On January 5th, the New York Times published an op-ed called “Publicly, We Say #MeToo. Privately, We Have Misgivings.” It was written by a woman named Daphne Merkin, who is one of those Not-Those-Kinds-Of-Feminists who feels the need to publicly lament the strawman argument that #MeToo will lead to the end of flirting. It’s a dumb, bullsh-t argument. Men and women will still flirt, they’ll still make passes at each other, they’ll still meet each other via Tindr or whatever. Sex will still happen, and some of it will even be enjoyable. The conflation of “sexual predators need to be called out publicly” and “this will be the end of casual flirting” is a flatly dumb argument. It goes to consent, and the need to make our society in Consent Culture instead of Rape Culture. Every single person, male and female, knows there’s a difference between a coworker making a sloppy, drunk pass at you at a Christmas party versus Matt Lauer using his rape button to trap unconsenting coworkers into his locked office.

But in France, apparently this whole #MoiToo thing is a grave concern because flirtation is life over there, and why should victims of assault and rape come forward and speak publicly when it might mean that a few coworkers will think twice about inviting an intern up their hotel room. Or something.

A collective of about 100 women has signed an open letter published in Le Monde today rejecting what it sees as a new puritanism in the wake of the sexual harassment and assault scandals. “Rape is a crime,” the women write. “Insistently or awkwardly hitting on someone is not.” Lamenting that the #MeToo campaign has led to “expeditious justice” for men who “may have touched a knee, tried to steal a kiss” or “spoken of ‘intimate’ things during a professional dinner,” the women further say they “defend a freedom to importune, which is indispensable to sexual freedom.”

Among the signatories, who include a number of doctors, sex experts, journalists and artists, the most famous name is Catherine Deneuve. Art critic and “The Sexual Life Of Catherine M” author Catherine Millet is also there. The women write that “as a result of the Weinstein affair there has been a legitimate raising of awareness of sexual violence against women,” notably in the workplace. “This was necessary,” they say. “But this liberation of speech is turning on itself: People are being intimidated to speak in the right way or to stay silent on what makes them angry. Those who refuse to comply with such injunctions are looked upon as traitors, accomplices!”

The #MeToo campaign, the group says, has led to “denunciations and public accusations of people who, without giving them the possibility of responding or defending themselves, have been placed on exactly the same level as sex offenders. This expeditious justice already has its victims, men sanctioned in their job functions, forced to resign, etc, while their only wrong is to have touched a knee, tried to steal a kiss, spoken of ‘intimate’ things during a professional dinner or to have sent sexually suggestive messages to a woman whose attraction was not reciprocal.”

This has led to a “fever to send the ‘pigs’ to the slaughter,” which the opinion piece contends is “far from helping women to empower themselves,” and rather “serves the interests of the enemies of sexual freedom.”

[From Page Six]

Among their other grievances, they are worried that all of this Me-Tooing will lead to “a hatred of men” because wouldn’t that be the real crime? They’re also bitching about the censorship of…Roman Polanski, because how many women have come forward now to say that he abused, assaulted or raped them when they were children? Here’s the part where I should play devil’s advocate and say that maybe, buried deep within this manifesto, they have some semblance of a decent point. But they don’t. Literally no one is saying “I hate it when I’m at a bar and a guy offers to buy me a drink, #metoo.” No one is saying that women have to assume the role of victim – women are saying they were victimized and traumatized by certain men, and they’ve only just recently felt like the world was ready to listen to them. This feels like a female-led backlash, going from “Believe women” to “Women need to shut up so they don’t alienate all of the alpha he-men who want to flirt with them.”

Photos courtesy of WENN.