The World Needs To Know About These Badass Feminists ASAP

1. Suzette Jordan

Years before women embraced the power and catharsis of #MeToo, Jordan was a single mother who lived with her daughters in Kolkata, in East India. One evening in 2012, when she was on her way home from a club, she was abducted and gang-raped by five men in a car. Bruised and battered, three days later Jordan filed a complaint against her rapists. Although Indian law forbids the press from naming or identifying rape survivors, in an interview with the BBC in 2013, Jordan refused to be identified as the “Park Street Survivor” and reclaimed her identity:

“Why should I hide my identity when it was not even my fault? Why should I be ashamed of something that I did not give rise to? I was subjected to brutality, I was subjected to torture, and I was subjected to rape, and I am fighting and I will fight,” she told the interviewer.

Owning her truth opened Jordan and her family up to further humiliation — Kolkata’s Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee insinuated Jordan had fabricated her story to malign the government. She was dubbed a prostitute, stigmatized, denied employment, randomly barred from eating in certain restaurants, and threatened with murder by her attackers. But she never gave up.

Until she died of encephalitis in 2015, Jordan worked as a women’s rights activist, supporting a helpline against domestic and sexual violence, while juggling her work, court appearances, and looking after her young daughters and their pet cat.

2. Saalumarada Thimmakka

Across cultures, women unable to bear children naturally battle with the stigma of being infertile. Thimmakka, born to a poverty-ridden family in rural Karnataka, southwest India, was no exception. When she and her husband could not conceive despite years of trying, Thimmakka decided that she would plant trees and care for them as her offspring instead.

Thimmakka began to plant her babies on a 4-kilometer stretch near her village, protecting each sapling from the elements, animals, and other predators with her husband, until every one of them grew into a gigantic and independent tree. Along with several state and national honours, Thimmakka was given the title of “Saalumarada,” which means “row of trees.”

Now 105 years old, Thimmakka has planted over 400 banyan trees in her lifetime, and has finally passed on the responsibilities of looking after her green family to a foster son.

3. The Consortium of Pub-Going, Loose and Forward Women

Every year, the occasion of Valentine’s Day in India causes the right wing to get their knickers in a twist. In 2009, a far-right Hindu outfit called the Sri Ram Sena began to attack young people in Karnataka — beating couples seen in pubs, young women feeding stray animals on the street, and just about anyone who caught their eye. The justification offered by a member of the group was that women who drank, smoke, and walked around at night were ruining other “good” women. “Why should girls go to pubs? Are they going to serve their future husbands alcohol? Should they not be learning to make chapattis [Indian bread]? Bars and pubs should be for men only. We wanted to ensure that all women in Mangalore are home by 7 p.m.,” he told an Indian newspaper.

In response to the Sri Ram Sena attacks, a group of women from Bengaluru formed the Consortium of Pub-Going, Loose and Forward Women. The group urged women from across the country to flood the Sri Ram Sena headquarters with pink underwear on Valentine's Day.

The Pink Chaddi campaign (chaddi means underwear in Hindi) inspired a Hindi film many years later, in which Nisha Susan, the journalist who originally came up with the campaign, was replaced by a male character. “We can’t show the campaign as being run by a woman! That won’t be realistic,” the film's creator toldSusan.

4. The Mothers of Manipur

Arguably one of the most iconic images from recent Indian history is of a group of naked women holding a sign that says “Indian Army Rape Us.”

The women in the photograph assembled outside the Assam Rifles headquarters in Kangla Fort, Imphal, northeast India, following the brutal rape, torture, and murder of a young woman named Thangjam Manorama, who was picked up by the Indian Army under suspicion of being a rebel.

The women protesting Manorama’s death were aged between 43 and 75 and belonged to the Meira Paibi (or “torchbearers” in Manipuri), a women’s civil rights group formed in 1977. While Manorama's death was the immediate catalyst for their protest in 2004, the Meira Pabi have witnessed a long history of gendered violence from the Indian Army. Even today, stories of sexual assault and torture are common in Indian states where the Armed Force Special Power Act (AFSPA) is enacted, granting officers immunity from legal proceedings against them.

