The paradox of French feminism
What does it mean when the feminists want to put the brakes on #MeToo?
The contradictory nature of French feminism never ceases to bemuse me. Take this weekend: at the same time that thousands of women were marching throughout France and Belgium to protest sexual violence, prominent feminist writer Caroline Fourest was promoting a book arguing that the #MeToo movement has gone too far.
In her book “MeToo Vertigo,” Fourest laments that the accused are found guilty on social media before they have had their day in court and that minor accusations are given the same weight as more serious ones, thus causing real aggression to be taken less seriously.
While Fourest has a point—there have certainly been people who have gravely suffered due to false accusations—there are nowhere near as many of them as there are women whose lives have been irrevocably damaged by sexual harassment or assault. And, given that 51 men are currently on trial for raping Gisèle Pelicot while she was drugged and unconscious and another 30 have yet to be identified, the timing is, at best, off.
In an interview on France Inter radio, journalist Léa Salamé asked Fourest if such excess is not simply the price of change. “Of course some heads will fall that perhaps shouldn't have, but that's revolution,” she said other feminists have argued. Given where we still are, isn’t it just “too early” for a book such as this, Salamé asked.
Indeed, even as I was listening to the replay of Fourest’s France Inter interview with Salamé, I could hear the crowd that had gathered at Place de la République making its way down the boulevard in front of my house. “We are all Gisèle,” the protestors chanted. “Rapist, we see you. Victim, we believe you.”
While it may be true that some people come forward with unserious accusations, they are far from the norm. Indeed, 90 percent of women who are raped in France don’t press charges, Magali Lafourcade, a magistrate and secretary general of the National Consultative Commission on Human Rights, told the Associated Press. Even when women do press charges, 80 percent of cases are dropped, Lafourcade said. That a person like Fourest, one of the most widely known feminists in France, would argue that #MeToo has been taken to an extreme in the face of such statistics boggles the mind.
And yet, the incoherence in French feminism is not Fourest’s alone. The very word is problematic for many women here. A few years ago, I was having lunch with a friend who used to be a publishing executive and now runs her own business. She is as empowered as any woman I know. But over salads she told me that she did not consider herself a feminist. “Do you believe women should have equal pay?” I asked. Of course she did. “Equal rights?” Again, she answered in the affirmative. “Equal opportunities? Representation?” Yes, and yes. By every metric that mattered, she was a feminist. But she categorically rejected the label.
We are all raised on a normalizing diet of patriarchy and misogyny that can make it difficult for us to recognize them at times, even as women. I have considered myself a feminist since my teens, but it was only in doing the research for “All the President’s Women” that I began to really see how deeply systemic those things are. Writing that book both sensitized me and radicalized me. I understand, then, the blind spots that many women have; I surely still have many of my own. I do find, though, that French women are overall less likely to recognize something as sexist than are American or British women.
I got a glimpse of that shortly after my arrival in Paris nine years ago. I was working for a media outlet where the men’s room was designated by a drawing of Albert Einstein and the women’s by one of Marilyn Monroe. “Why is that a problem?” a few French colleagues asked during my incredulous rants. My Anglo colleagues needed no explanation.
One evening as I was banging on about the bathrooms yet again, a young French colleague pulled a sticker out of her bag that said “sexist” in big red letters and slapped it over the picture of Monroe, where it stayed for the next few days. About a week later, I came in to work and saw that the sticker had been removed. “Some French guy have enough of it?” I wryly asked the British man who was working at the desk next to mine. “No,” he replied. “A French woman.”
That’s not to say that feminism doesn’t exist in France. It has its roots here and it continues to flourish in certain circles, particularly among the young. And, while France certainly does better than many other countries—including the US—when it comes to gender equality, it still came in at an unimpressive 40th place on the World Economic Forum’s 2023 Global Gender Gap Index, between Liberia and Belarus.
Contradiction is, of course, part of the human condition. Even Simone de Beauvoir, the grandmother of second-wave feminism, prolific author, winner of numerous literary prizes, and overall icon, referred to her male partner when defining herself, saying that her longstanding relationship with philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre was the greatest achievement of her life. Gender relations are not clear-cut.
Some things, though, are unambiguous. Those rape statistics. That people should not drug and invite men to sexually assault their wives. That women still don’t have the same power in society that men do. The list goes on. Until those things are rectified, the argument that the #MeToo movement has gone too far is premature.
Thanks for this interesting post. This woman you mention is not at all a réflection of what French feminism is. Actually almost no feminist activist in France agrees with her, and to me she is the incarnation of anti-feminism. I wish she didn’t get all that media attention and we heard more the many women who really fight for women rights.