THE QUEEN OF SEXUAL LIBERTY
IT HAS been the most explosive social media movement ever, a hashtag that has been shared millions of times, shaken the worlds of politics, business and showbiz and ended the careers of some of the world’s most powerful men.
But now a “manifesto” published in French newspaper Le Monde, signed by 100 French women including authors, psychologists and intellectuals, has denounced the #MeToo campaign as a “puritan” movement that “chains [women] down in their status as eternal victims”.
Leading the backlash is actress Catherine Deneuve, the 74-yearold star of films such as Belle de Jour, Indochine and Repulsion, muse of Yves Saint Laurent and the lady once voted “the world’s most elegant woman”.
Madame Deneuve and her co-signatories do not pull any punches in their scorn for #MeToo. “Insistent or clumsy flirting is not a crime, nor is gallantry a chauvinist aggression,” they write. “As a result of the Weinstein affair there has been a legitimate realisation of the sexual violence women experience, particularly in the workplace, where some men abuse their power. It was necessary. But now this liberation of speech has been turned on its head.”
The open letter goes on to contend that while genuine sexual assault should be punished, the #MeToo campaign is out of control, leading women to label every unwanted advance or inept chatup attempt as some sort of crime. “We defend a freedom to bother, indispensable to sexual freedom,” they write, adding that women should be “sufficiently farseeing not to confuse a clumsy come-on and sexual assault”. The letter was published on Monday just a day after the Golden Globes ceremony in LA was described as a triumph for #MeToo, with a speech by Oprah Winfrey hailed as a “feminist battle cry”.
FOR Deneuve, who in the 1960s found fame playing a series of aloof, mysterious beauties for directors including Roman Polanski, François Truffaut and Luis Buñuel, the movement, far from empowering women “in reality serves the interests of the enemies of sexual freedom, religious extremists, the worst reactionaries and those who believe in the name of Victorian morality that women are children with the faces of adults, demanding to be protected”.
Those leading the campaign are “arguing for the protection of women... in order to chain them down in their status of eternal victims, of poor little things under the power of male chauvinist devils like in the good old days of witchcraft”. And perhaps most controversially Deneuve’s manifesto declares that the hashtag has led to a campaign of baseless public accusations. “This expedited justice already has its victims,” it states. “Men prevented from practising their profession as punishment, forced to resign etc, while the only thing they did wrong was touching a knee, trying to steal a kiss, or speaking about ‘intimate’ things at a work dinner, or sending messages with sexual connotations to a woman whose feelings were not mutual.”
Deneuve has immediately come under fire with some accusing her of “wilfully insulting” victims of abuse and actress Asia Argento, who was one of the first women to accuse disgraced Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein of sexual assault, describing Deneuve as “lobotomised”.
Psychologist and dating coach Jo Hemmings, however, believes that, while the letter “has gone too far in the wrong direction”, it does also contain some serious points. “I think that the problem with any popularised campaign is that it can evolve into a bandwagon or a witch-hunt,” she says. “And there is a danger that what’s happened with #MeToo is that it has made every man who has ever tried to comfort a woman with a hand on her shoulder or made a silly suggestion to someone they fancied whilst drunk feel culpable – and that’s not what it was supposed to be about.”
However, she also argues that Deneuve’s letter is too extreme. “I’m sorry but ‘trying to steal a kiss’ or ‘sending messages with sexual connotations to a woman whose feelings were not mutual’ isn’t OK actually,” she says. “She’s right that men should be allowed to flirt with women – and I certainly wouldn’t want to live in a world where men felt they couldn’t even make eye contact without worrying about being seen as some kind of predator – but she is wrong about where the line must be drawn.”
If Deneuve found fame partly for her extraordinary beauty, she has over the course of 100 films and a 60-year career also gained immense critical acclaim both as an actress and supporter of liberal causes. Her letter concludes: “A woman can, in the same day, lead a professional team and enjoy being the sexual object of a man without being a ‘promiscuous woman’, nor a vile accomplice of patriarchy.”
And while Jo Hemmings recognises the feminist truth of that statement she believes that Deneuve is nonetheless being slightly disingenuous.
“I don’t know a single woman who couldn’t add herself to the #MeToo hashtag if she wanted to, owing to some sort of unwanted advance in their past that they had most likely simply brushed off,” she says. “But while older women might have had to deal with that it doesn’t follow that younger women should today. I don’t think it’s very fair for Deneuve to say, ‘I put up with it all right so why can’t you?’”