5. Thulasi Helen

Often described as “Lady Mohammed Ali,” pugilist Thulasi Helen was born to a Dalit family in Chennai, South India. When she turned 14, Thulasi’s family tried to marry her off to a much older man, at which point she ran away from her home, sleeping at hostels and looking for a way to live her dream of becoming a world-famous boxer.

In India’s casteist society, being Dalit — particularly being a Dalit woman — is to be constantly at the receiving end of incredible social and economic discrimination and violence. Thulasi was well on her way to achieving her dream of becoming a professional boxer when A.K. Karuna, the secretary of the State Boxing Association in India, asked her for cash and sexual favours if she wanted to be considered for the government programme. Risking her life and professional future, Thulasi called out Karuna — and ended up becoming a voice for dozens of other young women who had been abused by him as well.

“We are expected to be obedient and follow a set path. But this is my life. Girls like me of a lower caste have no value. Because I was born Dalit, I'm expected to stay at the bottom. But I dream of a different life,” Thulasi said in aninterview.

(Watch a trailer for the documentary on Thulasi's life, Light Fly, Fly High, here.)

6. Akkai Padmashali

Akkai knew she was a girl at the age of 8; the only problem was that she was assigned a male gender at birth, an identity her family was unwilling to let go of. At 12, Akkai considered killing herself. As she grew older and began to face sexual abuse and harassment from her peers, life only seemed more bleak. One day, Akkai spotted a group of transgender women by the side of the road and asked them how she could be like them.

In India, while a community of transgender people (hijras) are revered on certain religious occasions, a vast majority are still denied basic rights. The only means of livelihood available to most transgender women is still begging and sex work. Akkai was a sex worker for a few years, but found that it left her feeling unhappy and incomplete — men were often abusive, and the work had to be carried out covertly. (Transgender women who work in the sex trade are still living under constant threat of violence.)

But in 2004, Akkai joined a nonprofit organization to help sexual minorities and she continues to be the first port of call for any kind of advice, inspiration, and assistance for the LGBTQI community even today. In 2017, she became one of the only openly transgender people to be invited to a town hall event with Barack Obama.

7. Meena Soni

Meena Soni

Married at 16 to a much older man living with tuberculosis, Soni knew that she would have to become the breadwinner of her family. From the very beginning, her in-laws and husband were opposed to her working, but nonetheless happy to live off her earnings. Finally, Soni decided to take her daughters with her and leave the house — becoming a local reporter for a women-only newspaper in Uttar Pradesh.

Four months after she had left home, her husband showed up at her work, begging her to come back. Soni and her daughters moved back in to their old home. Within a few months, her husband began to return to his old ways — he wanted to know where she was at all times of the day, called her constantly at work, and accused her of sleeping with other men. In 2004, Soni was asleep at home with her daughter when her husband poured acid on her face.

Soni ran out of the house, to a government hospital where she had gone just the day before to interview a doctor, and begged him for help. As her treatment began, her husband was admitted to the same hospital, three beds away from her — right after she had left their home, he had attempted suicide. Five days later, Soni's husband died.

In the years that followed, Soni, an acid-scarred mother of three, trained herself in law and began to fight cases for women undertrials (those detained in prison while a trial is ongoing) in Lucknow's jails.

"If no one accepts you, reject all of them," she said over the phone. "I would tell people, if you don’t like my face, don’t look at me, I know just how beautiful I am. Remember, the day you lose your nerve, you lose everything. Keep fighting."

6 Things You Need To Know About Feminism

 

Don’t be afraid of the “f” word.

