{"id":120691,"date":"2018-01-24T09:30:15","date_gmt":"2018-01-24T14:30:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=120691"},"modified":"2018-01-26T13:02:17","modified_gmt":"2018-01-26T18:02:17","slug":"french-libertines-reckoning-metoo","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2018\/01\/24\/french-libertines-reckoning-metoo\/","title":{"rendered":"How French Libertines Are Reckoning with #MeToo"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Henri Gervex, “Rolla” <\/em>, 1878<\/p><\/div>\n

It\u2019s no news to anyone that France has a historically masculine-centric culture. The great republican project of the Revolution left women out; in response to the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen <\/em>\u00a0(1791), Olympe de Gouges supplied her Declaration of the Rights of Women and the Female Citizen<\/em>. (When she got too mouthy, the Jacobins arrested and executed her.) Feminism here has always been articulated not as a philosophy of equality, as it has in Anglophone countries, but around a philosophy of difference. This has often resulted in essentialist ideas about women\u2019s experiences; as the feminist journalist and activist Lauren Bastide put it recently<\/a>, the universalist French feminist context \u201cis the opposite of intersectionalist feminism. You\u2019re never going to be able to say that being a black woman is different from being a white woman.\u201d<\/p>\n

Still, unlike the U.S., France has actually taken steps to address inequality between the sexes. The new Secretary of State in charge of equality between men and women, Marl\u00e8ne Schiappa, is actively trying to implement legislation against street harassment. And in 1999, for instance, a law was passed that specified that political parties had to submit an equal number of male and female candidates for office or lose public funding in proportion to the inequality. By 2012, only two parties had even slightly approached parity: the Greens and the Communist Party. And, more recently, Emmanuel Macron\u2019s En Marche! saw 40 percent women elected, which was a record. Macron himself promised when he was elected that he would make a woman prime minister, if he found someone competent. His choice for PM? \u00c9douard Philippe. It\u2019s just a question of competence ladies, nothing more. Enjoy your march.<\/p>\n

When I published a book here, I received the full Gallic treatment from two men connected with my publisher. These instances were, in their way, lovely little parables of French masculinity. In the first one, an author only slightly older than me sent me (uninvited, unreciprocated) dirty text messages. I found them kind of funny, in an \u201cOh, French men, so typical\u201d kind of way, and the fact that the sender was attractive didn\u2019t hurt, even if I had no intention of sleeping with him. He never touched me inappropriately or did anything else out of line.<\/p>\n

The other instance is, I suppose, a #MeToo moment, though I will not be \u201cnaming and shaming\u201d either man. Another, much older, more powerful man took it upon himself, one evening, in front of several other male authors, including the text-message Casanova, to grab my ass as we were playing pool. I was wearing a kicky little miniskirt, I leaned over to take my shot, and\u00a0\u00e7a alors<\/em>, a pair of hands is grabbing mes fesses, <\/em>right under ma jupe<\/em>! I made some kind of whooping noise and hit the man over the head with my pool cue. He roared with laughter. The other authors roared with laughter. I went through the phases of outrage: I was the Stereotypical Humorless Feminist. Worse, I was a Humorless American Feminist.<\/p>\n

I thought back to this experience the other day, as I was reading the now-infamous op-ed in Le Monde<\/em>, signed by Catherine Deneuve and ninety-nine other women, suggesting that unlike rape, such \u201cnon-events\u201d like ass grabbing are part of the \u201cfreedom to bother\u201d we all apparently enjoy in a civilized society. What happened to me with that publisher was sexual assault, in that it was uninvited, nonconsensual, and took place in a situation that was a clear imbalance of power. Still, as far as my personal pantheon of trauma goes, I have decided it was no big deal. But that\u2019s for me to say, not Catherine Deneuve.<\/p>\n

In the matter of sexism, things haven\u2019t changed all that much since 1949, when Simone de Beauvoir observed that \u201cthe vast majority of men \u2026 do not posit women as inferior: they are too imbued today with the democratic ideal not to recognize all human beings as equals,\u201d but \u201cas he nevertheless recognizes some points of inferiority\u2014professional incapacity being the predominant one\u2014he attributes them to nature.\u201d The supposedly fundamental differences between the sexes serves as the basis for the most brazen inequalities, from unequal pay to unequal treatment in the professional world. It\u2019s the reason why that powerful man in publishing thought he could help himself to my ass. And it\u2019s the reason why I knew it was pointless for me to tell anyone what he\u2019d done.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

