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ACTIVISM
Flesh: A love-hate kind of thing
BY CAMILLE DODERO

Flash a boob during the Super Bowl halftime show and you become the punch line of a Billy Crystal joke at the Oscars. Show a pair of boobs in Harvard Square, even with taped pasties, and you get mentioned on Saturday Night Live and tossed in the clink. Just ask the six animal-rights activists — PETA director Dan Mathews, four female PETA staffers and interns, and one Harvard sophomore — who last Monday at noon stripped to their undies and mounted a sheet-covered mattress in Harvard Square to protest fur as fashion. They waved glossy, heart-shaped cut-outs reading FUR OUT and LOVE IN. They coyly snuggled under a striped Strawberry Shortcake blanket. They playfully bopped each other with pink flower-shaped pillows and a greenish-blue stuffed animal. "We’re here because we care!" they chanted. "We’re bare in Harvard Square!" And then they got nicked.

Nearly 20 Cambridge police officers watched the spectacle, as did an incredulous yet intently focused crowd of photographers, television reporters, and one broadly grinning construction worker preserving the moment with a disposable Kodak camera. But after only about 20 minutes — and after a suited NECN reporter squatted beside the pajama-less party and rammed his microphone at Mathews — a Cambridge police officer asked the bare bedfellows to disperse. So Mathews rose, stepping away from the bed like a quarterback emerging from a game-day huddle, and led the five women into the intersection toward Harvard Yard. Before they could all cross the road, however, the cops hesitantly took the half-dozen demonstrators into custody, looking noticeably uncomfortable as they dressed the women in patterned hospital johnnies and escorted them to a paddy wagon.

The protest was not, as WHDH-TV reported, "part of a class project at Harvard." Rather, Mathews was in town to speak to the 588 students enrolled in Dr. Brian Palmer’s "Personal Choice and Global Transformation" course, which focuses on "how individuals can make a difference in a troubled world." Palmer’s 3 p.m. class, which Mathews didn’t make because he was behind bars until seven o’clock that evening, invites guests like radical thinker Noam Chomsky, writer Naomi Klein, and Harvard president Lawrence Summers to field student questions in a talk-show format. (See "Class Notes," This Just In, March 13, 2003.)

So Mathews decided to stage the protest while he was in town, inviting Palmer’s students via e-mail to participate. Although word got out, only one Harvard pupil hopped in bed: Kristin Waller, who planned to interview Mathews on the mattress as a quirky piece for H Bomb, Harvard’s brand-spanking-new literary sex magazine. Palmer, meanwhile, watched from the sidelines.

Mathews says he had no idea they’d get arrested. "It was a total surprise," he says on his cell phone from Harvard Square’s Veggie Planet, reached after his Tuesday-morning court appearance. In fact, PETA applied for a permit to hold the protest weeks ago. Mathews says they were led to believe it would be granted — PETA called every day, scaled back its original plan (which called for the construction of a giant bed), and even submitted a diagram of the mattress’s placement in the Harvard Square Pit — until an hour before the protest. "An hour before the demo, they called us and said, ‘You know what? Actually you don’t need a permit protest, you need a public-performance protest. So you can’t do it.’ By then I was like, ‘You know, fuck off.’"

"Just because somebody applies for a permit does not mean that you’re going to get it," says Cambridge Police Department spokesperson Frank Pasquarello. "I guess Mr. Mathews was upset because he had a class he had to teach. Well, if you have a class to teach, you should have the protest after class."

Mathews stayed in jail so long, he says, because the cops didn’t know how to charge the protesters. "I had loitering, which I don’t even know what loitering is." And he doesn’t believe the group actually broke any laws. "The girls had pasties on, I had SpongeBob boxers on, I was not blocking pedestrian traffic or car traffic. And when they told us to move on, we did. It was just odd." Making matters worse, other cities have been tickled by this same protest. "We’ve done these bed demos in Paris, Los Angeles, and New York," he says. "And the cops are usually cheering it along."

"This isn’t London, Paris, or New York," responds Pasquarello. "It’s Cambridge. And this is how we do things here."


Issue Date: March 5 - 11, 2004
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