 

Cassidy Murphy

Feminism is not as scary as it seems. Now, before you roll your eyes and/or run away from this article, open your mind a bit. Feminists are widely misunderstood and misrepresented in today's society. Feminism has a bad reputation, but not everything you hear is true. Here are some things you may want to know about this movement:

1. Let’s start with the definition of the word

In its simplest form, feminism is synonymous to the belief of equality. Feminism is, by definition, the theory of the political, economic, and social equality of the sexes. It is not by any means a superiority movement. Equality is a straightforward term to understand and believe in. If you believe in equal opportunity for all people, surprise you probably are a feminist and didn’t even know it!

2. Feminists don’t hate men

This is a common misconception, but a feminist hating a man would be hypocritical. We are fighting for equality, so hating someone based upon his or her gender would be counterintuitive. How can we hate men when we all have a father, husband, brother, uncle, cousin, friend, or boyfriend that we admire? Some of the best authors, musicians, actors and people we look up to most are men. Feminists are accepting of all genders, as that is what we stand for by definition. As it turns out, some men are feminists.

3. It’s not just for women

Feminism is all-inclusive! There are absolutely no bounds in this movement. Any person of any gender, color, religion, shape, size, etc. can be a feminist. Equality is not limited to just one group of people. We’re all in this together. Together is the only way we can obtain equality.

4. Feminism is a man’s issue too

Gender roles in society are a huge issue. Men have a certain manly, impassive standard to uphold, and women are expected to be emotional and sensitive. This ideal is unrealistic and that’s where feminism comes into play. Feminism is all about fighting for the ability for women to be seen as strong as men are perceived, and the ability for men to be as vulnerable as women are perceived. Gender should be recognized on a spectrum, and not as two opposing sets of ideals.

5. The wage gap is real

In the media, it has been said that a women makes 78 cents to a man’s dollar. That, however, is only somehwat true. Awhite woman makes 78 cents to a man’s dollar. A black woman makes 64 cents to a man’s dollar. A Hispanic woman makes 54 cents to a man’s dollar. For the same work. Now does that sound fair to you?

6. If you believe in equality, you’re probably a feminist

It’s okay to admit it. Don’t be embarrassed! If you are a feminist, that’s just a sign you’re a decent human being who believes anyone and everyone deserves to be treated equally no matter what gender he or she identifies as. Good for you, you're a great person.

The Ugly Truth About Feminism In India

The ugly truth is we have all, at some point, been complicit in the oppression of another person. We have all innocently, accidentally oppressed. I know because I've done it too.

Social Activist Kiese Laymon illustrates this truth through a series of gripping and revealing essays in his book, How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America. His work showed me that when we are ignorant of systems of oppression, we are complicit in perpetuating those systems. He writes, "Lots of times, we've taken turns killing ourselves slowly, before trying to bring each other back to life." Systems of oppression kill opportunity, spirit and resilience. When we, as a society, allow repressive systems to exist unchallenged we are each partially responsible for killing those affected. It is up to us, how we bring each other back to life.

Intersectional feminism

Feminism is one way I try to revive myself and others. At its most fundamental level Feminism (n): is the advocacy of women's rights based on the inherent equality of the sexes. However, because the must of feminism is so deeply misunderstood by men and women alike, a critical part of the conversation is missing. Indian feminism and feminist issues as they stand, most often, are not fully inclusive of all women or experiences. This article correctly notes:

Intersectionality (n): is the study of intersecting social identities and the related systems of oppression. First coined within the context of feminism, it examines social hierarchies that privilege and oppress people based on overlapping aspects of their identity such as: race, gender, class, caste, sexual orientation, (dis)ability and so on. For example, two well-known hierarchal systems in India include the patriarchy, based on gender, and the historical caste system. And though the latter no longer formally exists, its norms and repercussions are still very real within Indian communities. When we examine those who are the most vulnerable to each of these systems, women and Dalits, we see the resulting disadvantage is compounded. A severe iteration of oppression specific to these overlapping identities is in the form of sexual violence. Studies show that Dalit women are disproportionately exposed to violence. Beyond this, the conviction rate for rape cases against all women in India is a mere 25%, but when specifically looking at Dalit women the conviction rate drops to an abysmal 2%. Intersectionality goes to understand that when identities intersect the related discrimination can result in an "experience that is more than the sum of its parts."