There is a distinctly\u00a0American flavor to the #MeToo movement. The movement simply has not caught on in France the way it has in America, and perhaps this is in part because the movement is too reminiscent of American sexual mores, a \u201cpuritanism\u201c that Deneuve and her cosignatories specifically rail against. But they\u2019re also reacting to the ways in which this puritanism\u00a0has <\/em>begun to take hold on their own soil: the younger generation of French feminists is intersectional, savvy, and ready to rumble. A new generation of feminist writers, podcasters, academics, and activists is having its moment, and the older generation is all too aware of it. In some ways, the younger French feminists are even ahead of their American counterparts: the #BalanceTonPorc (\u201csqueal on your pig\u201d) hashtag was launched in France the day before Alyssa Milano created the #MeToo hashtag. And a week before the Weinstein story broke, there was already a debate underway in France about sexual harassment, and how we should talk about it.<\/p>\n

On September 30, 2017, a clash between a writer and a politician on a French evening television program launched a nationwide polemic. On the show, On n<\/em>\u2019<\/em>est pas couch\u00e9<\/em>, the former spokesperson for the Green Party, Sandrine Rousseau, was invited to talk about her recently published book about being molested by Denis Baupin, the vice president of the Assembl\u00e9e nationale. She is one of five women who have accused Baupin of assault, forcing him to resign. His behavior has apparently long been an open secret in French politics; he was known among his female colleagues, apparently, as \u201cthe octopus.\u201d The case was eventually dropped on the grounds that the statute of limitations on the complaints had elapsed. Baupin, for his part, has protested that he is just a \u201cmisunderstood libertine.\u201d<\/p>\n

Rousseau\u2019s book is called Parler<\/em>, \u201cto talk,\u201d and her vision for addressing sexual assault, as she articulated it on the show, was interactive, collective, action based, and political. Her book, she said, was \u201ca call to acknowledge that the subject of sexual abuse, violence against women, is still very taboo in our culture.\u201d She pointed out that when the Dominique Strauss-Kahn affair broke, the Socialist Party did \u201cnothing, there was no reaction.\u201d The Green Party, however, took action, putting in place a call center so that victims of harassment could speak with \u201cpeople who were form<\/em>\u00e9es pour accueillir la parole<\/em> [trained to listen to them].\u201d<\/p>\n

At this, one of the show\u2019s regular panelists, the writer Christine Angot, who has published her own personal accounts of sexual assault and incest, lost her patience and accused Rousseau of spouting nonsense. \u201cForm<\/em>\u00e9es pour accueuillir la parole<\/em>? I cannot hear this. Try to understand: I cannot hear this.\u201d She had a difficult time expressing what, exactly, she had a hard time hearing; she repeated herself, she repeated Rousseau, she trailed off, and then she powered back: \u201cI forbid you to say what you are saying! You cannot speak in the name of all women! You should speak only in the first person [v<\/em>ous auriez d\u00fb dire ‘je’<\/em>]. We can only speak of our own rape … There is no one to help. You have to get it through your head. There is no one who can understand.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cSo what are we supposed to do?\u201d Rousseau asked, in tears.<\/p>\n

\u201cOn se d\u00e9brouille<\/em>.\u201d We deal with\u00a0it. At some point during the exchange\u2014it\u2019s hard to know when, as it\u2019s been edited for television\u2014Angot stormed off the set as the crowd booed her. The producers had to convince Angot, who was also in tears in her dressing room, to come back on camera and finish the conversation.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

