Upping the Stakes DERRICK JENSEN
Not iN My NaMe
Undignified acts do not equal activism
LET ME SAY UPFRONT: I like fun, and I like sex. But I’m sick to death of hearing that we need to make
environmentalism fun and sexy. The notion is wrongheaded, disrespectful to the
human and nonhuman victims of this culture, an enormous distraction that wastes
time and energy we don’t have and undermines whatever slight chance we do
have of developing the e=ective resistance
required to stop this culture from killing
the planet. The fact that so many people
routinely call for environmentalism to be
more fun and more sexy reveals not only
the weakness of our movement but also the
utter lack of seriousness with which even
many activists approach the problems we
face. When it comes to stopping the murder of the planet, too many environmentalists act more like they’re planning a party
than building a movement.
For instance, there’s a video on You Tube
of supermodels stripping, allegedly to warn
us about global warming. How better to
warn us than for a supermodel to shimmy
out of her clothes to the accompaniment of
a driving rock beat? The tagline beneath
the video says, “No matter what your poli-
tics are, I think we can all get behind the
notion of supermodels stripping.”
Well, not me. The video reinforces the
values of a deeply misogynistic culture,
where women’s bodies are routinely dis-
played for consumption by men, where
pornography is a 90-billion-dollar industry
and the single largest commercial use of
the internet. And in a movement that al-
ready loses women in droves because
they’re objectified, harassed, raped, and
silenced by men they’d considered com-
rades, do we really want to use recruiting
tools that further this objectification?
The role of absurdity in political discourse is to ridicule and
humiliate those in power, not ourselves.
Belo Monte. No more dialogue. Now is the
time to make more resolute and serious
acts of resistance against this project.”
I guarantee that Sheyla Juruna did not
become an activist for the fun and sex.
What’s more, the “fun and sexy” ap-
proach to environmentalism attempts to
mobilize techniques that were developed
for selling products toward building a
movement. Showing a woman’s orgas-
mic face as she picks up a bottle of fabric
softener may influence some people to
attrition among such recruits or, far worse,
the activism itself will become superficial
enough to retain them. It ought to be obvi-
ous but in case it’s not: you can’t build a
serious movement on superficiality.
