Officialized by the United Nations in 1977, the International Day for Women’s Rights is, every March 8, an opportunity to take stock of the situation of women in the world. If some consider that this day is essential because it puts the problem back on the front of the stage, others consider that it has no reason to be.
It is not a day to celebrate women, but a day to highlight the struggles for women’s rights around the world. In many countries, their rights are still violated in 2022 and many of them are oppressed. Celebrating women has a sexist connotation, says Ibtissame Betty Lachgar, clinical psychologist, feminist activist and spokesperson for Mali in Morocco (Alternative Movement for Individual Freedoms). She laments the marketing side of March 8. ” We offer them flowers, gifts, we tell them that they are great mothers, wives, etc. In short, relying on completely sexist stereotypes! »
” What we demand on March 8 is what we demand every day. But symbolically, like all causes, it takes a day to highlight the cause we defend. We don’t want gifts, we want rights “. And Ibtissame Betty Lachgar to note that there is also no possible emancipation of women without deconstructing the rhetoric of the dominant. ” Women do not form a monolithic block. The plural is therefore appropriate to speak of “LA FAME” as she says.
Responsible patriarchy?
For the feminist activist, the demands of women are generally the same everywhere in the world: the emancipation of women beyond equality. If in France, for example, equal rights between women and men are legally effective, there are still inequalities in the field of pensions or equal pay. ” This day is made to denounce all laws and practices that undermine the rights and dignity of women in the world. “, she insists.
” The problem is that it is always the men who have dominated the women “. The countries where women’s rights are most violated, notes the psychologist, are those where the patriarchal system is most present, and in this regard, “ to varying degrees, all women in the world are affected “.
Capitalist patriarchy, the majority in Europe (one thinks of prostitution, surrogacy) but also religious patriarchy. ” All religions are misogynistic, that’s a fact. All religious texts are sexist and patriarchal. Therefore, in countries where religion prevails, women are oppressed. This is the case in Morocco, in certain countries of Latin America and Central Asia, in Israel.
” It saddens me to see that certain feminists, under the guise of cultural relativism, accuse me of Islamophobia or something else (about polygamy, excision, etc.) and who ultimately play the game of patriarchy, who put into practice the “divide and conquer” strategy among us. However, the oppressed cannot be divided. »
What about March 8 at the time of the “end of the sexes”?
In the era of transgender struggles, is a day devoted to women’s rights still defensible? Should we include transsexual women, who are also victims of violence? But in this case, what about transsexual men? And Ibtissame Betty Lachgar to retort with the right to abortion which does not concern them, just like gynecological and obstetrical violence, or even to mention feticides – one every fifty seconds – in India where the fetus is aborted from strength when it is female.
” So, for me, trans women are not women. If a man wants to identify as a woman, there is no problem. The problem is that we are talking about systemic and structural violence that is based on gender. We can’t compare ! We are still in the patriarchy, with trans women, who are men, who want to take over our struggle and who call us transphobes. » « March 8 or not, men always come out on top concludes Ibtissame Betty Lachgar.
■ Bérénice Levet, philosopher and essayist: “ Feminist discourse works to intimidate us »
RFI : Why do you think March 8 is meaningless? ?
Berenice Levet: The day of March 8 has less meaning than ever in the post #metoo world. Is there a single day of the year when women are not on the agenda? There are no rights that we do not already enjoy. It is the objective of victim rhetoric to justify one-upmanship: men, and our civilizations more broadly, would have contracted such a debt towards women that they would be in advance authorized to draw endless bills on Western and particularly French capital. Henry James brought this mechanism to light beautifully in his novel The Bostonians.
It is not rights that feminist activism demands, but the advent of societies which would no longer have any other horizon than that of individuals and their identities, gendered, sexual, racial identities… societies requisitioned by the issues of “diversity” and minorities. That France, which has in its wallet, that is to say in its history, the principle of indifference to differences, in other words, universalism, an abstract word but a very concrete thing, which bets on the freedom of side, which is not a freedom of uprooting, but the freedom to suspend one’s primary affiliations, that France not be the spearhead of a revolt against this confinement of individuals in the narrow circle of particular identities overwhelms.
The breakdown of our societies into communities whose cement is the lowest common denominator, sex – as we no longer say, preferring that of “gender”, since it would be understood that being a man or a woman is unsupported in nature, but pure constructions – sexuality (LGBTQI+), religion, should occupy and preoccupy us.
You talk about “bullying day”, that is to say ?
I don’t remember having called March 8 in particular a day of intimidation, it is the feminist discourse, sound and daily, which works to intimidate us, that is to say to make captive our thoughts and to delegitimize any criticism, any dissenting position.
In the 1970s, society as a whole did not speak the language of feminist activism, but today, which presidential candidates do not sacrifice inclusive language – the midpoint being de rigueur on each of the candidate sites of left, and the double inflection to the detriment of the generic masculine in all the discourses – if not those that we will qualify as far–right?
With what eagerness everyone assures that his film, his work serves the cause of women and anyone who ventures to express some reservations about the #meetoo movement hastens above all to proclaim that ” #metoo was necessary, that it is a very good thing, that the word having been released “. Perhaps it is the rebellious spirit that is sorely lacking today, but it is also that not entering into this rhetoric today comes at a high price.
The patriarchy would be the cause of all the evils of women, what do you think ?
Patriarchy is Molière’s lung. The key supposed to open the locks, the end of the story… Dreary plain that the feminist intrigue, the whole history of humanity and particularly of the West and even more particularly of France would consist in a great factory of victims, starting with women. ” The miracle of being does not interest ideologies “, concluded superbly, but not without spite, Hannah Arendt. The miracle of being is everything that does not enter into the Grand Narrative. Rather than encumbering itself with it, feminism ignores it, planes it, it pulls the thread and everything is ordered with a perfect coherence that is never observed in reality. It is therefore the real that feminism, like all ideologies, tramples…
Many feminist activists struggle to defend women’s rights around the world. Is it a vain fight ?
Not at all, however, our feminists are desperately absent in this area. They have, and this is serious, no sense of responsibility: when, like our Minister for Women’s Rights (admittedly before retraction), Yannick Jadot or Éric Piolle, they support sports hijjabeuses claiming to wear the veil in competitions, they forget that the women who fight in Islamist countries against regimes that impose it on them, these women look at us and count infinitely on us to continue to embody a civilization where faith, confession does not appear in public.
Secularism is not the freedom to live and in this case to dress as one sees fit, it is above all a magnificent demand for discretion – this beautiful common virtue, of living together, we does not show his self. But obviously, visibility is now a right and an obsession! I am who I am.
► Bérénice Levet is the author, among others, of Free us from feminism ! published by the Observatory coll. “Alpha test” and Ecology or the drunkenness of a clean slate, also published by the Observatory editions.