When this episode of On n<\/em>\u2019<\/em>est pas couch\u00e9<\/em> aired, I happened to be reading Virginie Despentes\u2019s essay collection King Kong Theory<\/em>, in which she describes her rape, at the age of eighteen, by a group of men from whom she and a friend had accepted a ride. A few years later, she writes, she was reading an article by Camille Paglia in Spin<\/em>\u00a0in which Paglia controversially asserted that women run the risk of being assaulted every time they leave their homes, and that if that\u2019s too scary for them, they should stay home with their mothers, manicuring their nails. Despentes\u2019s initial disgust at Paglia\u2019s article soon gave way to excitement. She was elated at seeing rape finally talked about in a way that didn\u2019t entrap women in a narrative of victimization. \u201cFor the first time, someone was valuing the ability to get over it, instead of lying down obligingly in the anthology of trauma. Someone was devaluing rape, its impact and its consequences. This did not invalidate any part of what happened.\u201d Devaluing rape is a risky thing to do. It may be seen as excusing the perpetrators, or, through minimizing one\u2019s own experience, as a means of indirectly invalidating those of other women.\u00a0But for Despentes it was a means of empowerment. In \u201cgetting over it,\u201d she deprived the men who\u2019d attacked her of their power to control or define her life.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Christine Angot (left) and\u00a0Sandrine Rousseau (right) on On n\u2019est pas\u00a0couch\u00e9.<\/i><\/p><\/div>\n

Over the course of the twenty-minute segment, Rousseau articulated a legal rather than a personal definition of consent, even when asked what her personal opinion was. It seemed the personal simply didn\u2019t exist for her in the face of the legal. Yet she also insisted on the importance of telling her own story. She saw the Green Party\u2019s call center as quantifiable progress. Angot retorted that you cannot appeal to a political party to do anything in this situation. So to sum up: For\u00a0Rousseau, the personal is personal, and must be valued as such, but it is also political, and legal, and must be treated appropriately in that forum. For\u00a0Angot, the personal is personal, and should stay that way. Talk about it if you want but don\u2019t pretend you speak for everyone else.<\/p>\n

Reading Despentes, I thought of Angot\u2019s on se d<\/em>\u00e9brouille<\/em> approach, parts of which were still baffling me. If Angot wanted to se d\u00e9brouiller toute seule<\/em>, then fine. But what about women who needed\u00a0others to forge spaces for them to speak? How could Angot\u2014in insisting each woman\u00a0only speak in the first person\u2014speak for them? Thinking about Angot and Rousseau\u2019s exchange now, after everything we\u2019ve seen and heard in the U.S. and France since this movement began, it seems to me that Angot and Rousseau represent two different visions of French society, the old and the new. Angot was born in 1959,\u00a0Rousseau in 1972. Angot\u2019s \u201cjust deal with it\u201d attitude hearkens back to a France that went out with the Minitel, where men are charming seducers and women pretend to like the boss\u2019s hand on their ass.<\/p>\n

When Despentes was raped, in the late 1980s, people still didn\u2019t really talk about what had happened to them. There were few books she could turn to. As she writes, \u201cthis crucial and fundamental trauma\u2014the very definition of femininity, \u2018the body that can be taken by force and must remain defenseless\u2019\u2014was not part of literature. Not a single woman who had been through the process of rape had taken to words to craft a novel out of her experience \u2026 Rape wasn\u2019t allowed into the symbolic realm.\u201d<\/p>\n

But it was. It just went by a different name: libertinisme<\/em>. The \u201cfreedom to bother\u201d that Deneuve et al defend so vociferously has a rich literary and cinematic history in France, from the Marquis de Sade to Georges Bataille to Deneuve\u2019s cosignatory Catherine Millet\u2019s erotic memoir La Vie sexuelle de Catherine M; <\/em>from The Story of <\/em>O <\/em>and Belle de Jour <\/em>to the recent Isabelle Huppert rape fantasy Elle<\/em>. Many of these works are daring in that they explore the way a woman can take pleasure in violent subordination. But as Nancy K. Miller, the author of French Dressing: Men, Women, and Ancien R\u00e9gime Fiction <\/em>has pointed out, though libertine literature is marked by the \u201cplayful pursuit of pleasure\u201d and the \u201cfree exercise of power,\u201d the power is never equal between the sexes. As she told the novelist Catherine Cusset, \u201cI think there is a tyranny of a certain kind of playfulness that benefits one group\u201d: men. \u201cIt\u2019s a very different game for women to play.\u201d<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

Over the course of their discussion, Cusset notes that the real appeal of libertine fiction may be the way it opens up a sphere of ambiguity: it \u201cescapes a strict moral system of values: it does not ignore the moral code but it plays with it.\u201d It is this sphere of ambiguity that I think explains why the genre is so popular in France, and why it didn\u2019t grow up in more puritanical cultures like England or America: in France, there has historically been more tolerance for not knowing exactly where one stands, for a certain flexibility in sexual relationships. This may have historically always favored the man, but it doesn\u2019t exclude the possibility of a female libertinage, in which the woman exercises the power\u2014even through her own submission.<\/p>\n

