Hundreds of Lebanese professionals are posting nude pictures of themselves online in solidarity with Jackie Chamoun, the 22-year-old Lebanese Olympic skier, who was this week publicly scorned by the country’s politicians for participating in a risqué photo-shoot.
The “I Am Not Naked” campaign, in which people are invited to strip off their clothes and be photographed, covering their private areas with a round sign saying #StripForJackie, was started on the spur of the moment by friends of Ms Chamoun.
“It took us a few hours to launch the idea and the Facebook page on Tuesday,” said Mohamad Abdouni, a co-organiser of the campaign and the editor for a Lebanese arts magazine. “I went to bed at 6am and when I woke up at 10am on the same day, I found 4,000 likes on the Facebook page!”
The campaign has since taken Lebanese media by storm, dominating chat shows, newspapers and social networking sites including Twitter and Facebook. And it has gone beyond Ms Chamoun’s breasts, kickstarting the conversation about what kind of a society Lebanon wants to be.
The photographs of Ms Chamoun, which showed the young skier, who is currently participating in the Sochi Winter Olympics, posing in the snow in only her underpants, were offcuts from a calendar shoot that she had participated in three years ago.
They were never meant for public consumption, and the mortified Ms Chamoun explained that she had no idea who had posted them online.
Faisal Karmai, the Lebanese minister for youth and sports, however, deemed it necessary to punish the young athlete, threatening to have her banned from the Olympic games and accusing her of “harming Lebanon’s reputation”.
A still from the Jackie Chamoun video
The comment laid bare the extreme divisions within Lebanese culture, highlighting the gap between social and religious conservatives and liberals. The former advocate a culture closer to that of Saudi Arabia where women must wear headscarves and alcohol is not tolerated. Women from the latter category however are often seen jogging on the capital’s corniche in tiny hot pants or dancing rhythmically to pulsing beats in one of the country’s many nightclubs.
In Beirut the contrast is stark: streets stuffed with bars and loud music, lie just meters away from neighbourhoods where alcohol consumption is deemed blasphemous.
While many supported Mr Karmai’s message, professionals like Mr Abdouni read the comment as a naked hypocrisy.
At a time when car bombs are detonating regularly in Beirut, when millions of refugees from the neighbouring conflict in Syria are putting enormous strain on Lebanon’s resources, when the government has collapsed and politicians are too preoccupied with infighting to form a new one, critics of Ms Chamoun, they argue, need to get their priorities right.
The hashtag #Boobsnotbombs has gone viral on Twitter. On Tuesday one man wrote: “Is showing boobs worse than supporting armed groups who kill indiscriminately? Get your priorities right.”
The organizers set up in an art studio where on Wednesday they had invited friends and members of the public to ‘strip for Jackie’ and be tastefully photographed by a professional photographer.
“We were flooded with messages from hundreds of willing volunteers,” said Mr Abdouni. “Then there were also messages from those who wished us to burn in hell along with Jackie.”
The response to the ‘I Am Not Naked’ campaign has been so huge that the organizers are providing another opportunity, this Friday, for volunteers to get their kit off.
“This isn’t just about getting naked,” said Mr Abdouni. “We just got naked to get your attention. This is about awareness. It is a campaign to remind people that there are serious issues in our everyday lives that we need to work together to solve.”
