France's Socialist Party attacks Catherine Deneuve for opposing #MeToo witch-hunt
The politically courageous column published by 100 women in Le Monde criticizing the #MeToo campaign has provoked a venomous response from the French ruling elite. The column—co-signed by personalities including actresses Catherine Deneuve and Ingrid Caven, and writers Catherine Millet and Catherine Robbe-Grillet—pulled no punches. It made clear that the #MeToo frenzy, which emerged last year from the US media campaign accusing producer Harvey Weinstein of sexual abuse of women, is a right-wing political campaign.
Refusing to confuse “persistently or clumsily hitting on someone” with rape, it opposed the “incursion of self-appointed prosecutors into private lives” and demands that intellectual and artistic life conform to #MeToo’s dictates. It bluntly warned that by demanding censorship of explicit artworks and humiliating public confessions from men accused of sexual misdeeds, #MeToo was creating “a climate like a totalitarian society.”
This exposure of #MeToo has provoked outrage among forces that have long specialized in packaging right-wing forms of identity politics as “left.” The Socialist Party (PS), France’s main social democratic party of government since the May-June 1968 general strike and a key purveyor of gender politics, led the charge. Leading PS figures, reeling from the party’s disintegration in the 2017 elections amid mass anger at its austerity policies and wars, picked up their pens to hysterically denounce Deneuve and other signatories as rape apologists.
In fact, an examination of their arguments—a mixture of unsubstantiated accusations, threats and foul-mouthed slanders on the column’s signatories, mainly Deneuve—vindicate the column’s assessment of the anti-democratic, right-wing character of the #MeToo movement.
Read more: https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2018/01/11/dene-j11.html
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