Shortly after October 15, 2017 and the New York Times investigation into producer Harvey Weinstein, while American actress Alyssa Milano posted this message, “If all the women who had been sexually harassed or assaulted wrote 'me too,' we “We could perhaps show the extent of the problem”, from Rome to Rio, from Paris to Los Angeles, women of all origins and conditions revealed that power relations made them “disposable bodies”. Their voice broke the wall of silence and became active.
The great anti-sexist and anti-patriarchal movement thus triggered was quickly described as a revolution. Does this revolution experience excesses or excesses like all those that preceded it? To discuss it, Alain Finkielkraut receives Camille Froidevaux-Metterie which makes it appear Patriarchy, the end of a world, et Caroline Fourestwhose last essay is entitled #MeToo vertigo. So let's start with this word, “vertigo”.
Why “Vertigo MeeToo”? What does the word mean, what concern does it carry?
Pour Caroline Fourestthe word does not only carry worry, it is a word that exactly says dizziness, that is to say something exhilarating, which also echoes what she experienced as a feminist, “this shift in a world that I knew for most of my life as a young girl, as a teenager, as a feminist activist. A world before MeToo, where we said, “me too”, in small circle, in silence, between women, very often, this word came up So moving into a world where finally this conversation is in the public square, is in the open, and where suddenly it is us who no longer have the power to resist. only to the fact of being “silenced”, but to the very fact of accusing, it's indeed exhilarating, it's dizzyingginous. It happened very quickly, she continues, thanks to the power of social networks too, but over centuries of feminist struggles which enabled this power. She recalls that she comes from a feminism which is not accustomed to power, by definition, which is a counter-power.
Camille Froidevaux-Metterie returns to the expression mentioned in the introduction to the show, “body available” – an expression that she often uses to define the condition of women in the patriarchal system. What it is about for today's feminists, as for those of yesterday, according to her, is “overthrow the basis of patriarchy, which is the definition of women through the prism of their bodily function alone, and specifically their sexual and maternal function. MeToo endorses the aspect of sexual disposition, of this condition of objectification and alienation, but it is part of a broader perspective which is a vast dynamic of reappropriation of all the bodily dimensions of our existence“.
The Challenges of Social Networks Listen later
Lecture listen 4 min
#BalanceTonPorc, the first accused
Return to the Eric Brion affair, former boss of the TV channel Equidia, who was the first accused of “Balance your pork” in 2017, by journalist Sandra Muller. “What it inspires me, explain Camille Froidevaux-Metterie,”it is something of the order of a questioning on a form of disproportion between the fact of evoking in depth a certain number of cases, of highlighting them and then of presenting them in a light which is generally that of people who suffered these accusations and who were then, you say, put to death socially, whose lives were ruined, their careers ruined. I actually find it quite indecent to draw a parallel between the fact that a few personalities were pushed to the margins of public life, that a few others had in fact had their careers interrupted, that perhaps socially their lives ended there, at regarding the approximately 320,000 women who are victims of domestic violence each year, the 94,000 who suffer attempted rape or rape, and then I am obviously not talking about the 120-130 women who die each year at the hands of their spouses “. Camille Froidevaux-Metterie
Replicas Listen later
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“There are people who can be wrongly accused, whose lives can be shattered, and about whom we should not speak as long as the patriarchy stands” (C. Fourest)
“What I am criticized for and opposed to is almost that we should not talk about what you called, Camille Froidevaux-Metterie, a “handful of personalities”. There are people who can be accused, and I insist, wrongly, whose lives can be broken, and about whom we should not speak as long as the patriarchy stands, as long as women are attacked, assaulted, raped. And in fact, here, I don't understand the approach intellectually, because I think that we still live in a world where we must be able to debate. There are debates in their complexity, that is to say that we have the right to say two things at the same time. We have the right to say “the MeToo revolution must continue, we must continue to denounce rape, sexual violence, and that women's bodies must not be made available to anyone, never, under any circumstances, and precisely, do not confuse when someone is wrongly accused”. Caroline Fourest
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Lecture listen 52 min
