Harvey Weinstein is not French, Cyrano de Bergerac is

I wish it were true

This is what many conservative French female journalists want us to believe after the #balancetonporc onslaught.  This French hashtag can be freely translated as “rat out your pig” or “denounce your creep”.  The # went viral in France and many women went public, revealing their sexual harassment experiences.  A recent poll indicates that 53% of French women claim to have been harassed at work.  For rightwing editorial writers and politicians, this outpouring is a leftish rage.  A conservative female politician argued that grivoiseries or male sauciness (lewd remarks) was part of the French DNA!  Journalists like Natasha Polony, from the rightwing daily le Figaro claims that Harvey Weinstein is not French (true) because French men don’t behave this way (is Dominic Strauss Kahn already forgotten??).   In an editorial titled Vive la virilité (no need to translate!), Polony argues that French people are not prudish, puritanical and moralistic like the Americans, they enjoy life and joie de vivre.  She warns the French not to follow the US mores, admonishes them not to start an American-style sex war, where women and men face each other in opposing camps.  She takes the defense of the normal guy, in other word the fellow who works for or with alpha males like Weinstein, and feels denigrated by the situation.  These normal guys are courteous, gentlemanly, fair, modern Cyranos de Bergerac; however, the problem is that these normal men shut up like Quentin Tarantino, Mat Damon and George Clooney. 

                                                                        #balancetonporc Too much bad publicity

And there are the normal women who witness their sisters being harassed and do nothing.  I wish that Polony would write another editorial on this subject, and I suggest a title: Vive la solidarité!  No translation needed.  For many editorialists, this explosion of emotional disclosures is a fad, and a dangerous loss of Gallic identity.  In France, the country of the insouciant shoulder shrug, many commentators predict that the flood of sexual harassment stories will ebb like Macronism. 

Polony gets on my nerves, and when I read her stuff my blood reaches the boiling point. 

Now, I can share a short story which could be titled Looking for the Normal Man.  Once upon a time, there was a female geologist in her mid-thirties who had been promoted to a new challenging job in a small developing country.  She had been warned that her future boss was an apparatchik from a Communist country who might not totally fathom the intricacies of capitalism in mining.  Too bad, she had not been alerted that apparatchiks don’t kindly accept dissent from their underlings.  She was therefore shocked when he grabbed her and requested intimate overtime with him.  Obviously, she pushed him off and rejected the offer on the ground that he was a married man, her boss and she had already a boyfriend.  The last excuse being incorrect, she had to rush to find a protective boyfriend.  

The duty station was a small port city blessed with a large pool of suitable men.  Luckily, the smart manager of a large construction project was available and receptive to the charm offensive.  Parading with a six-foot hunk of a man in front of a short, portly middle-aged guy was probably not the way to sooth a bruised ego and a needy libido.  Physical demands stopped, but retaliations were quick to come.  Additional work was dumped on her desk, petty rebukes and micro-verbal aggressions became permanent, and firing threats were made.  When a headquarter supervisor was informed, he requested patience and claimed that nothing could be done against an apparatchik.  Anyway, it was her voice against his.  Normal men who could have helped were nowhere to be found.  She took it in stride and fortunately the project work yielded positive results which were attributed to her efforts.  Junior staff noticed and rallied behind her.  Work-wise, the apparatchik was increasingly out of his depth, he became frustrated and despondent.  He alleged lack of funds to let her contract lapse.

Coincidentally, a new job was available in another country.  Was it a reward for her good work or a delayed acknowledgment of the harassment?  Later one, the supervisor claimed that she was an assertive lady and her performance had been positively evaluated.  This story took place in the mid-1980s, the protagonists were all Europeans and the sexual harassment episode had only raised a shrug.  As the Weinstein scandal unfolds, it seems that little has changed.  The old patriarchal system is alive and well.  The Droit de cuissage (the lord’s right) persists, and this privilege is tolerated by underlings.  Women still need a male protector to fend off unwanted sexual advances, but he does not help to evade the other more insidious forms of harassment like persecution in the work place.  One could claim that women have gone a long way because they can now pocket hefty cash payments from misbehaving supervisors.  This is a cynical macho statement.  These women are paid off to keep silent and they are paid only because they have some degree of leverage to begin with.  They are making themselves complicit with the system and the less fortunate preys have no recourse. 

Regrettably, in a way Polony is right, French men are not clones of Weinstein or Bill O’Reilly[1]: they haven’t yet paid tons of money to silence their victims and accusers.  They just shrug the accusations off.

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[1] The ex-Fox News commentator who kept his job with a US$ 100 m new contract even after his employer paid $ 45 m to silence his female accusers.