Here is the letter in French:
You can use Google to translate–or perhaps someone has found a good translation?
I think the letter has a lot of merit; although the problem of course is when the man is in a position of power over the woman.
100 female French writers, academics... negative on new “puritanism” sparked by sexual harassment...
It seems to be a propriety thing. France in general has a famously different attitude towards sex and relationships than America or Britain, and most of the women signing this are wealthy elites over a certain age, coming from an era where they see their relationships differently. It’s possible they refuse to admit they weren’t in control, or they simply have no comprehsnion of what others are living through.
I am no expert, nor a woman, that’s just how I’ve seen others interpret this unusual response, and I think I see their point.
It’s certainly worse when the man is in a position of authority, but I’d extend that to cover all situations where the contact between the two is non-voluntary. Being constantly hit on by a co-worker or a customer (especially if you’re in a public facing role) can be just as unpleasant and uncomfortable, if the work culture is that you should just suck it up and be flattered, honey.
If you agree to go out for lunch with a colleague and he spends it trying to hit on you, that seems kind of fair enough. Maybe you thought it was just a business lunch, but there’s definitely a grey area where he could reasonably have interpreted that as a sign of interest. But too many guys do just regard being female and in their presence as a sign of interest, and while flirting isn’t and shouldn’t be a crime, it can be very unpleasant if it’s unwanted, persistent and you can’t escape it.
Flirting shouldn’t be treated as a crime, but flirting persistently with someone showing no sign of interest in a situation where social or work rules discourage or disallow the object of the attention from getting away should be treated as what it is- unpleasant and damn rude.
I suspect your average writer or academic isn’t often in a situation where their job requires them to be nice to random people. They’re not working as a receptionist or on a checkout, and they’re not getting hit on by guys with poor boundaries on a daily basis.
“Flirting” is not the same thing as sexual assault or harassment. People who don’t know the difference should sit this one out. Yes, this means that men can’t “steal a kiss” or pinch a bottom. Too damn bad for them.
I don’t give a shit if Catherine Denueve thinks I’m a prude.
Cack-handedly?
Men is not being gentlemanly, men is being jerks.
I can haz cheezburger.
Yes.
And I think so many people fail to take into account the fact that women have been steeped in the idea that their worth is in how attractive they are to men. It’s taking a while to turn that ship, and women of a certain age may never get there. That’s okay, we’ll keep on keeping on without them.
Oh, please. Of course women have always tried to be attractive to men, they benefit from it. And there’s not a damn thing wrong with that, whether you’re a man or a woman! And if you think you’re ever going to turn that ship around, I’ve got all of human history and a multi-billion dollar makeup, modeling and movie industry that says you’ll never get there.
But self-worth isn’t the issue behind Denueve’s statement. It’s the fact that the ilk is trying to criminalize, or at least punish with career loss and ostracization, behavior that might be annoying at worst and welcome at best (depending largely on the looks of the, ahem, perpetrator), with the result that an even greater wedge is being driven between the sexes.
I’ve seen it stated on this board (just once, thankfully) that looking at a woman with obvious sexual interest is itself a form of sexual assault. People on your side of the aisle often have good intentions and worthwhile goals, but you never know when to stop! Rape, sexual assault (genuine, that is) ruining women’s careers, etc. is terrible and should never be tolerated. But it’s getting to the point where people think a compliment or come-on is sexual harassment and worthy of termination, and that is absolutely ludicrous.
I think there is a potential for post-modern sensibilities about relations between the sexes to gravitate back to a weird kind of puritanism. ‘Puritan’ tends to be a bad word but old sensibilities about sex had in their favor general logical consistency, keeping in mind people who weren’t married weren’t supposed to be having sex. In the post-modern neo-puritan view it’s fine for any pair or group of people to have sex at the drop of a hat if consenting adults. It gets trickier to overlay on that principal a highly restrictive code of behavior, especially just for men.
That said, as has been pointed out by one poster or another on every thread on this general topic, the actual stories of men ‘brought down’ in #me-too are usually guys grabbing women’s erogenous zones in ostensibly business situations, sometimes outright raping them. Or demanding sex under threat of career damage, etc. Crowds of people tend to get carried away. That’s a basic fact of human nature. The crowd can surely and probably is in some cases and respects getting carried away about this, proposing codes of conduct that don’t make logical sense, again especially starting with the assumption that all adult consensual sex should be socially acceptable. But the celebrated cases themselves recently don’t typically* demonstrate the crowd getting carried away. They have mainly been about guys way over any reasonable line of conduct.
*a few have raised my eyebrows, for example the writer Ryan Lizza getting canned at The New Yorker magazine for one case where the employer won’t say what it is. But it seems most of the publicized cases of politician/celeb/media people involve repeated and clearly egregious behavior.
But punishing people with career loss and ostracization is okay when it occurs under a system of sexual favoritism? People who refuse to be subjugated should have their careers ended?
Sexual harassment hurts everyone. It damages the entire economic system. The basic principle of the free market is that everyone should be able to compete and those people with the greatest talent will succeed. But sexism interferes with the process. It says that people will not succeed in professions for reasons that have nothing to do with their abilities. They’ll fail because powerful people in the profession will act as gatekeepers, excluding some of the best people either because they do not have sex with those gatekeepers or simply by making the environment too unpleasant to work in.
