group FEMEN, whose signature topless protests appear on news pages the world over.

FEMEN was founded in 2008 by Anna Hustol, protesting against the Ukraine’s sex-trade; first holding protests in underwear, and then going fully topless.   An obvious calculation: other things being equal, any protest that involves topless Ukrainian beauties will attract more attention than one without (the Daily Mail published a very long article on the London protest with lots of pictures).

Cynicism of this kind does not invalidate either the movement or its message. It is unlikely that FEMEN would have attracted much attention to the brutality underlying the ‘mail order bride’ industry without these tactics.   Their purview has spread to the subjection of women under Islam.  “NO SHARIA” read the message across one London protestor’s breasts.

FEMEN’s efforts are part of a wave of recently staged nude protests against religious conservatism.   In Germany, the soap-opera star Sila Sahin became the first German-Turkish woman to be a Playboy centrefold, a move that predictably earned her death threats.  Describing her motivation to the magazine, she said, “for years I subordinated myself to various societal constraints and did what others thought was right for me.  The Playboy photo shoot was a total act of liberation.”

Destroying a taboo by defying it in the most blatant way possible seems to be the general aim of these protests.  In Egypt, the 20 year old Aliaa Magda Elmahdy posted nude pictures of herself on her blog, an act she described as “screams against a society of violence, racism, sexism, sexual harassment and hypocrisy”.  In Iran, the actress Golshifteh Farahani similarly defied the mullahs.  The leader of the Workers’ Communist Party of Iran, Maryam Namazie, organized a nude revolutionary calendar in solidarity.

These ladies all seem to have taken a leaf out of the great journalist H.L. Mencken’s book:  “the liberation of the human mind has never been furthered by dunderheads; it has been furthered by gay fellows who heaved dead cats into sanctuaries and then went roistering down the highways of the world, proving to all men that doubt, after all, was safe – that the god in the sanctuary was finite in his power and hence a fraud.”

It's a good principle, but one that can sometimes be hard to defend completely. The recent Pussy Riot arrests in Russia are a case in point. Three members of the Russian protest movement barged into Moscow Cathedral to stage a  a protest against Vladimir Putin’s government in which they sang, danced, and called on the Virgin Mary to become a feminist (the original footage has since been edited into a music video of sorts). The harsh sentence is clearly politically motivated, and has the blessings of the Putin autocracy, but while freedom of speech is an absolute, being able to barge into someone else’s place of work or worship is not. I would defend the right of animal rights protestors to protest outside my department; if they tried to barge in, I would want them arrested. If Pussy Riot had held the demonstration outside, it would be an open and shut case in defence of them. However, they didn't, they forced entry into the place, and that places something of a question mark over it. But TWO YEARS?  Six weeks of scrubbing the cathedral steps would have been sufficient.

The affiliates of Pussy Riot, however, have done rather more than that.  Nadezhda Tolokonnikov one of the members so sentenced, held a protest called ‘Fucking for Medvedev’, in which members turned up in a Moscow museum and starting fornicating, in protest of Medvedev’s succession to the presidency.   Again, I would not wish to see something like that happen in the British Museum.

Nonetheless, it is worth remembering the thoroughly unlovely regimes they are protesting against.  Moscow Cathedral was not a location chosen by accident; one of the most sinister developments in the country recent years is the re-emergence of the Russian Orthodox Church and its spiritual sanctions of Russian autocracy.  The Patriarch of Moscow, Kiril I, has blessed Putin’s rule as a “miracle of God”.  His writings condemn secularism and classical liberalism as sinks of depravity, homosexuality, heresy and, naturally, Jewish philosophy.  It’s hard not to cheer FEMEN’s response to this, sending a topless blonde to chainsaw a memorial crucifix.

To bear arms or to bare breasts… when political push comes to political shove, which will prove the more important?