As I grow in my understanding of the power dynamics in our society, I realise my fight as a feminist isn't just against the patriarchy; it's against all systems of oppression and even my own privilege. It's about dismantling theKyriarchy (n): the social system that keeps all intersecting oppressions in place. Because if we are not advocating for the women whose realities do not look or feel like our own, then we are unequivocally a part of the problem. Intentional or not, complicity in the face of oppressive systems is choosing the side of the oppressor. That is wholly un-feminist.

Herein lies my call to action. Let us think critically about the systems we rely on as a society, and realise the full spectrum of womanhood in its various hues. Let us understand "that different kinds of oppression are interlinked, and that one can't liberate only one group without the others. It means acknowledging kyriarchy and intersectionality—the fact that along different axes, we're all both oppressed and oppressors, privileged and disprivileged."

The key to our liberation is ensuring everyone has an equal chance at success and happiness. It's consciously choosing to be open-minded and inclusive. It's about starting conversations that make us uncomfortable. It's about minimising our role as oppressors, about recusing apathy, as that inevitably hurts us too. It's about viscerally understanding this simple truth, "I am not free while any woman is unfree, even if her shackles are very different than my own."

Credits: Bithika Misha Rahman

If feminists aren’t fighting for my right to use my body how I choose, then they’ve dramatically detoured from their mission

Criminalising an entire industry because of isolated examples takes away choice from free-will participants based exclusively on the behaviour of abusers. 

While women’s libbers have spent decades fighting to get us dominion over our own bodies, radical feminists have spent almost as long trying to insert caveats.

Apparently there are right and egregiously wrong ways to use our bodies – more specifically our genitals – particularly when dollars are involved.

For “radfems”, sex work is a metonym for the sins of patriarchy and something that can only ever lead us away from equality.

Sex work – not that radfems would ever use the phrase – isn’t viewed simply as a commercial transaction but rather, as blood money exchanged for abuse that can only ever happen in a world where women are unequal. That selling sex somehow reduces every woman to a commodity, valued exclusively for the extent to which we’re found fuckable.

I not only vehemently disagree with the radfem position, but I view it as fundamentally un-feminist.

If the sisterhood can support my decision to swallow contraceptive pills or terminate an unwanted pregnancy, then there is a duty for them to support my choice to have as much or as little sex as I like and, if I so choose, put a price tag on that sex.

For me, it’s a matter of consent, of bodily autonomy. If feminists aren’t fighting for my right to use my body how I choose, then they’ve dramatically detoured from their mission.

In this article I counter three assertions made by radfems about sex work. While there isn’t a simple opposition to such views, nonetheless, liberal, third-wave, intersectional and sex-positive feminisms are united around the importance of choice and agency, and each opposes radfem’s frequently conservative, knees-together rhetoric.

The re-victimisation narrative

Radfems love to present testimony of industry “survivors” who were abused as children, have substance abuse problems, mental health calamities, or have experienced bad industry treatment and are now abolitionists. Heavy reliance on such testimony is severely problematic.

As revolting as it is, every industry is full of women who were abused as children. Why? Because the numbers of abused women the world over is deplorable.

Scores of women enter every industry as victims of abuse, with mental health problems or substance abuse issues. Or any combination thereof. This is a byproduct of gender inequality as well as dozens of other issues that dole out to women complicated – if not sometimes completely tragic – back-stories.

But the “broken woman” who’s preyed upon by a dreamcoat-wearing pimp and who is reliving her pain as a sex worker is a narrative indicative of too muchSpecial Victims Unit and ignores the reality that people enter the sex industry for an abundance of reasons. Just as they do any other profession.

