The risk to women and men in the #metoo movement
It wasn’t the drab black worn by actresses at the Golden Globes awards that bemused me so much as the Islamic level of chastity they displayed. Overnight they became nuns.
Imagine – clothes right up to the neck and down to the ground! Cleavage contained! Arms and legs covered! It was the uniform of a new religious order, prompted by mass conversion.
Was it a reaction to the ungovernable lust of men in show business, in which case we’ll get much more of it, or a misguided attempt at making us miss the hectares of flesh usually paraded at awards ceremonies? Misguided because it’s actually a bonus to see actresses fully dressed on special occasions. More usual is the shop window display of breasts, buttocks and legs that suggest lingerie, and – let’s be honest – bed. Tacky.
That isn’t glamour. Glamour holds something back. It’s advertising, and why clever and talented women do it, deadpan, is a mystery. It’s surely a universal rule that if you want to be taken seriously you keep your kit on, and don’t let it slide off.
This isn’t about blaming women when men behave badly, but it is a question whether the amount of simulated sex now required of actors of both sexes, for dubious plot reasons, has downgraded their work to the point where they’re judged by how physically desirable they are as much as by their ability to act. And that’s insulting.
The women wanted to express outrage at the men in their business who behave appallingly, part of a current process of naming names and getting even. In the process, though, they risk making any man who ever made a pathetic lunge a Harvey Weinstein, and every woman who was ever groped – surely all of us – a rape victim.
It’s this concept of victimhood that triggered a reaction from 100 eminent French women who denounced the #Metoo movement as puritanical, treating women as children, and denying their sexual freedom.
This was pretty rich, considering that in France the reverse happens; children are treated as women. Feminists there were outraged late last year over two adult men walking free after having sex with 11-year-old girls, one of whom was led away from playing on the street, and became pregnant. French courts refused to prosecute the men because a lack of consent could not be proved. As if – again insultingly – that was the valid point at issue. One case is being appealed.
Sex with children under 15 is illegal in France, but rape with younger children can only be proved if there was no consent, otherwise this is a relatively minor offence rather than statutory rape, which it would be in other countries. French feminists want the age of consent to be set firmly at 15, but the French justice minister has signalled that the limit could become 13.
It looks as if protection of children in this civilised country is seen as less important than the freedom of men to groom and accost primary school-age children, and you don’t have to be a prudish American to find that creepy and wrong.
That isn’t glamour. Glamour holds something back. It’s advertising.
Coercion because of relative status – age, workplace seniority – is seen by #Metoo as rape, but the 100 protesting French women don’t seem to agree. Instead, they suggest that they’re flattered by men who might be accused of, ‘‘touching a knee, stealing a kiss, talking of intimate matters at a professional dinner’’.
There’s a cultural gap here, as if French women pride themselves on scoring unwanted male attention, and can’t understand why other women – are offended by it. What they’re missing in their outline of gallant Gallic flurries is that they’re not talking about men like Harvey Weinstein or Roger Ailes, whose actions were beyond crude, and who relied on their ability to make or break the careers of women who rejected them to keep them silent.
They were more like the infamous Dominique StraussKahn, once a contender for high office in France, who forced himself on a chambermaid in a New York hotel. She was not flattered, but rightly furious, and rightly that was the end of anyone taking him seriously outside France.
There he probably still manages to be a self-styled libertine, the imaginary star of his own erotica, at an age when men would be better advised to take up dignity as a hobby, and hot cocoa before bed.