How would you define this #MeToo vertigo?
It’s a necessary dizziness. We are emerging from years of deafening silence, intimidation and violence. Listening is finally here but, in the process, we are mixing a necessary debate on predators, rapists and the protection of victims with all matters involving seduction and sexuality. We grope to find the limits between an accusation to be publicized in order to break impunity and a settling of scores or an abusive accusation.
You say that the #MeToo movement has become “preachy and moralistic”. How did it slip?
Feminism is still the best school to fight against inequalities but it is the story of exploitation. The era is victim-based, emotional, prone to denunciation. I certainly wouldn't want to go back because I believe in the virtues of naming to shame. But today, the feminist associative fabric is very politicized, and it chooses its fights and its battles.
In this book I share my torments. We need to be able to open a public conversation: how can we get men to put themselves more in women's shoes when they try to seduce…
Those who anathema to me are in reality those who are blamed for already making #MeToo drift in a sectarian, fanatical way with a blind taste for revenge.
You talk about “a gray area, an unbalanced desire”. You hope that “the day women are allowed to express their desire, they will no longer be prey.” Where is this gray area located?
We must both teach young girls the extent to which men sexualize them, and boys not to take the absence of a no for a yes. There is not the same wear and therefore not the same sensitivity to attacks. We cannot moralize everything and make people think that sexuality is something uniquely violent. I am simply saying, like the law, that there is a difference between isolated sexual assault and sexual harassment at work. In our way of mediating these affairs, we must restore this graduation.
You are accused of minimizing facts concerning Ibrahim Maalouf, Adrien Quatennens, of taking the side of attackers like Nicolas Bedos. You say that it would be enough to “accuse to exist”. Are you tackling a taboo in the feminist struggle?
I knew it would be very difficult and I was not disappointed. Those who anathema to me are in reality those who are blamed for already making #MeToo drift in a sectarian, fanatical way with a blind taste for revenge. The reality of the book is that it is a nuanced feminist plea.
If we continue to put too many abusive accusations under this hashtag, we will end up demonetizing it. We confuse Nicolas Bedos (sentenced to six months under an electronic bracelet for sexual assault) or Édouard Baer – whose girlfriends we interview to find out if he flirts well when there is no complaint for rape -, with a Harvey Weinstein.
Patriarchy has been there for centuries, it will still survive, but the best way to democratize this revolution is certainly not to use it indiscriminately.
Honestly, this is a remark that I don't understand. I'm not going to wait until there are no more rapists to talk about people who are wrongly accused. The issue of rape runs through all my work, because it is the greatest revealer of male domination. We must distinguish between the affairs of Abbé Pierre, the Mazan trial, the Tariq Ramadan affair, which will finally be judged, and the accusations brought against Nicolas Bedos or Gérard Depardieu. We are not talking about the same sentence, nor the same facts, nor the same risk of recidivism.
If you knew the number of people I know who are living in seclusion at home after being pilloried in the media for facts that have nothing to do with the Weinstein affair…
My wish is to have an elaborate public conversation. We have the right, finally, to ask questions about this new power that is in our hands.
Does the book fuel anger or harmonize a fractured feminism?
My wish is to have an elaborate public conversation. We have the right, finally, to ask questions about this new power that is in our hands. I come from a feminism that always questions power. People are relieved, reassured. There were some who supported Gérard Depardieu, for example, against all odds, because they felt that we were in an atmosphere of permanent lynching.
By reading my book, they change their opinion on Polanski or Depardieu which, for me, are serious cases. But if the criterion is that from the moment we are accused, we are condemned, then we will massacre and destroy lives.
You recall that 86% of sexual and gender-based violence are dismissed, as are 94% of rapes…
Sexual assaults are condemned very harshly today but when a rape has been too well premeditated and there are no witnesses, justice will always be difficult to achieve. That's why I'm not one of those who think that if someone is convicted, they are guilty. Or if he is acquitted, he is innocent: no. There are predators who have been released. It will happen again.
Do you think that Generation Z is really “fed with plaintive narcissism”?
I prefer to live in a world where we listen to victims but there is a risk in wanting to lock them into this identity. In psychoanalysis, we know that this is very bad. I know plenty of victims who don't want to be reduced to that; These are the ones who are doing the best.
There is a question to ask about the new plaintive media coverage; there is no more heroism. We end up believing that everything that can cause suffering is a media, political, public object. No ! We're living in an American era, and it's going to get worse and worse.