Interviews with women who have exited sex work is a problematic dataset: talk to anyone who has left any job and they’ll have war stories.

No, this doesn’t make these stories invalid. But it does remind us that the tales of former sex workers don’t speak for all sex workers. Every experience is an individual one.

Abhorrent work practices

Be it about sex work in the form of pay-to-play intercourse or participation in pornography, radfems are abolitionists.

Coerced participation, trafficking and lacklustre working conditions are used to pad out the claim that no sex worker has truly chosen their toil. Not only is such an argument predicated on the false-consciousness argument so intoxicating for radfems, but it pretends that sex work is some kind of special case; that sex work shouldn’t exist because there’s certain labour that simply shouldn’t be sold.

Point to any industry and there will be examples of bad practices, abused workers, and unsafe conditions.

Welcome, my friends, to capitalism. This doesn’t make trafficking or coercion unimportant issues, but equally, it doesn’t make their presence in the sex industry a special case. There are no shortages of industries that need better oversight. But equally, in no other industry where bad practices exist do weever talk of abolition.

Criminalising an entire industry because of isolated bad examples takes away choice from free-will participants and justifies doing so on the behaviour of abusers. Doing so is victim-blaming and paternalistic.

It also provides another hint that the radfem position isn’t truly based on worker safety at all, but is about sex. About the radfem problem with sex.

The tyranny of the cock

In the radfem imagination, for the selling of sex to be understood as so very horrible sex is understood as having special properties; that it can never just be labour like any other, seemingly because no other job necessitates so much cock.

There’s more than a little puritanical blood in the water here.

Radfems apparently find it inconceivable that women could actually chose to have contact with a penis they’re not in love with. That having random-cock-contact could actually be found fun or lucrative or even a preferable use of one’s workday than toil in a factory, a lecture theatre or a coal mine.

Such views aren’t grounded in women’s lived experiences. They fail to recognise that quite a few of us not only really like the cock, but that having contact with it doesn’t necessitate “giving ourselves away”. Instead, they rely on a moralistic opposition to any sex that’s had in quantities greater than every second Tuesday.

And they use terms like “sell herself” as though, at the end of the transaction, a woman has sold off a body part. Cue Catholic school metaphors about virginity loss.

My worth isn’t determined by how much sex I’ve had. Equally, having sex for money doesn’t change me as a person any more than teaching for money or writing for money does: we each sell our time – our labour – to the market.

Sex work isn’t an industry you have to love, nor is it an industry you have to find empowering. But love and empowerment aren’t things we ever expect of any other industry either. The sex industry doesn’t need your admiration, but nor does it deserve your condemnation.

If there is anything feminists should be in agreement on, it’s our right to make our own decisions about how we use our bodies.

Credit:
Lauren Rosewarne

French Feminist Writers Celebrating Women

I’m not much of a Francophile. Despite what numerous books and articles claim, I’ve never been entirely convinced that French women do (insert random thing here) better than the rest of us. But I am rather fond of their laissez faire style of  feminism. You have the famous French feminist theorists, like Simone de Beauvoir, Helene Cixous and Virginie Despentes. But you also have the everyday feminist women writers whose books don’t explain theory so much as demonstrate it.

Below are four books celebrating women. None of these books tells a story with a beginning, middle, and end. Only one of them even attempts to deal with something resembling feminist theory. But all four are written in voices that are distinctly and uncompromisingly feminist. And they’re all written by French women. So, in honor of International Women’s Day I encourage you to lose (or discover?) yourself in one of them.

Not One Day by Anne Garréta, translated by Emma Ramadan.
You’ll have to wait until April to read the Oulipian Anne Garréta’s second book to be published in English. A work of both feminist and LGBTQ literature, in it she challenges herself to record memories of a different woman from her past, every day, for a month. Her guiding principle is “not one day without a woman” and, like Kerouac, she writes her memories down in free-flowing, unedited, stream-of-conscious prose. The result is both intimate and immediate — the writing dazzling.  I open my copy to a random page and read: “Your car seems to surf on the surface. Chesapeake Bay swallows up body, lane, and soul. Spiraling ramps and arching suspension cables, a thin strip of steel and concrete surfaces and plunges anew into an endless vertigo. The cliff against which the Tappan Zee Bridge seems to want to throw itself, the elegant swerve of its deck skirting the abyss.” These are the kinds of sentences you want to put in your pocket and keep with you.

