THey publication of an important ‘Investigation into Violence against Women in France’ in 2001 prompted a backlash in France from all directions, targeting feminism. Books and noisy manifestos, with approval from obsessive media, called feminism a ‘scam’, a factory for the ‘victimization’ of women, accusing feminists of ‘weakening’ men and transforming them into the ‘passive objects’ of their ‘new masters’ (1).
Critics questioned the seriousness and extent of violence against women and, as one, took the report to task for indiscriminately lumping together different forms of violence. The authors of the first such study in France were accused of putting psychological, physical and sexual harm in the same category of domestic violence (2). Some sleight of hand was at play, detractors said, a wish for reparations: feminism encouraged a victim mentality, and its goal, and result, was to oppress men, the innocent party.
One could query what leads some women who loudly call themselves feminists to bother about male drubbings in the name of scientific rigor when what is really at stake is the misery and despair of the majority of the world’s women. Are they unaware of the huge power of men over women, and a socioeconomic superiority that means women make up most of the unemployed, minimum wage-earners, part-time workers (83%) and those with fixed-term contracts (60%) ? Not to mention discrimination in hiring, career development and exclusion from large companies’ senior management. The result is a poverty rate of 80%.
The critics seemed unaware that male domination is at the root of violence, real or symbolic. Once widespread, it’s a religious and cultural norm that is still tolerated. A violent man stakes out his territory and reminds us that he holds the power, a link between virility and sexuality (3).
Diverse and universal
Violence against women is diverse and universal, and can even be one of the extreme ways in which the sexes relate within a couple, as acknowledged by the 1993 Vienna World Conference on Human Rights. In Beijing, during the Fourth UN World Conference on Women (1995), the attending governments committed to set up reports to fight against such violence and support its victims.
Today’s accusers put the victims of domestic abuse in the dock, women who know only too well that there is no boundary between different forms of violence, except on sterile police reports. It goes from relentless interrogation (‘Where were you when I called?’) To explosions of contempt that are then internalised (‘You’re ugly’, ‘You’re dumb’) to a push or a slap. That can be followed by a beating and capped by sexual assault. It’s a continuum of violence. Women say it’s just different versions of the same thing, and the same pain, of being denied existence as a human being.
In this report, it might have been preferable to separate (as far as possible) the results according to different forms of assault. But its foundation remains the same: the existence of male domination that ‘incorporates properties of virile man, constructed in opposition to woman, into the definition of human being’ (Pierre Bourdieu).
The feminist ‘plot’ is taking place at a time when men (whose rights include that to a ‘prostitutable’ woman) are put on trial everywhere by abolitionist feminists who deny the existence of liberated sex work. Some of these women would even wish (Quelle horreur) to penalize clients, as in certain countries (4), and their ‘right to pleasure’. They think the market, without demand, will see supply run dry.
Killing the woman in the woman
Certain books and manifestos by self-proclaimed feminists (it would be interesting to know their titles and acts in the field of feminism) affirm that one can prostitute oneself freely and for pleasure. They forget that those who once said the same thing, like Ulla in the 1970s, today admit to having lied in order to ‘corporatise the profession’. ‘How could you have believed us?’ they ask, astounded by such ignorance. No woman, absent a particular taste for certain sexual relations, would freely sell her body… No one would accept being reified, consumable, becoming an object among others. Prostitution is the apex of a woman’s lack of power over herself. It kills the woman in the woman (5).
Certain prostitutes can resign themselves to it with time. Have they become free as a result? None forget that solitude and misery pushed them out onto the pavement. ‘Worse than an enslaved soul is a resigned one,’ Péguy might respond. I fear that these signatories, all privileged intellectuals, have been fantasizing over Catherine Deneuve’s role in Luis Buñuel’s Belle of the Day (1967).
Do our detractors recognize the existence of sexual harassment against women? I’ve often worked on such cases. It reduces those we are defending to drowning women. Sick leave, antidepressants, the difficulty of supplying proof, the enforced silencing of colleagues – their wish to preserve their dignity costs them dearly. Advising them to remedy their situation by slapping the culprit is evidence of a baffling misunderstanding of the rules of the workplace.
Elizabeth Badinter speaks of a ‘masculine impulse’ and mocks ‘feminist militancy’ that believes itself capable of ‘bringing it to heel’ (6). She accuses feminists – which ones and which organizations? – of ‘curbing sexuality’. One may conclude that only men have overpowering impulses, and that these are furthermore a matter of identity for them. And never mind women and their own identities.
Man + woman = humanity
Here we reach the major logical contradiction of this kind of thesis. The die-hard universalism of our accusers does not mind swimming in the troubled waters of differentialism. As long as each sex remains within its ‘universe’, an understanding will arise between them. Feminists – stop trying to bar the way to men’s ‘impulses’! You are responsible for ‘male malaise’.
This argument is antifeminist by nature and objectively reactionary, and tries to obfuscate the fact that feminism, through its struggles, has created the basis of important social change, bringing more justice and more equality.
But that is not all. The feminist ‘plot’ has even managed to impose parity. It has defeated republican universalism. This is not the place to rehash that debate. It should suffice to recall that a universalism that has, for more than two centuries, excluded women from citizenship, then from sharing political power, has proven its misogynistic ‘differentialism’. For this false universalism, we can substitute a double universalism. Man + woman = humanity.
Sinking into puritanism?
According to their indictment, for good measure, we are said to be sinking into puritanism and a new moral order – this to feminist movements and personalities who have led and won the fight for choice in giving life (contraception and abortion). To those among us who have signaled the dissociation of procreation from love – that is to say, the right to pleasure. To we who have requested, and obtained, the abolition of all discrimination against homosexuals (7).
From this process of evidence-gathering emerges the general accusation of segregation, hatred, war of the sexes, citing American writers such as Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon for support. Not translated into French they remain part of a society and a transatlantic feminism that is radically different from the situation in France. French feminists have never wanted to exclude or get rid of men. Their general societal program is mixed. Men must come to a ‘theoretical understanding’ of their liberation through our own. We will convince them. And the process by which we are deemed guilty is just the denial of a cultural fact: the specificity of French feminism.
Did our critics want to warn us against possible slippages? That may be the (very limited) usefulness of their words. Was it necessary, in order to do this, to rehabilitate, through a ‘masculinist’ discourse, the stereotype of the castrating woman?
Or did the success of some feminist struggles worry them? I like this African proverb very much: ‘When people begin throwing rocks at a tree, it is because it is bearing fruit.’
Translated by Lucie Elven in 2020.