Laura Amherst, 31, is a climate change protestor. She raises the alarm for her cause not by singing on a ring-road she’s glued herself to or delivering interpretative dances to bongo music in Trafalgar Square, but by getting her boobs out. No wonder some ears have pricked up.
At October’s COP26, the UN conference on how to tackle climate change, amidst up-cycled and hemp-clad crowds chanting for climate justice now and an end to the use of fossil fuels, Laura had her top off.
Laura felt compelled to learn more about climate change earlier this year, “I read the IPCC report [a 4,000-page report which found that the global temperature could rise by 1.5°C by the early 2030s] and the science was clear. Climate change is a crime against humanity. Many people in different countries are suffering so badly from the effects of the climate crisis. They’re losing their homes, families and lives.”
So she turned to protest, joining with Extinction Rebellion to draw attention to the climate crisis. “There are other groups of women who go topless, but I’m a maverick, so I do it off my initiative. I know I’m powerful as just one person.”
The reaction has been mixed; she explains: “70% of people will smile, 20% of people will be shocked but relatively positive, and 10% of people will give me a dirty look. One old lady at COP26 came up to me and said I’d be done for indecent exposure, and I explained that it wasn’t technically indecent exposure to show your breasts in public.”
Staying abreast of the law is vital to Laura’s campaigning. While her Extinction Rebellion comrades will shuffle around demonstrations handing out plastic-free flyers detailing protestors’ rights should they be arrested, she has to remember that: “The police can arrest you if you ‘show your genitals to cause alarm’, that’s the legal way of wording it. Women police [officers] tell me, ‘If you take your knickers off, we will arrest you straight away.’”
Male police aren’t always so polite; she says: “Once, I was walking away from a protest, clothed, and a group of police wolf-whistled me and shouted ‘get your tits out. It’s misogyny at the end of the day – women should be able to walk around the streets without harassment, for their looks or their body or anything. We should be able to be free in our bodies, free from harassment.”
Laura considers her protest as playing a part in liberating women from the “stigmatisation” of our bodies. She’s not the first female protestor to use her breasts to draw attention – both negative and positive – to the cause, though. In the 2010s, Europe’s Femen were perhaps better known for protesting topless and being led by a man than the anti-Putin and pro-democracy messages scrawled across their bosoms.
Laura insists that her form of protesting is directly linked to the subject of her protest. Echoing two UN reports stating the specific risks of climate change to “vulnerable” women and the fact one billion children are at “extremely high risk” of the impacts of the climate crisis, Laura explains: “Women and children are disproportionately affected by the climate crisis. Also, as a woman, someone who has been bullied quite heavily for doing sex work, I want to stand up and say it’s my body, my choice and nobody can shame me over that.”
Though Laura doesn’t want breasts to be treated as radically different from a man’s chest, she appreciates that they do give her leverage right now. Before protesting, Laura says, “I thought, what will draw as much attention with the assets that I have? Desperate times call for desperate measures. I wanted to draw that attention to Extinction Rebellion’s aims and causes and to make it on people’s radar.”
The logical conclusion for her was to use what she’s got to attract the attention of young straight men: “The kind of person that I appeal to is obviously a male in their 20s, 30s, potentially 40s, and they’re not really into the climate crisis. So I wanted to appeal to them, and to stand with my body and say I’m not going to be shamed. In fact, a couple of guys have told me that, because of my campaigning, they’ve gone out and bought an electric car.”
Is she at all worried that the prospect of her hanging her boobs up and no longer protesting nude might put men off of helping her cause? “Well, I have my OnlyFans that I’ll continue to post photos on! But I’d probably have to stop at some point when I get to forty when I get too old and saggy.”