Dose of sense from the French

WHILE the women of Hollywood wallowed in post-weinstein self-pity, in France, common sense seems to have broken out.

In a letter to the Le Monde newspaper, actress Catherine Deneuve — along with 100 female actors, writers and academics — decried the MeToo ‘witch-hunts’ that, they claim, have unleashed a wave of ‘ sexual puritanism’ that now threatens their freedoms. ‘what began as freeing women up to speak,’ they write, ‘ has today turned into the opposite — we intimidate people into speaking “correctly”, shout down those who don’t fall into line, and those women who refused to bend [to the new realities] are regarded as complicit and traitors.’ Merci, mesdames. I could not have put it better myself.