I have a dilemma and I prefer to be frank.
I have just finished the book by my colleague Sophie Durocher entitled Where are the women?
If I tell you all the good things I thought about it, you will say to me: well, it’s predictable, it’s your gang, you won’t plant your colleague in your newspaper!
What do I do then? Very simple: I tell you to read it and judge for yourself.
Erased!
The book starts from a reality that seems clear to me: women, who have fought for centuries to gain their right to visibility in public life, are once again in the process of being repressed, made invisible, marginalized.
Who is leading the charge for this public erasure? An enemy from within and an enemy from without.
The external enemy is religious dogmatism, mainly Islamist.
We want to trivialize the hijab,abaya and the niqab by turning the rhetoric of individual freedom against Western societies.
The Muslim man will dress as he sees fit.
The enemy within is this false progressivism which, in the name of benevolent inclusion, replaces the word “woman” with the terms “person with a uterus”, glorifies men disguised as women, allows biological men to stealing sports medals from women, turning a blind eye to abortions strictly because the fetus is female, and dismissing science when the facts are inconvenient.
Pseudoprogressives and true regressives become allies in this fight which reveals the astonishing fragility of historical gains.
We brandish the word “feminism”, we often claim it, but we flout its principles and attack its conquests.
We even arrive at zanies like so-called “Islamo-feminism”, which we could laugh at if its concrete consequences were not tragic.
And then too bad, I can’t resist the temptation to tell you that the findings are irrefutable, the examples are numerous and perfectly documented, the argument is made of reinforced concrete, and the prose is crystal clear.
System
This book, which deserves the widest possible distribution, risks coming up against two obstacles.
The first is overabundance.
There are too many books produced for the small Quebec market.
The system of subsidies, necessary for fragile genres like poetry to be minimally viable, has the perverse effect of allowing piles of uninteresting books to see the light of day.
Difficult to emerge from this clutter.
The second could be the silence orchestrated by ideological adversaries, housed in positions of influence in the media apparatus.
When we have no arguments to oppose, we wait for one novelty to chase another.
I also bet that many will attack the author and not the book… that they will make it a point not to read.
I don’t know if essays are your cup of tea or not, but if you only have to read one this year, this is it.
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