Journalist Larissa Nolan on why the #Metoo campaign will do nothing to advance equality
Wthe Year.
Step forward Catherine Deneuve – the only internationally famous female who had the courage to stand up and say what every woman of reason was thinking – #metoo has descended from a vital international reckoning into an anti-sex crusade.
The fear was borne of the inevitable backlash from a feminist movement that had lost its way – replacing tolerance with tyranny, dialogue with shouting down and reacting furiously to anyone who didn’t agree with their orthodoxy.
Feminism had eaten itself – and Deneuve stood in front of the world and called it out.
The iconic French actress risked a loss of career and reputation by leading a group of 100 women in academia and the arts in writing a truly revolutionary public letter in newspaper Le Monde.
It said #metoo had started as an awakening to sexual violence, but had descended into a puritanical witch hunt that had created a totalitarian climate that “unfairly punishes men, infantilises women and undermines sexual freedom.”
She pointed out: “Far from
Garrison Keillor helping women become autonomous, it serves the interests of the enemies of sexual freedom, religious extremists, and those who deem with Victorian morality that women are children.
“What was supposed to liberate voices has turned on its head – we are now being told what to say and what to stay silent about.”
PE’RE only halfway through January and already there’s a clear winner for Woman of
redictably, those she stood up against threw out their usual trite response of attacking her as being either mad, or bad, labelling her as a “rape apologist” who was suffering from “internalised misogyny”.
She was disparaged as old andout-of-touch – apparently those fiercely opposed to sexism are fine with ageism.
Deneuve gave a crusading figure to the majority women who do not want to demonise males, or see the sexes divided into men as predators and women who are victims.
Those of us who do not believe in scaremongering, hysteria and summary justice.
It was the moment the tide turned in a world that had lost its mind – not, in fact, treating women like equals, but delicate Catherine Deneuve flowers who could never be insulted or offended, would never lie and must be implicitly believed at all time, according to the policy of the nonsense: “I believe you before you open your mouth” brigade, who spit in the face of the presumption of innocence. The consensus of women being oppressed by men was becoming accepted as fact. But we aren’t, not in the West. What was offensive was the narrative “fragile” women were under fire from a relentless male backlash.
Feminism has come so far in the past 50 years – thanks to our mothers and grandmothers’ generation – that all the major battles have already been won.
But we couldn’t be told anything anymore, for fear of offence. If being given special treatment and patronised is seen as a win for feminism, it’s a pyrrhic victory.
T18TH CENTURY PHILOSOPHER
Bad things happen when good men stand by and do nothing EDMUND BURKE