Actress Lea Seydoux was correct to call out the hypocrisy of some MeToo champions
The MeToo movement’s problem was that it made children of women, writes Donal Lynch
THE French, it is sometimes said, have different sexual mores to the rest of us.
They have a more laissez faire attitude to affairs — they invented the cinq a sept after all — and turn a blind eye to their politicians’ mistresses. Workplace flirting, which has subsided in the rest of the western world, remains rampant there — a recent French court case identified a “conflation of heavy-handed flirting and sexual harassment in the workplace”.
Perhaps it’s no surprise, then, that the French have also had a slightly different attitude to the MeToo movement. The godmother of French cinema, Catherine Deneuve, was one of the first to call it a “witch hunt” and her scepticism was echoed this week by one of her younger countrywomen.
Quietly, and mostly drowned out by the coronavirus din, Lea Seydoux told Harper’s Bazaar that she feels that some women have ‘‘taken advantage’’ of the campaign against sexual harassment in Hollywood and added that there was ‘‘hypocrisy’’ in the outrage since so many people knew what was going on. It was an extraordinary statement from a woman who had previously been a champion of the movement.
Had a man criticised MeToo, he would have been roundly condemned, as Matt Damon was, but Seydoux’s statements were met, mostly, with silence. This was all the more extraordinary given Seydoux’s own involvement with the movement. In
2017 she wrote a piece for The Guardian in which she described her first meeting with Harvey Weinstein in the lobby of the Hotel Plaza Athenee in Paris.
“It didn’t take me long to figure him out,” she wrote, “This was never going to be about work. He had other intentions — I could see that very clearly.”
Despite this knowledge, she made her way up to his hotel room with him. “It was hard to say no because he’s so powerful” — and there he tried to kiss her.
This was a horrendous situation. Obviously nobody deserves unwanted kisses — and Weinstein, in the end, got what was coming to him. But Seydoux, by her own admission, made the informed (since she well knew his intentions and reputation) calculation that it was worth following him to his room.
She went against the advice of her agent, who told her to maintain a distance from Weinstein. If she decided to do all this for career reasons, more power to her — we’re surely well past the point of shaming anyone who uses their sexuality to get ahead — but it seems a little rich to then turn around, when things went wrong, and pretend to be a passive actor in the whole terrible episode.
Belatedly, Seydoux herself seems to have understood this. She told
Harper’s last week that the headline
‘‘Harvey
Weinstein jumped on me’’ was
“all wrong” and added “I wanted to say that I don’t victimise myself, that
I was aware... I’m not naive, that’s all”.
Part of the problem with the MeToo movement was that it created a false narrative of victim and perpetrators by branding all women as martyrs. It denied the idea of female agency. It made women into children. Its revisionism has recast Monica Lewinsky, for instance, as one of the original MeToo martyrs. This is wrong. She may have been a victim of Kenneth Starr and the American judicial process, she may have been thrown under a bus by Clinton himself in his repeated denials of “sexual relations”, but at that moment of reciprocal lust in the Oval Office, she was not a victim, and to describe her as such does a disservice to the true victims of sexual impropriety.
Like Seydoux, she was fully aware of what was going on and her decisions were suffused with calculation. She even remembered to keep the evidence.
Like many wars, the MeToo movement did not allow for nuance — any attempts to set bad behaviour by powerful men in context was dismissed as victim blaming.
Perhaps now that Weinstein has been convicted and other notable men have paid something of a price for their indiscretions, there is room to discuss the grey areas. Seydoux was last week called “radical” for her observation that being a victim makes you a hero. “Come on,” she added, “a hero, for me, would forgive.” She called for the MeToo movement to become “less openly violent”.
In doing so she has moved the conversation on, and for that she should be applauded.