Robin Hölzken | Hicham Riad | Elle Belgium Mai 2012 | Smart Sensuality Values Expressed

 Each morning I think of Hicham Riad’s fresh images of new model Robin Hölzken, feeling like the White Rabbit saying “I’m late, I’m late for a very important date!” Hicham sent these Smart Sensuality rich images to me right before the April 28 War Against the Women rally around America. 

Robin represents the best Smart Sensuality values in these images: smart, sexy and spiritual with heart. Stylist Anne Rabeaus selects kindred-spirit fashions, on location near Zanzibar. Robin’s hair and makeup are by Vasko Todorof @Dominique Models.

Robin looks considerably more sensually ravishing than Melinda Gates, on the ground in Africa, gearing up for the fight of her life. Gates has declared war on Catholic bishops who insist that women in poor countries have no access to family planning and birth control.

FINALLY, we have a powerful woman on our side of this critical equation because we can’t bear the suffering of women bearing 10 children they cannot feed.

I was in White Rabbit mode again last week after the rally, not collaping but gearing up to fight for progressive women in the November elections — de facto Democrats but I’d love a Republican woman on our team.

Will Women Ever Inhabit Our Own Bodies?

Again I apologized to Hicham for the delay in posting his editorial with commentary — which the images deserve.

Hello, Anne. No problem, there is no emergency for the pictures … the emergency lies in the activities you do that defend women … I saw the video of the flogging, I was shocked and above all I felt that I could not remain impassive in the face of this violence against women….

Photography with more sensuality, and repossession of women about their own bodies, their own lives…

Last night I wrote my asylum testimony for the brave man now in my physical orbit, the man who sent me the flogging video files after they came down repeatedly on YouTube. It was my role to stabilize the video files on AOC, until the major media could get to it.

My friend is stunned to be in America now, witnessing the growing assault on women’s reproductive health in here. “It’s all the same issue,” I tell him and he agrees. Hicham just summed up the situation as well. 

When my Sudanese activist friend’s legal status is secure, we will all move out aggressively together — including Lubna Hussein, the journalist who first brought global attention to this hideous reality for women in Sudan by inviting 500 journalists to her own flogging.

Until then, I am glad to have a new friend in Hicham Riad. It’s purely poetic serendipidity that his editorial follows Eric Guillemain’s, who also understands and supports the method to my White Rabbit fashion madness on behalf of the world’s women.

I am so moved when the support for my efforts and authenticity comes — not from the women I work with — but from strangers like Eric and Hicham — and many more photographers, of course. Your support inspires me, giving sustenance to fight harder for women’s rights to self-actualization, wherever we live on Planet Earth. I am humbled and grateful for your support.  ~ Anne