In a scene where everybody dresses in black, it can be difficult for a protestor to get attention. One young Portland lass figured out that less is more. Dressed in only a stocking cap and COVID mask, she fended off fascism by showing the cops her cooze. The boys in blue were disarmed by her vulgar display of power like demons squaring off against a Sheela Na Gig. At the Los Angeles Times Richard Read waxed rhapsodic (among other things) in describing her heroic fight against oppression:

Numerous photos and videos posted on Twitter show the unidentified woman as she halted in the middle of the street at about 1:45 a.m. She stood calmly, a surreal image of human vulnerability in the face of an overpowering force that has been criticized nationally by civil rights advocates…

Images of her on social media harked back to previous iconic — but clothed — images juxtaposing force and vulnerability, such as the 1967 photo of a Vietnam War protester who faced a line of U.S. troops and placed a carnation into the barrel of a soldier’s rifle. In an ultimate act of defiance broadcast worldwide, a man stood in front of a column of tanks leaving Beijing’s Tiananmen Square on June 5, 1989, a day after the Chinese military had suppressed protests by force.

And if Read was enthusiastically supportive, he had nothing on artist DaVida Sal, who declared:

The World will be Saved by a Western Vagina! This is amazing! 🔥Regain Your Feminine Power & Release Your Inner Goddess 🔥Just happened in Portland, and I am here! She made the riot police leave the street with her powerful yoni! #portland #Pussypower #VaginaRevolution ❤️❤️❤️In this new era of the recognition of inner beauty, diamonds are no longer a girl’s best friend and validation is for parking tickets only. In this new paradigm, women everywhere are striving for self recognition and we have began to utilise the tools which guide us on our path to self enlightenment and the exploration of our higher potential. By reclaiming our feminine power we are learning to love ourselves and each other again.

Yet amidst all this outpouring of support and bodily fluids, some have remained resistant to the siren’s charms. It’s not that we don’t get the message: the message is, after all, even plainer than the nose on her face. But we are puzzled as to what “LOOK AT MY CUNT!!!” has to do with, well, anything.

Was she protesting for the right to public nudity? While Portland (unlike much of Oregon) still expects you to stay clothed in the city limits, they make exceptions for nudity as a political statement. In 2012 a Multnomah County Judge threw out a public indecency case against a man who walked naked through a TSA checkpoint at Portland International Airport, citing a 1985 Oregon Appellate Court ruling on naked protests. And given that Portland is also the home base for the World Naked Bike Ride, it is pretty clear that Portland authorities interpret “political nudity” quite broadly.

Was she defending her freedom to expose her genitals? Today American women not only have the freedom to expose their genitals, they can make a tidy living doing so on sites like Onlyfans and Chaturbate. Should anybody belittle them for their occupation, they will find an army of supporters reassuring them that “sex work is work” and dismissing detractors as sex-negative slut-shaming bigots. At no time in human history have women had more opportunity to show the world their naughty bits, or freedom to do so without fear of persecution.

Was she worshipping the Sacred Yoni? Indian mythologist Devdutt Pattanaik explains:

All creatures in this world are classified as yonija, those born of a womb, and a-yonija, those not born of a womb. The former are trapped in samsara, so birth and death. The latter are not. In Ramayana, Rama is yonija and so experiences birth and death like a normal person. However, Sita is not yonija; she is born of earth and so does not die, just returns to earth. Likewise, in Mahabharata, Pandavas are yonija while Draupadi is born of fire so not yonija. Ganesha is a-yonija as he is created outside Parvati’s body. So is Kartikeya. This makes them divine. Yoni or vagina is seen as reminder of human mortality. And so in temples, women are shown standing displaying their vagina to devotees – for it offers both pleasure of life and pain of death. Literally and metaphorically, as symbol of the world. 

While at Hridaya Yoga we learn:

A yoni puja is a sacred ritual during which the yoni is worshipped. It is very important to understand that the prerequisite for worshipping the yoni is the purification of the mind from worldly ideas about the yoni. The yoni is the form of the cosmos and encompasses the mysteries of creation. Reverence in front of Shakti’s mystery is the attitude that needs to be cultivated to perform a yoni puja. That is why in Yoni Tantra we find this warning: “Never worship the yoni in front of pashus (males still possessed by their animal nature).”

I think it safe to say that those Federal officials she flashed were still possessed of their animal nature. I doubt very much they were reminded of the pleasures of life and pains of death upon seeing her vagina. And if she’s anything like her fellow Yoni-worshippers, she sees her pussy as a tool for pleasure and would be outraged if you told her she had a sacred duty to be fruitful and multiply. For Vedic Hindus the Yoni represents the Great Womb: American New Agers are more focused on the Cosmic Clitoris.

Which brings us to the final question: was she doing this to protest the death of George Floyd and to prove that Black Lives Matter? Quite a few inside and outside the Black community have noted mission creep within BLM Inc. and a growing focus on LGBTQ Black Lives. In Seattle a “Black Femmes Take Over I-5” march ended when two non-binary protestors who were were neither Black nor Femme were struck by an Eritrean driver who appears to have been the Blackest person at the protest. Reflecting on the naked protestor, Sarah Penn noted:

It’s one of the biggest acts of centering I’ve ever seen. She put herself in the center of the issue. And all the conversations about her have literally centered on her nudity, and not even about what she was there to do, which is to protest racism and police brutality against the black body.

Lastly, I think often about injecting help where it has not been requested. You know there is absolutely a consent issue there. And I really have to wonder where she got the idea that that would be what black people really needed in this fight was for her to sit naked in front of those officers. I really think on what the thought process must have been her to decide that the best way to keep black bodies safe and and shift the viewpoint on black bodies was to Bear her own. I have not heard a single black person state that they thought this is what would bring us to Freedom. To have more white women get naked in front of the police.

In Eros and Civilization, Herbert Marcuse explained “The effective subjugation of the instincts to repressive controls is imposed not by nature but by man.” Only by overthrowing the Primal Father could we break “the chain reaction of enslavement, rebellion, and reinforced domination which marks the history of civilization.” Today we are free to seek out casual sexual encounters and to terminate unwanted pregnancies. Where once we saw a Sacred Yoni and a Holy Grail, we now see a warm tight orifice. The emblem of Creation is now neatly tagged and sorted to fit our every fantasy on various porn sites. And where repression once drove us to overthrow our oppressors, liberation has left us content with exposing ourselves to disinterested soldiers.