How we read narratives of libertinisme <\/em>comes down, yet again, to the question of who<\/em> is writing, or speaking, and how; certainly Deneuve and Huppert are speaking, in a way, through their characters in Belle de Jour<\/em> and Elle<\/em>, but those are films that were scripted and directed by men, based on novels by men. Works expressing a feminist libertine aesthetic by women, like The Story of O<\/em> or La Vie sexuelle de Catherine M <\/em>are less often greeted as part of this literary tradition and have to have their cases made for them (by men preferably); to wit, reviewing Millet in Bookforum<\/em>, Saul Anton specifies: \u201cThis book\u2019s pleasures are first and foremost literary.\u201d As if they might be, what, culinary?<\/p>\n

On On n<\/em>\u2019<\/em>est pas couch\u00e9<\/em>, things got surprisingly semiotic for an evening panel show. The famously acerbic author and director Yann Moix asked, seemingly in Rousseau\u2019s defense, if the key to their dispute didn\u2019t lie in the fact that Angot is a writer, and writers, he said, quoting Georges Bataille, are there to \u201cface down the impossible.\u201d On the other hand, Rousseau is a politician and therefore operates \u201cin another universe.\u201d \u201cThere are two ways of expressing oneself in society,\u201d he said: \u201cdiscours<\/em> and parole<\/em>,\u201d discourse and speech. If I\u2019ve understood correctly (it\u2019s been awhile since I\u2019ve been au fait<\/em> with Saussure, but I think it\u2019s been awhile for Moix as well), he seemed to be suggesting that writers create art (I guess this is what he meant by \u201cparole<\/em>\u201d?) while politicians speechify, or speak in policies and issues (discourse).<\/p>\n

Then it was Rousseau\u2019s turn to take offense. \u201cI can\u2019t listen to him talk like this, telling me I am speechifying. I\u2019m telling my<\/em> story here.\u201d Women telling their own stories, in forms like the diary or the letter, have often been looked down upon. Rousseau was maintaining her ultimate right to tell her story and to be taken seriously for it.<\/p>\n

The fact that neither side could really articulate what she meant, or what she was upset about in the exchange, indicates that when we have<\/em> to address these issues in legal, social terms, we don\u2019t have the language that we need to talk about sexual assault, and we may never have it. Angot has often written and spoken of the limits of language and the incompatibility between prose and speech. The outline of a story captures nothing, Angot said on another French television show<\/a> in 1999, after being asked to give a short summary of her book L\u2019Inceste<\/em>. She cannot describe what it is \u201cabout\u201d; the content cannot be paraphrased. If it could, it wouldn\u2019t be writing. \u201cI don\u2019t tell, I write,\u201d she said, patiently trying to explain the difference.<\/p>\n

At the end of the day, the question of literary merit was not the most important aspect of the On n\u2019est pas couch\u00e9<\/em> debacle, but I think it\u2019s striking that it came up\u2014it indicates that the real question is how comfortable we are willing to be with ambiguity. It\u2019s possible Moix wasn\u2019t reaching for Saussure but for Roland Barthes, who makes a similar distinction between parole<\/em> and \u00e9criture<\/em> (or \u201cscription,\u201d<\/em> as he prefers to call it). The parole<\/em> is more dangerous because it can be uttered quickly and not taken back, whereas the scription\u00a0\u201chas its life ahead of it.\u201d The scription raises questions that the parole tries to shut down by answering them.<\/p>\n

The role of art is to open up productive ambiguities, to pose questions of morality or of ethics rather than to prescribe answers. It is bad for art, and bad for a culture, to censure works of art, as in the recent attempt in the name of feminism<\/a> to \u201ccontextualize\u201d Balthus\u2019s Th<\/em>\u00e9<\/em>r<\/em>\u00e8<\/em>se Dreaming<\/em>. The best work uses the medium of literature or film to explore the relationships between power, freedom, and sex, not to dictate how we ought to feel about them.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

