When in January 2024, Sylvie Pierre-Brossolette, as president of the High Council for Equality between Women and Men (HCE), submits her sixth annual inventory on sexism in France, she is applauded. I am always very circumspect about these reports, which invariably prefer to give priority to the patriarchal drama which has been going on since the dawn of time, a sort of conspiracy of all men against all women, without any possibility of progress.
This is the case with the salary gap between men and women, which for equal positions and working hours amounts to 5.5% (according to INSEE and not a group of dangerous far-right masculinist trolls ) and 15.4% for all positions combined (again according to INSEE). The only figure worth tackling to improve the wage gap is 5.5% since there is room for comparison, therefore for reflection and potentially for a solution. But it would seem that the neo-feminism which holds the upper hand prefers high brackets and patriarchal impasses to the realities which flatly note that 66% of French magistrates are women – among other examples. What should be celebrated as a victory is obscured to continue to bring into existence professional neo-feminists whose sole job is to reduce feminist advances to nothing in order to continue to make a living from it.
We don’t redo biology
Thus, when the HCE points out the sex of toys considering that offering “sexed” toys transforms women into mops and men into dangerous predatory virilists. I have a smile on my face thinking of the results of a study carried out by two American ethnologists for fourteen years on chimpanzees in Uganda and finally published in the journal Current Biology, showing that young primates all play with sticks but the females like to carry them, rock them, like dolls… A few years ago, young monkeys in captivity were offered toys of all kinds and, to the astonishment researchers, the females rushed towards the dolls, the males towards the tractors. We are not redoing biology, which absolutely does not mean that playing with a child’s doll will precipitate you as an adult towards the abyss of gendered despair.
According to the HCE: “More and more young men consider that it is difficult to be a man in today’s society or have the feeling of having been treated less well because of their sex .” The report also observes greater adherence to “masculinist” clichés, particularly among 25-34 year olds. And perhaps instead of deploring this inconceivable sexism by blaming it on… – on what again? – we could see that boys are studying less and less; and that being told from primary school that they are monstrous human specimens is not exactly the best solution for eradicating clichés and allowing the emergence of a feminism for all, where resentment, distrust even hatred of the opposite sex would have no place.
Power struggle at HCE
But despite all this neo-feminist and counterproductive molasses, that Sylvie Pierre-Brossolette is at the head of the HCE is reassuring. This historic and universalist feminist, who refuses ideological dogmas, is today the subject of a power struggle relayed by complacent media which list the attacks of six employees (of the 120 in the HCE), against their president , presenting her as racist, homophobic, Islamophobic, harasser, etc.
We can only remember Annie Le Brun (whose Flammarion editions are reissuing her excellent Who lives)in 1978, on the set of Bernard Pivot, who already spoke of “Stalinists in petticoats”: “The fundamental question is to put an end to the screaming packs of which our era has shown itself to be so fruitful, in establishing this climate of continual recrimination, of systematic suspicion of the other. Because I know that there are women who are really struggling and who are scandalized by so many impostures and stupidities, but who do not say it in the name of the women’s cause. So that, for me, is ideological terrorism, this kind of silence.”
Abnousse Shalmani, committed against the obsession with identity, is a writer and journalist
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