Political poster association experiment

My exclamatory confusion is not with your translation (I don't read Dutch, and I only remember how to introduce myself, ask for a beer, and say "the sky is blue" from the year of German I took in college). A naked woman and livestock just aren't what I think of when I think 'disarmament.'

OK, thats the who and what. Now, as to the poster itself.

The poster was, of course, meant to provoke: "epater les bourgeois", so to say.

Remember, up till 1967, five years before this poster, Christian parties held half of the seats in Dutch parliament. But the time for provoking them was ripe: the Christians would sink from 53% of the vote to 36% in five years: 1972 brought their nadir.

The sixties, dont you know.

The poster has since become somewhat of a cultural icon. It's all there: sexual liberation, back to the nature, provocation ... and disarmament. Nakedness = disarming. Shed your clothes and your weapons!

It's also been the object of much political discussion. For example, whereas its defenders praised it as a symbol of women's lib, some feminists reacted angrily, and one feminist group retorted with a poster showing a naked man in a field. (I'm not sure if any cows - or bulls - were involved.)

Anyway - history, now, good only for a self-referential wink on the part of politics buffs.

Except that it was raised again, recently, in a private conversation that was then publicized, and in turn spurred more comments. And that part is interesting because of the wholly different context it apparently conjures up for people from wholly different backgrounds.

Here, I'm going on a recent column by the cantankerous publicist Sylvain Ephimenco.

He comments on how in the introduction to a recent article, current Green Left leader Femke Halsema (ex-Labour) recounts how, "on a beautiful spring evening", she shared a glass of wine with Ayaan Hirsi Ali - the Somali refugee who became one of Holland's most prolific female politicians. Hirsi Ali herself switched parties from Labour to the right-wing liberals, in order to further fight her crusade against Islamic fundamentalism.

Hirsi Ali has strongly pleaded for clamping down against Islamist imams, the headscarf, genital mutilation, and extremist Muslim groups, and said some things about the Qu'ran and Mohammed that weren't taken gladly in Muslim circles either. As a woman who dropped Islam (and the veil) herself, she's a prime target and has received numerous life threats. She fled abroad a while and is now under continuous police protection.

The Green Left, meanwhile, though ever defending the rights of gays and women, also is known as the most prominent defender of tolerance towards minorities and Muslims.

Over their glass of wine, in a sign of the icon-value of the poster, the two women came to talk about it, over 30 years after its use.

The rightwing liberal and the leftist agreed that it had been a very beautiful one, and important.

But they disagreed about why it was important; what the cheering naked woman in the meadow meant.

Femke saw in the poster "two core values of progressive thought: freedom and imagination". But Ayaan found, in the naked woman, "an anti-poison against oppressive religious concepts". Femke in turn was a little annoyed about this particularist interpretation and perceived "a superficial flirting" with it.

Finally, Ephimenco adds that he himself, personally, saw a hidden religious symbol: "with her eyes extatically to the heavens and both arms horizontally stretched, she looked like a female Jesus who had liberated herself from her cross".

I can't immediately find it via google, but my first thought was moo? and then, "All us cows do our best for Jerseymaid" - a sentence I remember, or think I remember, from an old TV commercial.

Leftist evangelicals, right-wing liberals, anti-Islam crusaders who embrace a hippie icon - I realise this might all be a bit confusing for you. I'm kinda banking on its mind-altering effect ;-)

"Hirsi Ali has strongly pleaded for clamping down against Islamist imams, the headscarf, genital mutilation, and extremist Muslim groups, and said some things about the Qu'ran and Mohammed that weren't taken gladly in Muslim circles either. As a woman who dropped Islam (and the veil) herself, she's a prime target and has received numerous life threats. She fled abroad a while and is now under continuous police protection.

The Green Left, meanwhile, though ever defending the rights of gays and women, also is known as the most prominent defender of tolerance towards minorities and Muslims."


Life is just too complex.