#Metoo feminist backlash against Catherine Deneuve
French women rights activists denounce Catherine Deneuve’s open letter that men are being unfairly targeted by sexual misconduct allegations.
Catherine Deneuve and other critics of the #Metoo movement against sexual harassment sound like “the tiresome uncle at the family dinner” who does not understand that the world is changing, leading French feminists say.
Deneuve and 99 other women this week signed a column in the newspaper Le Monde that argued that the #Metoo movement amounted to puritanism and was fuelled by a hatred of men.
Their column struck a radically different tone from that of Monday’s Golden Globe Awards ceremony at which Oprah Winfrey and major Hollywood figures backed #Metoo and other initiatives to fight gender inequality and sexual assault.
Italian actress Asia Argento, who was among the first to accuse Harvey Weinstein, led the backlash, tweeting: “Deneuve and other French women tell the world how their interiorised misogyny has lobotomised them to the point of no return.”
A group of leading French feminists also excoriated Deneuve in a counterblast letter, branding her and the other signatories as “apologists for rape”.
“With this column they are trying to build back the wall of silence we have started breaking down,” feminist activist Caroline De Haas and some 30 other women said in their own column, published by franceinfo TV’s website.
To say that #MeToo was puritanical and driven by a “hatred of men” was “contemptuous” of the victims of abuse and harassment, the feminists insisted, accusing them of trying to “slam back the lid” blown off by the Weinstein scandal.
They claimed most of the women who signed the letter to Le Monde were “recidivists in defending child abusers”, a reference to film director Roman Polanski, who Deneuve has supported in his long fight against extradition to the US on rape charges.
‘Their world is disappearing’
“Their letter is like a tired old uncle who doesn’t understand what is happening,” the feminists said. “The (male chauvinist) pigs and their allies have reason to be worried. Their old world is fast disappearing,” they added.
The Deneuve letter had complained that “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.”
It was also signed by Catherine Millet, whose explicit 2002 memoir, The Sexual Life of Catherine M., was a defence of libertine lifestyles.
Reaction on social media was equally vociferous. The letter’s assertions that being “fondled on a metro... was a non-event” to some women, and a man’s right to hit on a woman was fundamental to sexual freedom, sparked particular fury.
“Catherine Deneuve might have very different opinions about harassment if she weren’t an extraordinarily beautiful, very rich white woman living in a bubble of heightened privilege. And had some empathy,” tweeted New York Times cartoonist Colleen Doran.
America novelist Laila Lalami said such thinking was “the clearest explanation yet of how men like Woody Allen and Harvey Weinstein lasted.”
“Would Catherine Deneuve be rushing to the defence of men who ‘try to steal a kiss’ if these men had been North African?” she added.
But not all were hostile. American academic Christina Sommers, author of Who Stole Feminism?, said Deneuve was calling out “the excesses of the #MeToo crusade”.
In the aftermath of accusations against US movie producer Harvey Weinstein, millions of women took to social media to share their stories of being sexually harassed or assaulted, using the #Metoo hashtag worldwide or #SquealOnYourPig (#balancetonporc) in France.
But 74-year-old Deneuve and the other signatories to the column said the #Metoo movement had gone too far, defending what they termed as a right for men to “pester” women. They said this was essential to sexual freedom and that women could be strong enough “not to be traumatised by gropers in the metro”.
“It’s dangerous to put it this way,” Gender Equality Minister Marlene Schiappa told France Culture radio, saying the government was already struggling to convince young women they are not to blame when someone gropes them and that they should go to the police to file a complaint when it happens. Schiappa told Reuters last year that she believed the Weinstein scandal would force a rethink of attitudes towards sexual harassment in France.
Reuters
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