When a talented person is told they don’t belong in an engineering field, they suffer by losing a job opportunity. But the rest of us suffer because we lose the technology they might have developed. When a talented performer refuses to have sex with an executive and doesn’t get a job, the rest of us are denied the performance they would have given. Sexism is about powerful people putting their own self-interests above the interests of their organization, their profession, and society as a whole.
Obviously the people who have gained power in this system will defend the way the system works. Their interests are being served. But the rest of us have no reason to defend their system.
I don’t believe I said anything that would lead to this conclusion. I stated very clearly that true sexual harassment is among the things not to be tolerated, and clearly career-ending punishment for not going along with sexual propositions qualifies as sexual harassment. My point is that complimenting a woman or asking her out is not harassment, and yet these days such behavior can result in job loss or ‘career ending’ consequences for men. My secondary point was that this situation is ludicrous and is what Catherine Denueve is speaking out against.
This is the whole problem with ‘witch hunt’ complaints like the one in the OP, or the one - I haven’t seen anyone proposing a “highly restrictive code of behavior”, especially one “just for men” (or “just for men interacting with women”). Like you point out later on, none of this is based on minor behavior blown out of proportion, it’s for really egregious stuff. The idea that “giving women a choice between ‘have sex with me’ or ‘never work in this industry again’ is bad” leads to something that can reasonably be called ‘puritan’ doesn’t seem to be based on reality.
Seriously, how many men would be perfectly cool if a larger man who was interested in you followed you into the parking lot and got between you and your car to ask you on a date? What if a guy just came up to you and started massaging your shoulders or smacking your ass? Hell how many guys will even comment on how pretty another guy looks in the office?
If you consider not doing that stuff a ‘restrictive code of behavior,’ you’ve already embraced a restrictive code of behavior, you just don’t apply it to women from men. And if you do think it’s perfectly cool behavior, you’re in a definite minority.
Can you point to some evidence that this is actually happening, or is it just bald assertion not based in reality? I mean, sure if you make compliments like “Your ass so so perfect, I’d love to shove my dick in it tonight” you’ll have problems, but that’s a little different than the “I like your new haircut” or “Good job on the Michaelson account” that ‘complimenting a woman’ implies.
I think what this does illustrate is that “dismantling the patriarchy” is not the relatively simple task of “getting men to stop oppressing women.”
Women themselves do a bang-up job of supporting and upholding the patriarchy.
There are plenty of things that men need to change on their own right now. But the rest of it we’ve got to figure out together. The narrative that women as a class are universally oppressed by men as a class is useful in some ways, but ultimately is going to get in the way of progress.
You ain’t kiddin’. Look how many women voted for Trump. :mad::mad::mad:
100 French women need to prepare to be Pitted! Oh noes!
The letter explicitly defends persistent and “cack-handed” attempts to seduce somebody. If somebody keeps telling you they want to fuck you, even after you’ve told them you’re not interested, you feel that doesn’t qualify as sexual harassment? Even when that somebody is your boss? (To keep it interesting, your boss in this scenario is Kevin Spacey not Catherine Denueve.)
They do seem to be seeking to narrowly sandbox what is to be considered “sexual harassment” or assault. Hey, sure, I can see opposing adoption of an absolute-Zero-Tolerance, no-statute-of-limitation policy, and wanting more narrowly drawn lines to distinguish between conduct that deserves just social disapproval or mockery, and that which deserves punishing consequences that will hurt.
** But**, call it fairness or justice or respect for dignity, it should* not* be considered “paying your dues” to tolerate being subjected to churlish behavior that disregards your boundaries and autonomy, any more than it should to endure bullying or having to let slide casual bigotry or quietly watch people with the right parents be hired over more-qualified you. Even if not every instance rises to the level of deserving a firing or blacklisting, it should not get dismissed as “well, that’s just the way it is, suck it up, get over it”, to let the offender keep going at it, either.
Certainly, it can be argued “men being gentlemanly” (I suppose the more on point translation would have been “chivalrous”) does not constitute per se a macho attack. BUT to me, “persistent and cack-handed attempts at seduction” sounds quite un-gentlemanly (plus it makes me wonder, then persistent* but suave *attempts at seduction would be just fine?) .
Also, so there is this group of notable women in French cultural/media circles for whom it’s no big whoop to just laugh off the persistently cack-handed, as just everyday life. I’d wonder for how many women not in their sphere it may it be a wearying grind they want something done about. What’s French for “check your privilege”? (OTOH at least they went ahead and disagreed for the record, I get the feeling many here in the USA who did not particularly care or even thought the old way was to their advantage only now are falling all over themselves to show how MeToo they are…)
Well said.
So one post constitutes an entire ilk?
Do you need a safe zone?
Yes, you say you’re anti-harassment. But then you perpetuate false claims about the current anti-harassment movement, claiming it’s about looking at women, complimenting them, or asking them out. None of the people who have been disgraced by this movement have been kicked out for such, so that claim is false.
So, while you say you’re anti-harassment, you’re actually fighting to stop the current anti-harassment movement. As are these women.
The only thing holding back my condemnation of the women is the statistic of how many women have been sexually harassed. It is possible at least some of these women have been have been harassed themselves and only say it’s just “flirting” or whatever to keep from breaking down. Still, these women are making things worse for everyone by spreading this myth.
And it’s something that always happens. When has their been moves for progress that we haven’t had some people who say they are fine with the current state? There were women who claimed they didn’t want equality with men. There were slaves who said they appreciated their masters.
We didn’t let that stop us before, and I see no reason to let it stop us now.