Catherine Deneuve was one of more than 100 French women to sign a petition last week “rejecting” the #MeToo movement. Their petition was… odd, let’s say. They had a number of complaints about the outing of sexual predators and the movement to believe women’s stories. Those complaints/arguments involved: conflating harassment, abuse and assault with sloppy flirtation; arguing that predators needed due process before they were publicly outed by their victims; arguing that predators have historically been praised and celebrated in other eras, so why not now? And a lot more. It was messy and terrible and offensive. And Catherine Deneuve is sorry for some of it, but not all of it.
Last week, actress Catherine Deneuve was one of more than 100 French women to voice their qualms about the #MeToo movement and its French equivalent #BalanceTonPorc in an open letter published in Le Monde. “As a result of the Weinstein affair, there has been a legitimate realization of the sexual violence women experience, particularly in the workplace, where some men abuse their power,” the open letter said. “It was necessary. But now this liberation of speech has been turned on its head.” After experiencing the backlash to their backlash, Deneuve elaborated on the letter’s intent on Sunday night. “I am a free woman and I will remain so,” the actress said in an open letter published by Libération. “I welcome all the victims of odious acts that may have felt aggrieved by this letter published in Le Monde. It is to them and to them alone that I apologize.”
Deneuve’s follow-up missive seems, at least in part, designed to distance herself from certain signees of the initial letter, specifically former radio host Brigitte Lahaie who, after the Le Monde letter was published, said in a televised debate that some women experience sexual pleasure from being raped. Comments like those, the actress says without specifically calling out Lahaie by name, are like “spitting in the face of all those who have suffered this crime.”
But while Deneuve sends her regards to those victims who might have been hurt by the open letter, she nonetheless doubles down on her insistence that the movement has unfairly maligned some men accused of sexual harassment. “A time where simple denunciations on social media generate punishment, resignation and sometimes, and often, lynching by the media … I don’t excuse anything. I don’t decide the guilt of these men because I am not qualified to do so,” she says, as reported by Deadline. In response to those who felt the anti–#MeToo letter was, at best, beside the point and, at worst, potentially damaging to the feminist cause, Deneuve points to her own feminist credentials, having publicly admitted to having an abortion as a signee of Simone de Beauvoir’s 1971 Manifesto of the 343 in an effort to further the conversation about reproductive rights in France. Abortion was illegal in the country at the time.
In her essay, Deneuve expresses her concern that exiling accused sexual harassers and rapists from creative industries would lead to “the purging of the arts. Are we going to burn Sade from La Pléiade? Designate Leonardo da Vinci as a pedophile artist and erase his paintings? Take Gaugin off museum walls? Destroy the drawings of Egon Schiele? Ban Phil Spector’s records? This climate of censorship leaves me speechless and worried about the future of our societies.” As for the intent of the initial letter, Deneuve hopes it’s clear she and her fellow countrywomen signed it in an attempt to question the method of #MeToo, not its aim. “Obviously nothing in the text claims that harassment is good,” points out Deneuve. “Otherwise I would not have signed it.”
This is all very complicated and I don’t have the energy right now to parse everything she said and analyze why she’s wrong about this or that. I don’t believe Catherine Deneuve is a bad person. I believe she’s a 74 year old woman who has operated, thrived and succeeded in a patriarchal society and, like so many women, she has some kind of Stockholm Syndrome when it comes to her historical oppressors. She’s not alone. Many women are nitpicking, second-guessing, strawman-arguing and rejecting the #MeToo movement. That doesn’t mean we should give them carte blanche to work their dumb sh-t out in public, you know?
Photos courtesy of WENN.
I seem to recall some racist stuff circling around her too. I am going off to Google…
…so although I find her signing of the letter still problematic, she did clarify that she was not denouncing the right of rape victims to speak out, and she distanced herself from the most outrageous claims made by the anti#metoo signees, and rejected the praise of racists, conservatives who were clamouring to support her. I still think that her initial act was wrong and misguided, but I feel I should acknowledge that.
Somebody else said if those aren’t the types of people you want following you, you may need to reconsider the direction you’re headed in. It’s so important for public figures who consider themselves feminists to think about who and what they’re enabling with public statements they put out there. It happens all the time.
Have you heard what she said, a few months ago, about Polanski ? It was disgusting. She said that it wasn’t a rape because the victim was looking older, and anyway her mother drove her to Polanski.
Never read the comments on E!
I did, about the Michelle W. Marky Mark pay inequity and the were 90% bad: She doesn’t deserve the same amount, who is she, nobody knows her, people wanna.see the movie because of Marky Mark, etc.
What I’m trying to say is that they are A Lot of these people and shockingly most are women.
It breaks my heart 🙁
“I am a free woman and I will remain so,” the actress said in an open letter published by Libération.” No, lady. You are a victim. Just another victim of this nauseating, twisted system. The problem is, you are incapable of recognizing yourself as such because you clearly believe being a victim is degrading and weakening. And that lack of empathy is what’s gotten you where you are right now, defending something that obviously embarrasses you (otherwise you wouldn’t be half-apologizing right now) and whining about how men will no longer be able to “flirt” with you. So take several seats.
