Catherine Deneuve in 1999. Photograph by Georges Biard.
Every revolution has a counterrevolution. We push a pendulum away from us and it comes back to us with equal force. That’s just physics.
And, as it turns out, politics. A pair of Catherines – actress Deneuve and writer Millet – have joined with 100 Frenchwomen to sign a letter in Le Monde stating that #MeToo has gone too far. They want men to be treated fairly. They don’t want women to appear as wimps. And, most of all, they don’t want sexual freedom curtailed. The “freedom to bother” – as in a man bothering a woman – is “indispensable to sexual freedom.”
Let’s take these points one at a time. No one wants to see men – or anyone – treated unfairly. Injustice for one, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said, is injustice for all. And yes, as people of common sense and good will we must recognize that, like autism, sexual harassment has a spectrum. And there’s a good deal of difference between a clumsy overture and rape.
But the stories that pervade #MeToo are not of the “Why won’t you go out with me?” variety. They are horrific tales of degradation, manipulation and coercion that women endured out of fear, confusion and dread as well as sheer frustration with a system that failed them.
These women were not wimps. They took and took and took the abuse. Now some critics are saying they waited too long. Yet had the women reported the abuse, they risked loss of jobs, children, lives even and one thing more: They risked being derided as “victims,” which is what Deneuve is accusing them of turning women into.
She and her fellow signatories would have the abused understand that “hitting on someone insistently or awkwardly is not an offense, nor is gallantry a chauvinist aggression.”
Again, going back to our spectrum, there’s a great deal of difference between “You are as brainy as you are beautiful” and “I’m not going to let you out of this room until you agree to go out with me.” Insistent and awkward behavior is not gallantry.
And, I’m sorry, but there is no such thing as absolute freedom – sexual or otherwise. People can’t walk into the subway naked and start masturbating without being arrested for public indecency. Even acknowledging that people have different degrees of tolerance, there are certain things that are just not done. And it’s not even a question of moral or immoral. Rather, it’s about what’s appropriate or inappropriate.
Nor can we say that you are free to do what you want in private. No one is free to molest a child. Civilized societies acknowledge that children are not mentally (or physically) mature enough to give their informed consent for sex. They are not, then, free to make the choice.
Has there been collateral damage in #MeToo? No doubt. But the vast majority of men who’ve lost their prestigious positions have acted completely inappropriately for a long time. And they were sacked by the very patriarchy they once supported and that has cost women in alarming ways.
Eventually, a pendulum stops swinging. It finds its equilibrium. It finds its center.
It doesn’t happen at first, however, but rather at last.