Elite France Has More Issues Than The National Geographic

Apparently the fine French actress, Catherine Deneuve, who has done a number of admirable things in her life, is championing the rapists, sexual assaulters, sexual harassers and other, assorted poor, put upon things who are being exposed in the past several months.  And it isn't the ambiguous cases she and apparently a group of French stars in popular culture and the pop-star culture academia that is a fixture in France.  As Noam Chomsky has pointed out, even the philosophers are media stars in the fashion driven culture of Paris.

The revered French actor Catherine Deneuve has hit out at a new “puritanism” sparked by sexual harassment scandals, declaring that men should be “free to hit on” women.

Deneuve was one of about 100 female French writers, performers and academics who wrote an open letter deploring the wave of “denunciations” that has followed claims that the Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein raped and sexually assaulted women over decades.

They claimed the “witch-hunt” that followed threatens sexual freedom.

“Rape is a crime, but trying to seduce someone, even persistently or cack-handedly, is not – nor is men being gentlemanly a macho attack,” said the letter published in the newspaper Le Monde.

“Men have been punished summarily, forced out of their jobs when all they did was touch someone’s knee or try to steal a kiss,” said the letter, which was also signed by Catherine Millet, author of the explicit 2002 bestseller The Sexual Life of Catherine M.

Men had been dragged through the mud, they argued, for “talking about intimate subjects during professional dinners or for sending sexually charged messages to women who did not return their attentions”.

The poor, put upon men..  Apparently Deneuve et al, consider "sexually charged messages which women elsewhere don't return" include groping, other physical forms of assault (some with violence) intimidation, threats, indecent exposure, being ejaculated on and, yes, being raped.

I would go farther into what was said, which you can read in the many articles about it online,  but I've got to go take an anti-emetic. 

While reading the several articles I read on it all I could think was that France was the country that invented the absolutely, disgustingly misogynistic Danse Apache, most gratifyingly and intelligently presented cinematically in the movie Ma and Pa Kettle on Vacation in which Ma Kettle intervenes, beating up the man to protect the woman who is being brutalized as entertainment in a night club.  Other than that it's pretty much pure misogyny in which all involved takes the liberté for the fraternité and says fuck all to the égalité.  From my understanding, occasionally such a dance is reenacted for the benefit of those who would like a deeper understanding of the great French cultural tradition, even now.

It's also worth remembering that France was a country where women didn't get the vote until 1945, which isn't that much worse than in the United States and other countries but it would seem to still lag way behind other countries in really believing women have a right to personal autonomy and integrity.   Again, that's not something that we can take much pride in, here.  American pop culture is full to the top with stuff as bad as any in French culture.   And, to tell you the truth, I remember hearing Brits complaining that Americans took such things "too seriously" as well.  Though generally that's more about race when they say it, but misogyny, too.

I really can't say the extent to which this petition for the right for men to harass and, apparently, to ejaculate on women, or perhaps to rape them - since men being held accountable for that is what the manifestation is complaining about, is a product of the secular side of French culture, something which is a major division of society there since the revolution.  It would be interesting to know more about the famous women who are signing onto something telling other women they should just take it in the interest of "liberty" in terms of that.   Paris has issues.  While there are many wonderful things in French culture, that isn't one of them.