Yeah. Still canceled.
She looks like Sinead Cusack but harsher
Women of that generation dealt with some things they had to normalize to survive. In the initial statement/petition, their definition of sexual misconduct was rape. All the other levels of harassment and abuse seemed childish to them to be upset about. I don’t know. I’ve been conflicted about how to approach the women that wrote and signed this petition, because I’m positive if we delved deeper we’d find they’ve been through some horrible things regarding abuse that they’ve rationalized as no big deal.
There is definitely an element of being mentally warped from years of abuse / oppression. It’s the same with long-term cult members, etc. But at some point you have to write it off, and can’t let them use their platform to do more harm.
I have a lot of similar feelings about, say, women in the south, who vote for these horrible republican men. Many were brought up that way and married into that way, and they are victims too, but I still blame them for Trump and others. It’s a strange thing to feel sorry for someone, and at the same time just want them to go away because they are now damaging others.
I’m somewhat of the same mind. Somewhat. Maybe minisculely so. To fully ‘jump on board’ might mean they have to negate their entire lives in their minds. Everything they had to put up with, compartmentalize, overcome, push through, forget and stay strong gets minimized and watered down. Having said that, I may not be in my 60s,70s or older, but I’m old enough to have worked in male-dominated industries and had to put up with, compartmentalize, overcome, push through, forget and stay strong and I stand with all women and men coming forward… every single one of them. This movement has been a long time coming, and to rationalize it away or diminish it in any manner should be horrifying to all women successful or not.
Witch hunt: the actual persecution, torture and murder of marginalized and unconventional women
Lynching: the summary execution of black boys and men designed to terrorize black communities and assert white supremacy
I seriously CANNOT bear to hear these terms applied to privileged men having to behave decently or think about others for the first time in years. It’s unconscionable to compare systemic life-threatening oppression and murder to some guy who’s been costing women jobs for years having to maybe to find another one himself.
They cannot co-opt this historical suffering inflicted on women and African-Americans for the mere fact of existing, to the just consequences for their opportunistic abuse bulls—t.
If you want to lose hope in the human race just google Catherine Millet.
She has repeated said she wished she’d been raped so she could tell women how not a big deal it is.
For the French speakers among us has anyone read Leila Slimani’s reply to the letter in Libe? I already loved her as a writer and now as a person.
Lo! ! Just almost fall out my chair from laughter after reading your first sentence, I am French and man your first sentence manage to make me laugh while depicting the sad reality of the existence of despicable Catherine Millet!
And yes extra love to Leila Slimani!#mygal
She sucks. How did Deneuve and these other signers not see that men and children are victims of sexual harassment and predatory behavior as well? this isn’t about a woman’s problem with being told she is attractive. This is about abuse of power, period.
She is still tone deaf for not retracting her signature completely.
I canceled her in 2013 when she said she was against gay marriage in France. People bent sideways to explain her statement, back then. While she isn’t homophobic, it’s not her business who’s marrying who, so the fact that she’d just decide a part of the population shall not have the same right as she does didn’t sit well with me.
Then, there’s this open letter. And please, don’t get fooled. The only reason she’s kind of backpedalling is because of two of the women who signed had some really stupid things to say on TV and in the radio.
One said not having been raped is one of her biggest regrets because then she’d have been able to tell/ show people that you can recover from rape.
The other was debating with a feminist who said that it was more difficult for a survivor to find pleasure in sex after having experienced abuse. That’s how that idiot answered you could orgasm from rape.
Deneuve hasn’t changed her stance, she hasn’t apologized, she’s still in her privileged bubble. I’m glad people got outraged and roasted her on Twitter. No sympathy from us.
JFC, having an abortion is not a feminist credential, it is a medical procedure and a deeply personal choice. Catherine Deneuve needs to take several seats now.
To be fair, it was illegal when she did it. Until Simone Veil stepped in as prime minister and shoehorned the right to free contraception and abortion, it was a slaughter for women and doctors could go to prison, like the women who didn’t actually die while trying to abort. So I get why she’d take the credit for it. But it was another time.
WE GET IT YOU ADMITTED TO AN ABORTION IN 1981. If that’s the only “feminist credential” you can point to, it might be time to renew your membership.
She admitted to an abortion in 1971 to support three women who were on trial precisely for what was then the crime of abortion. The manifesto of the 343 was an “I am Spartacus” movement (a metoo movement, one might even say) : a group of well-known women admitted to having violated the same law as the accused and challenged the French authorities to arrest, judge and incarcerate them in the same manner as the accused.
Being willing to go to jail for abortion to become legal and safe for one’s fellow countrywomen is at least as much of a credential as that of any “woke” millenial whose main, if not sole, feminist battlefield so far has been made of hashtags and retweets.
It, of course, does not make what Catherine Deneuve recently co-signed any less moronic. It is dumb as hell. I am glad she was called out for it and perfectly fine with anyone “cancelling” her if they so wish. But to deny her feminist credentials is, I’m afraid, downright dishonest. She is a feminist. A feminist of the 1960s and 1970s though…