Living in France,\u00a0it sometimes feels like the men and women here are so invested in performing some libertine idea of Frenchness that they\u2019ve lost track of whether they really like<\/em> it. I remember being genuinely surprised, when I moved here, to find that that the rumors about Parisians are true: they really do have orgies and go to swinger\u2019s clubs. It\u2019s a pretty bourgeois thing to do.\u00a0There\u2019s even something upwardly mobile about it. Some of my friends have done it; one of my exes tried to get me to go to the couples-only Les Chandelles, which advertises itself on the Internet as an \u201cerotic boudoir\u201d and features on its website errant nonsense like \u201cnever forget seduction is like an unfinished painting.\u201d Their Twitter feed is full of illustrations of girls in nighties or photos of them in high heels and seamed stockings, Eyes Wide Shut<\/em> masks and bottles of champagne at the ready. But it doesn\u2019t look sexy and transgressive, just sort of tired, an empty set of signifiers.<\/p>\n

The famous \u201clook the other way\u201d approach to monogamy really does exist here as well, though whenever you see it played out in recent films or television shows it\u2019s always an issue, never something people are sophisticatedly taking in stride (see: any number of films with Charlotte Gainsbourg in them). This conflicted attitude toward monogamy in France has fascinated me to the point where\u00a0I\u2019ve spent the last decade writing a novel about it. It seemed linked, somehow, to this notion of libertinisme<\/em>, and to a French concept of sexual freedom that I suspected was only a myth but hoped was not. Marriage, I reasoned, was just as much of a construction, just as fetishized and mythologized.<\/p>\n

When I started my research, I began to collect issues of magazines devoted to l\u2019\u00e9rotisme<\/em>, le d\u00e9sir<\/em>, le libertinage<\/em>, art & sexe<\/em>. (French magazines are great at bringing together a bunch of different writers and documents on a given theme and calling it a dossier sp\u00e9cial<\/em>.) The December 1998 issue of Le Magazine litt\u00e9raire<\/em> is headlined Les libertins: s\u00e9duction et subversion<\/em>. It wouldn\u2019t do well in the VIDA count: of the twenty-one articles in the dossier, only one is by a woman (about male writers writing women at the fin de si\u00e8cle), and only one is about a woman (Ninon de Lenclos, a seventeenth-century writer and courtesan).<\/p>\n

As I work on the novel (slowly, in between other projects), I find myself wondering who benefits from all this freedom, if true freedom is really possible without anyone ever getting hurt, and if that means a feminist libertinage is impossible, or if not, what it would look like, and how we would even begin to describe it. But I\u2019m not sure we\u2019ve figured things out any better in the U.S., with our cultural preference for monogamy and our sometimes tolerant but often skeptical attitude toward, let\u2019s say, alternative sexual practices. It hardly needs pointing out that libertinage is, by and large, something men do to women.<\/p>\n

For Deneuve and her cosignatories, it must seem as if that libertine culture were on the wane\u2014and, in its departure, as if something really crucial to French identity were being lost. But the true spirit of libertinage is not that some guy gets to rub up against you on the metro: it\u2019s a tolerance for ambiguity, it\u2019s irreverence in the face of platitudes. In France\u2014or maybe just in adulthood\u2014I have learned that art and sex both need to be, on some level, transgressive, and that our conversations about art and sex require nuance. But I am afraid that the nuance and ambiguity are endangered at this moment. I am afraid that important phrases\u00a0like \u201cyou\u2019re making me uncomfortable\u201d and \u201cyou ignored my nonverbal cues\u201d are being reduced to self-righteous memes. When it rings true, the #MeToo movement is about laying bare power dynamics, giving vent to anger, validating experience. But where it goes awry is where it shuts down ambiguity. We can\u2019t just clamor for the stories, we have to allow room for them to surprise us, and trouble us. Desire thrives off risk, which makes it risky to legislate, legally or socially. We can\u2019t presume to speak for each other. Il faut dire je<\/em>, to paraphrase Angot: we have to speak in the first person, and keep encouraging others to speak in the first person, if we\u2019re ever going to level the field of play.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Lauren Elkin is the author of <\/em>Fl\u00e2neuse: Women Walk the City. She lives in Paris.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It\u2019s no news to anyone that France has a historically masculine-centric culture. The great republican project of the Revolution left women out; in response to the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen \u00a0(1791), Olympe de Gouges supplied her Declaration of the Rights of Women and the Female Citizen. 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