Salman Rushdie, happily alive and joking as soon as he wakes up, should remind us how much we are in danger, how much our freedoms, our rights, our ways of life are the target of Islamism – which is totalitarianism. In the torpor of a scorching summer, the attempted assassination of Salman Rushdie should have been a kind of cold shower. A Western awakening, an intellectual takeover, a democratic leap should have occupied the media and private space.
As the war in Ukraine continues and the dead pile up; while the geopolitical order is being reshaped, while Russia and China are consolidating their leadership at the head of the so-called countries of the South, while the energy crisis may give birth to serious social crises in the West; whereas to remedy this we are going to have to get our hands dirty and trample on precisely why we support the Ukrainians, namely democracy, freedom, individual rights, by turning a blind eye to authoritarian and draconian governance, such as the military- corrupt Algerian; while we once again left a free hand to Recep Erdogan, the neosultan, under the pretext of validating the entry of Sweden and Finland into NATO, who has already begun to pound the Kurdish positions – our so precious allies so cowardly abandoned – in the north of Syria, and which calls for the extradition of Turkish and Kurdish political refugees in Europe; while the far right, the real one, is about to take the reins of the Italian government, what occupied France was to know if a man could be pregnant – I sell you the fuse right away, the answer is no . The world is burning in all directions, and France is debating the non-existent womb of men.
Family planning, this institution which has done so much for women’s rights to control their bodies, which has enabled adolescent girls and women to have access to contraception and abortion, has been plagued by militants from obviously out of school in fifth grade. Don’t get me wrong, dear readers, that the fight against transphobia is legitimate, that it is inadmissible to refuse a job, an apartment, access to a restaurant to a transgender person, okay, but no, the men cannot be pregnant. It is neither insulting, nor reductive, nor mean to say it or write it. The pregnant man is a woman who has kept her feminine reproductive system and whose envelope is masculine. Hormones can change a person’s appearance, voice, body hair, muscle mass, but they cannot make a man grow a uterus. It’s impossible. Biology is not an ideology in the hands of far-right reactionary dominant white males who measure the size of the clitoris and penis at birth and randomly decide the sex of babies – as we can read on the Planning website family, for whom “a penis is a penis, not a male sexual organ”. No, a man cannot become a woman, nor a woman a man, which in no way erases the reality of transidentity.
Women have integrated for millennia the hatred of their body, of their feminine being. As the veil covers the shame of being born a woman in this body which can only be temptation and sin, the neofeminists surf on this ancestral hatred of women towards themselves – it is not surprising that the neofeminists support the veil, this act of erasing the body of women from the public space. Thus, any sign of femininity is seen as an allegiance to toxic masculinity, any trace of lipstick as patriarchal domination, any stiletto heel as a negation of the brain. These debates have always existed, what is surprising is that they reappear today, even though feminism has won, that a feminine woman can be at the head of a big company and that it is not you no longer have to look like a man to be taken seriously. But neo-feminist hatred for women knows no bounds, so much so that the word “woman” should be erased. The only remedy for this ideological delirium is once again laughter. Let’s laugh at this madness, let’s laugh at these new women who tremble with indignation at the overpowering sound of heels clicking on the asphalt, but kneel in front of dad’s suits and ties.