“37% of French women have already experienced situations of non-consent”; “+ 21% of victims of domestic violence between 2020 and 2021.” The report of the High Council for Equality (HCE) on the state of sexism shows alarming results. But his recommendations, often above ground, are not reassuring.
On January 23, 2023, the HCE published its state of sexism in France, and its recommendations to contain it. From accepted measurements yesterday at the Elysée, “the regulation of digital content” or the establishment of a “National Day against sexism”. A way for Emmanuel Macron to very symbolically honor the priority of his first five-year term. Problem: most of the report’s recommendations are above ground, even marketing. The cause ? The report is based on the theory of the “continuum of violence”, a concept reappropriated and used here without scientific rigor.
This continuum, as defined in the report, is “the link between ordinary, benign sexism [aux yeux des hommes]and the consequences it arouses in terms of domination and violence”. In the article of Liz Kellyat the origin of the concept, and on which the report is based, the researcher specifies that her study, concerning only 60 women, “aims only to report on the experiences of the women interviewed and does not claim to have a general scope”. However, the scientific viability of a study requires a sample of 1,000 people on average. Others researchers pointed out the impossibility of generalizing the concept, because “ahistorical, asocial”. It takes into account neither the legislation in force on sexual violence, nor the social perception of sexuality and consent at the time of the events.
Moreover, the HCE distorts the concept when it prioritizes, in the name of this continuum, “acting on mentalities”, for example by “degenerating” toys. It establishes a link between exposure to gender stereotypes and acting out violence. However, this is not the point of Liz Kelly, for whom the continuum of sexual violence is the possibility that an act of moderate violence can lead to more serious acts. An aggressor can move on to “pressure, then coercion and use of force”. Continuity is established between degrees of violence perpetrated, and not between exposure to “masculinist” content and acting out. There’s no guarantee that playing with dolls will keep a little boy from being violent later on. Yet it is a priority of the report.
We therefore do not know if this continuum exists. But we continue to believe in it, to develop public policies on this basis, and to castigate “adherence to sexist stereotypes” at the origin of this “continuum of violence”. Thus, pornography is also in the viewfinder: we must “regulate digital content”.
Pornography, really a feminist priority?
However, more than twenty years of research in psychology and in cognitive sciences do not establish a link between the consumption of pornographic content and the exercise of sexual violence against women. Direct causal links are found only when subjects already exhibit deviant behaviors. Yes, pornography can traumatize, and create mental disorders, especially in the youngest. But there is nothing to say that it incites violence. Why make it a feminist priority?
In France, in 2021, 180,000 women were victims of physical violence, not counting those who were silent. Faced with such a serious problem, a little more scientific rigor and less ideology would be welcome. And this, while the HCE today is the institutional reference in terms of feminism, and influences both public policies and budgetary decisions.
So when the HCE deplores a discrepancy between “consciousness and action”, I also see it as the result of an ideologized feminism, bathed in theories according to which acting on representations is acting on the world. However, it acts only on consciences. Proof of this is that the filing of complaints for domestic violence has doubled since #MeToo “in a context of freedom of speech,” specifies the Ministry of the Interior. But the violence continues. Establishing “a national day against sexism” or “degendering toys” is like renaming Pantin “Pantine”: it awakens consciences (even tenses them), but does not neutralize an aggressor.