King Kong Theory by Virginie Despentes, translated by Stéphanie Benson.  Virginie Despentes is a French feminist writer, filmmaker, former sex worker, rape survivor and punk music lover… so no one should be surprised that she has a lot of opinions.  And, I won’t lie, some of those opinions frighten me – because I can easily apply it to hundreds of examples… including the current U.S. president. Her book, King Kong Theory, contains essays about gender, sex, rape, pornography and perceptions of female beauty. In these essays Despentes is irreverent, profane and more than a little controversial. But she’ll definitely make you think. And she might just blow your mind. This isn’t a book you can read and then forget.

Self-Portrait in Green by Marie Ndiaye, translated by Jordan Stump.  Ndiaye may be one of the most important women writing in France today.  She’s received international acclaim and won several awards. Her books are complicated and experimental — by no means easy reading. Self-Portrait in Green is a collection of stories, told by the same narrator and containing portraits of individual women who all represent different aspects of the author. The color green appears in all of them — often, but not always, in the form of clothing. These women in green are subversively feminist (as are many Ndiaye characters). They present as strangers, friends, mothers, lovers, daughters and wives. They are strong, mysterious, neurotic, paranoid, nurturing, dominant, submissive, beautiful and grotesque. Ndiaye makes it clear that they are her past, present and future. The subtle message — that you can be inspired by and learn from women you encounter, and that these women need not be perfect in order to set an example — is a powerful one.

Suite for Barbara Loden by Nathalie Léger, translated by Natasha Lehrer & Cécile Menon.  This isn’t the first time I’ve written aboutSuite for Barbara Loden for Book Riot. It is one of my absolute favorite reads from last year, but also difficult to describe what makes it so compelling. At the most superficial level the book breaks down the plot of the 1970’s American film Wanda, which Barbara Loden wrote, directed and starred in. Interspersed between these hyper-detailed descriptions of the film are biographical details about Loden’s life. Add to this a third layer in which Léger examines her own fascination with Wanda and you start to get a sense of this beautifully complex book which immerses the reader in a single subject – a woman and film that remain mostly obscure and yet, by the time you reach the last page, feel oddly significant.

Credit: Tara Cheesman

Catherine Deneuve and the French Feminist Difference

If Americans have long had a certain fascination with Frenchwomen and their attitudes toward matters of love and sex, so too have American views on sex, sexual codes and relationships between men and women intrigued French observers. Simone de Beauvoir was no exception.

In “America Day by Day,” which she wrote during a stay in the United States in 1947, the author observed her Yankee counterparts with a befuddlement that is still shaping sisterly relations across the Atlantic.

“The American woman is a myth,” she wrote. “She is often viewed as a praying mantis who devours her male partner. The comparison is the right one, but it is incomplete.”

In America, Ms. de Beauvoir felt there was a kind of invisible glass wall between men and women, which she didn’t feel existed in France. The way American women dressed, she wrote, was “violently feminine, almost sexual.” They talked about men with almost open animosity: “One evening, I was invited to a girls-only dinner: for the first time in my life, it felt not like a dinner among women, but a dinner ‘without men.’” American women “have only contempt for French women always too happy to please their men and too accepting of their whims, and they are often right about this, but the tension with which they cling to their moral pedestal reveals as big a weakness.”

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Ms. de Beauvoir would later go on to write the 20th-century landmark feminist bible “The Second Sex,” and her writings, along with her very rich amorous life (which, notably, included affairs with her students, male and female), continue to shape the views of French feminists today.

