In 2020, Caroline Fourest published the precursor Offended Generationwarning of the liberticidal tendencies of what was not yet called wokism. In The MeToo Vertigothe journalist and director examines with the same concern for nuances the “new sexual revolution” that has shaken our societies since 2017. The term “vertigo” is not insignificant. As the director of the weekly magazine points out Free-Shooter, The acceleration of the liberation of speech, encouraged by social networks, can be dizzying. After years of silence protecting the guilty, the multiplication of accusations has allowed rapists, aggressors and harassers to be exposed, but it has also, in passing, sacrificed innocent people and given rise to hasty convictions in the public square.
For Caroline Fourest, since the emergence of the #MeToo hashtag, we have suddenly moved from a “society of honor” to one of “purity.” In the first, shame rests on women, which plays into the hands of predators. Rape is a double punishment, since it is accompanied by dishonor that falls on the victim and her family. Conversely, in a society of purity, victims are placed on a pedestal and their words are considered truth, even if it means “binding incest or rape and clumsy sexual propositions in the same MeToo bag.”
“Servant’s dressing”
How did we get here? The essayist, who knows the history of feminism well, recalls that the liberation of speech began half a century before MeToo. In France, in 1970, Emmanuèle de Lesseps (a pseudonym) recounts in the magazine Supporters her assault by a law student. Awareness will be slow, but very quickly, the contradictions surface. In 1973, when a feminist activist dared to denounce the rape by a black immigrant, revolutionary comrades asked her to keep quiet so as not to play into the hands of racism. The same intimidation that Caroline Fourest will encounter when denouncing the Islamist Tariq Ramadan.
In France, in 2011, the fall of a favorite in the presidential election, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, is still analyzed from the angle of American puritanism and “servant’s rigging”. But the earthquake could only come from Hollywood. In 2017, the investigations of the New York Times and of New Yorker on producer Harvey Weinstein trigger a global explosion, under the banner #MeToo. Journalist Sandra Muller gives him a French response, #BalanceTonPorc, before giving the digital pack the name of a channel boss. What does it matter if this man’s smutty outing is very far from the Weinstein case…
Guidelines
With finesse, Caroline Fourest dissects several emblematic cases, from Nicolas Hulot to Roman Polanski, including Gérard Depardieu, Adrien Quatennens or the “Moscow trial” suffered by the producer Juliette Favreul, finally acquitted by the courts… An excellent guide, the journalist develops lines of conduct to try to find her way between the media storms. If we must no longer separate the man from the artist (and use “genius” as a pretext to turn a blind eye to assaults), it is however essential to continue to separate the man from the work, by never censoring the latter. If several victims accuse a man of serious and repeated sexual assaults and dare to file a complaint, there is generally no “smoke without fire”. On the other hand, let us be wary of political manipulation, like Julien Bayou, former national secretary of EELV accused of “psychological violence” by his rival Sandrine Rousseau, and who ended up resigning from the party.
Let us also be careful not to judge a MeToo according to our own ideological biases, or according to the identity of the accused. Caroline Fourest is surprised that the director Ladj Ly, convicted of a sexist kidnapping, has not aroused the same indignation as a Polanski. The book also dismantles the cliché of a supposed “French backwardness”, emphasizing that the United States will perhaps re-elect a man, Donald Trump, who boasted of grabbing women “by the pussy”, while feminism is making spectacular progress here.
There is no nostalgia in this universalist progressive, who much prefers to live in this “new world” than under “the old patriarchal regime”. Her book simply exercises an indispensable right of inventory to protect this revolution from its excesses, so that it does not end in Terror or provoke a reactionary backlash. It is also a vibrant plea for feminism to continue to create “warriors, and not just victims”.
The MeToo Vertigoby Caroline Fourest. Grasset, 314 p., €22. Published on September 11.
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