A bizarrely common trend in the wake of the growing number of sexual assault allegations post-Weinstein has been the bizarre conflation of unwanted sexual advances with regular human interaction. Somehow, people have heard ‘Hey, don’t get your dick out and masturbate in front of people who do not want you to that.‘ and decided to interpret it as ‘It’s illegal to be in the same room as a woman!!!‘
For whatever reason, people are interpreting a crackdown on behaviour that has always been deemed unacceptable (just kept secret) as a quasi-fascist tightening of restrictions on what you can and can’t do around people. Obviously, we can’t expect a uniformity of opinion from everyone, but it does seem odd to see so many brave women speaking up about the awful things that have happened to them and decide that they’re somehow ruining the experience of dating.
French actress Catherine Deneuve and 99 other French women are taking that tack. In a letter co-signed by the other 99 women and published in French newspaper Le Monde, the Guardian reports, Deneuve asserted that the concerted effort to try and make a world where women aren’t regularly sexually assault was driven by “puritanism“:
What began as freeing women up to speak has today turned into the opposite – we intimidate people into speaking ‘correctly’, shout down those who don’t fall into line, and those women who refused to bend [to the new realities] are regarded as complicit and traitors.ve
Deneuve said that the response had gone too far:
Rape is a crime, but trying to seduce someone, even persistently or cack-handedly, is not – nor is men being gentlemanly a macho attack. Men have been punished summarily, forced out of their jobs when all they did was touch someone’s knee or try to steal a kiss.
It seems like encouraging an environment that perpetuates the sense of entitlement men have over women’s bodies would only encourage the culture we’re only now starting to deal with but, hey, imagine how bleak the world would be if gross men didn’t feel like they had license to try and make out with you whenever.
I’m no expert, but I reckon you can probably encourage female sexual autonomy and the concept romance while simultaneously saying ‘Hey, don’t sexually assault your coworkers‘. Just a hunch.
