When women win, 3rd wave feminists sulk. You have to understand: it’s their business and the only source of their inspiration. The bourgeois has always been bored, civil rights acquired, motherhood tamed, sex available, diplomas in hand, bank account full, children in trombone lessons, (natural) swimming pool, climbing, husband in cleaning – it’s her turn – she’s going around in circles. Beauvoir always fell from her hands, she never reached the chapter which reminds us that hetaries and courtesans were our feminist ancestors. It’s too bad. We might have escaped the long cry of pain that came from the depths of time “when women were not given meat” (this is a fake news).
And here she is standing, the woman, proud to have seen, with the sacred eye of the witch which gradually awakens, what the State, the father, the husband, the brother, the son, the teacher, the priest, the comrade, the historian, the teacher, the student, the boss, the passerby, the janitor, all men, at one time or another, with a look, a gesture or a word have subjected, since the ancestral gesture of man oppressing woman – always refusing her meat so that she remains smaller and that he can dominate her for the rest of time – to impose his point of view, her penis, her musculature, her art, her ideas, her religion, her music, her language, her letters, her words, her capital letters, to dominate her in everything forever and ever.
But the witch woke up within her bourgeois comfort – an additional ruse to lull the power of women dominated, oppressed, suffocated, under the terrible yoke of the immortal patriarchy. Suddenly, memories flood in: the kindergarten kid who stole her a drooling kiss marked her with the scarlet letter. From that day on, her body has been subjected to patriarchal violence and all of this explodes in front of her, with a clarity that almost surprises her: she didn’t know she was so brilliant. She laughs. Of course she couldn’t know: she was dominated.
“We won”
Okay. I’m exaggerating – barely. I compile more than I exaggerate. Feeling being fashionable, let’s say: it’s my feeling. I’m teasing, I admit, but I’m celebrating a great victory: we won. In the West at least. In France, particularly. Everything is not acquired, nothing is ever acquired elsewhere, vigilance is required, but in a generation or two the victory will be total with a bonus: we perhaps did not expect to dominate with one arm .
The time is one of weariness, sometimes of despair, the revealing pandemic has exposed deadly individualism, taboo death, the fractured social contract before our eyes. So let’s look forward to two books that complement each other to offer something to take a deep breath and get excited about the incredible progress of feminism. Tristane Banon bets on The peace of the sexes (The Observatory), refuses the status of victim, analyses, without ideology, without exaggeration, while remaining firmly rooted in historical and legal reality, notes equality in the law and proposes to roll up our sleeves to apply what is already acquired by sweeping away the dust of what still hinders, all without making man an enemy. By proclaiming: “I am a woman, I am not a victim, I have been, these things pass”, Tristane Banon castigates the masters are victimization, who are only ambitious women who have sniffed out what it takes to climb the ladder of power.
One can be exasperated by Emmanuel Todd, one can refute a number of his theories – like the “zombie Catholics” of the demonstration for charlie of January 11, 2015 – but with Where are they? the anthropologist offers a serious, invigorating and scientific analysis, substantiated and dispassionate of the victories of feminism. While women were excluded from learning, they are now in the majority in higher education, which they do better than men; while the legal status of women sanctioned inequality, they now mastered all the tools of emancipation. Women are no longer creatures inferiorized by law, custom, mentalities. And if every woman who dies under the blows of a man is one death too many, the reality of awareness and the figures say how much progress is stronger than postures that slow down.