There were echoes of Ms. de Beauvoir this week, when a hundred French female public figures, among them the actor Catherine Deneuve and the writer Catherine Millet, signed a public letterpublished in the daily newspaper Le Monde calling for a more nuanced view on how to tackle sexual harassment than the one advocated by the #MeToo campaign.

“We are talking here about destroying all the ambiguity and the charm of relationships between men and women,” explained the writer Anne-Elisabeth Moutet, who signed the letter, on the BBC. “We are French, we believe in gray areas. America is a different country. They do things in black and white and make very good computers. We don’t think human relationships should be treated like that.” Ms. Moutet sounded like Ms. de Beauvoir: “In America, love is mentioned almost only through hygienic terms. Sensuality is accepted only in a rational way, which is another way of refusing it.”

Like America, France is reeling from the Harvey Weinstein scandal, but in different ways. Initially, many French actresses — Léa Seydoux, for instance — started sharing their own stories publicly. Shortly after the #MeToo campaign appeared on Twitter, the French equivalent, #BalanceTonPorc (Call Out Your Pig), shot to fame and at first proved extremely popular. Women of all walks of life and from various professional backgrounds were calling out sexual predators and inundating Twitter with names of former colleagues or bosses who allegedly harassed them. Men were suspended or fired as a result.

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And then, after a few weeks, the tone in France began to shift. Intellectuals began voicing their concerns that such denunciations were going too far. Ms. Deneuve, in a televised interview, declared: “I will certainly not defend Harvey Weinstein. I have never had much consideration for him. I always felt there was something disturbing about him.” However, she said she found extremely shocking “what is happening on social networks around it. It is excessive.” And she wasn’t alone.

There was something about the recent big displays of American sisterhood laid out on the cover of Time magazine, and at the Golden Globes ceremony, where women turned up dressed in black with their “Time’s Up” pins, that seemed to trigger Gallic irritation. In this week’s letter, the signatories worried that the “thought police” were out and that anyone who voiced disagreement would be called complicit and a traitor. They noted that women are not children who need protecting. But there was also this: “We do not recognize ourselves in this feminism,” they said, which “takes on a hatred of men and of sexuality.”

Call it a cliché if you like, but ours is a culture that, for better and for worse, views seduction as a harmless and pleasurable game, dating back to the days of medieval “amour courtois.” As a result, there has been a kind of harmony between the sexes that is particularly French. This does not mean that sexism doesn’t exist in France — of course it does. It also doesn’t mean we don’t disapprove of the actions of men like Mr. Weinstein. What it does mean is that we are wary of things that might disturb this harmony.

And in the past 20 years or so, a new French feminism has emerged — an American import. It has embraced this rather alien brand of anti-men paranoia that Ms. de Beauvoir described; it took control of #MeToo in France, and this same form of feminism has been very vocal against the Deneuve letter. Today, Frenchwomen, too, have the girls’ nights out that Ms. de Beauvoir once found so foreign.

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When “America Day by Day” was published, American women were incensed. The novelist Mary McCarthy couldn’t stand the book. “Mademoiselle Gulliver en Amérique,” she wrote, “who descended from the plane as from a space ship, wearing metaphorical goggles: eager as a little girl to taste the rock-candy delights of this materialistic moon civilization.”

Ms. de Beauvoir was in many ways easy to mock: She wrote in a direct, authoritative, self-assured way that may have sounded arrogant to readers unaccustomed to its bluntness. But the epidermic reaction across the Atlantic, to both Ms. de Beauvoir and to that letter, may in fact underscore the sharpness of the French critique. To many of us in France, Simone de Beauvoir could have been writing yesterday: “Relations between men and women in America are one of permanent war. They don’t seem to actually like each other. There seems to be no possible friendship between them. They distrust each other, lack generosity in dealing with one another. Their relationship is often made of small vexations, little disputes, and short-lived triumphs.”

Credit:
Agnès Poirier