Glimmers of support among the backlash against Deneuve’s #MeToo letter

LONDON: Feminist activists have rounded on France’s best known and arguably most respected actress Catherine Deneuve who joined scores of other women in denouncing the #MeToo campaign against sexual harassment as fueling “hatred of men.”
In an open letter published by the left-of-center French newspaper Le Monde last week, Deneuve and about 100 other women prominent in the arts and literature made no attempt to defend sexual violence but attacked what they saw as a witch-hunt and a drift toward a new “puritanism”.
While it would be an exaggeration to suggest the gesture forms part of a serious counter-movement against the supposed excesses of #MeToo, it is becoming clear that not all Western women agree with the strict feminist analysis.
“Rape is a crime,” wrote Deneuve, 74, and cosignatories including the German actress Ingrid Caven and the French-Iranian writer Abnousse Shalmani. “But insistent or clumsy flirting is not a crime, nor is gallantry a machismo aggression.”
Publication of the open letter follows weeks of intense scrutiny of the conduct of influential men in the film industry toward young women, in many cases those hoping at the time for advancement in Hollywood careers.
The producer Harvey Weinstein has been accused of abusing dozens of women in a scandal that has already cost him his role as head of his own studio and may yet cost him his liberty. The actor and producer Kevin Spacey is among others facing allegations, in his case levelled by men who say he sexually abused or harassed them.
The open letter stated: “As a result of the Weinstein affair, there has been a legitimate awareness of sexual violence against women, particularly in the workplace, where some men abuse their power.
“It was necessary. But this liberation of speech turns today into its opposite: we are intimated to speak properly, to silence what is angry, and those who refuse to comply with such injunctions are regarded as treacherous, accomplices.
“But it is the characteristic of puritanism to borrow, in the name of a so-called general good, the arguments of the protection of women and their emancipation to better bind them to a status of eternal victims … as in the good old days of witchcraft.”
The letter also referred to men being forced out of their jobs by relatively minor allegations, such as: “when all they did was touch someone’s knee or try to steal a kiss”. This was an unambiguous reference to the resignation in October of Britain’s defense secretary Sir Michael Fallon after admitting that he touched a female journalist’s knee at a dinner 15 years earlier.
The response from feminists, and women who have spoken out about their experiences of the attentions of Weinstein and others, has been swift and ferocious.
The Australian playwright and novelist Van Badham said Deneuve had offered another reminder that while film stars and pop icons have “matchless gifts to bestow on our collective entertainment, responsible policymaking for our nation-states demands more specialized qualifications”.
“Only within the structural narcissism encouraged in Hollywood’s predator-barons and those like them could being held to account for one’s own behavior provoke complaints of victimization,” she wrote for the British newspaper, The Guardian.
Sandra Muller, who launched the French equivalent of #MeToo — #BalanceTonPorc, or “call out your pig [the man who abused you]” — told CNN those behind the open letter would just “sap the morale of the numerous victims who try to have a bit of courage.” She was among 30 women who signed a retaliatory open letter at the broadcaster Franceinfo’s website.
When, more than a year ago, the British actress Joanna Lumley described wolf whistling as a compliment” rather than “offensive to women”, she too faced an angry backlash from feminists. Social media comments sharply criticized her, one saying wolf whistling was not flattering but “power-play” and harassment.
Asia Argento, the Italian filmmaker and actress who is among women claiming to have been sexually harassed or assaulted by Weinstein, tweeted that the open letter was “deplorable.”
But one French woman, who recalls inappropriate behavior in the hotel suite of a powerful Hollywood figurehead during the Cannes film festival in the 1990s, offers a different view.
She supports Deneuve’s stance.
“In my case, it wasn’t really sexual but there were sexual overtones,” she said.
“I had helped him into his room after collecting him from the airport. He told me to stay while he had a shower, re-appeared in a very loosely fitting dressing gown and asked me to massaged his neck and shoulders. Later came to my room while I was at the fax machine and started kissing my neck. I just ignored it and got on with faxing the letter.
“It may be a generational thing but now, I think, the pendulum has swung too far.”
And the British author and journalist Helena Frith Powell, born to Swedish and Italian parents, wrote in Britain’s Daily Mail that many in Britain were “paralyzed by political correctness, too scared to say anything as this terrifying tide of separatism and priggishness sweeps the Western world.”

Glimmers of support among the backlash against Deneuve’s #MeToo letter