Pussy Riot’s Nadya Tolokonnikova on feminism, abortion, and dehumanization | Big Think

[Music] I think feminism that doesn't benefit men is not my feminism. I mean, does it really exist? Because feminism is something about equality, right? So it means feminism means that you can choose what kind of gender from, like, you'll see a gender as a palette, and you can draw with this palette freely.

Ideally, you would have as much power over creating yourself as a piece of art as you can. So like I see that tester, that's their meaning of developing, of evolving as a human being or as the human humanity, right? So we were given will and we were given mind for some reason, I guess to define ourselves, to think about our social presence and to think to redefine our existence by ourselves and within our community and within our society.

So feminism is a great tool that helps us to understand, actually, that throughout the history, for some reason, that one part of humanity was deprived from having basic human rights from himself, for some weird reason that they don't have a dick, right? That if you don't have a dick, then you have to, then you have to, I don't know, be a slave. That's strange, right?

And so feminism is about equality, and how feminism can be against men, I don't know, it is really interesting for me. As a Russian activist, there is still a question here whether women have the right to have abortions or not. As you know, in Russia, it's completely out of the question; like, we just do have this right, and like, you know, snow is white. Women have the right to have abortions, that's the end of the story.

And then I started to think, like, why? Why is it like that in Russia? Because, you know, like, for unfortunately for a lot of American people, it's kind of obvious that Russia is not as developed as America, which is not true at all. We had an amazing experience of a Soviet experiment, and you know, it brought us a lot of terrible things, including the extinction of philosophy and art.

As a philosophy student, I really suffered from that, but at the same time, it brought a lot of brilliant things, like, you know, strong feminism, socialist movement. In the beginning of the 20s, Russian women once and for all, I think, realized that they do have the right to control their bodies. Then they were given the right to have abortion in the twenties, then they lost this right when Stalin came to power, but then they got it back in 1953, and since then, they always had this right.

I don't like to answer unnecessary things with nasty words. What I like, when even when I was attacked in McDonald's in Moscow with this green medicine liquid in my eyes and, like, some metal objects thrown in my mushes, my colleague's heads, like, what I did at that instance, I just came to those people and hugged them and then asked, "Why? Why did you do that?"

And then I thought, I saw that. I saw something in their eyes, like they did, they were, they started to think that actually we are human beings. Because, you know, it's the beginning of war where you dehumanize others. So yeah, I don't want to dehumanize people who hate feminism. Yo...