Precis

Hollywood’s blockbuster #MeToo movement took the world by storm, giving voice to women and causing powerful men to hit the speed dial to their lawyers and PR flacks.

Then it met the French resistance.

More than 100 prominent French women – including screen goddess Catherine Deneuve - signed the now famous “Le Monde Letter” denouncing #Metoo. They pledged to “defend a freedom to bother as indispensable to sexual freedom” and sympathised with “men who’ve been disciplined in the workplace… when their only crime was to touch a woman’s knee or steal a kiss”.

So what is it about sex and seduction a la francaise? Does #MeToo threaten a proud libertine tradition that differentiates France from stitched-up Anglo-Saxon culture? Or do such ideas belong to the bygone era of lustful cartoon skunk Pepe Le Lew?

Reporter Annabel Crabb goes to Paris to interrogate the Le Monde women and their critics from the French #MeToo movement, as well as some mildly confused males.

“Women like to be protected,” says ex-porn star, radio host and Le Monde signatory Brigitte Lahaie. “Wanting to be equal to men takes away this possibility of feeling protected and nurturing sexuality, desire and eroticism.”

Crabb asks how that view squares with a recent government survey of female public transport users. How many respondents reported having been harassed while travelling? 100 per cent.

The Macron Government has pledged a new era of equality for women and has introduced a controversial on-the-spot fine for sexual harassment in public. But it baulked at the last minute in its attempt to introduce a legal age of consent in France for the first time.

“Rape is minimised in France. Most people think it’s not such a big deal,” says Adelaide Bon, a writer and former actress who was raped as a child.

Scientist and philosopher Peggy Sastre co-wrote the Le Monde letter. She spies danger in the naming and shaming promoted by #MeToo and its French counterpart Balance ton Porc – “Call Out Your Pig”.

“We must not go back to some medieval logic,” she says. “It leads to witch hunts, to a lot of excesses, to a lot of people wrongly accused.”

Young YouTube star Marion Seclin, whose anti-harassment videos go viral, dismisses Sastre and the other Le Monde signatories as the old guard of French womanhood.

“I don’t need someone to open the door for me or pay for my dinner because I earn my own money,” she says.

Weinstein on red carpet

PHOTOGRAPHERS: “Harvey, Harvey!”

00:00

ANNABEL CRABB: Top dog turned Hollywood uber-creep. 

00:03

Music

00:06

ANNABEL CRABB:  Movie mogul Harvey Weinstein was the first big scalp of #MeToo – the movement that calls out celebrity gropers and sexual predators.

00:13

#MeToo rallies

Music

00:30

#MeToo took off around the globe until it met the French Resistance. 

00:33

Stills. Women signatories to Le Monde letter

More than a 100 high profile women who signed the famous “Le Monde” letter, defending the right of men to pester women.

00:39

Crabb walking down French street

“This is a country notorious for its paradoxes. 

00:49

Crabb to camera on street

The French eat a crazy about of cheese and don’t get fat.  They’re famous on one hand for their French feminist writers, but on the other for their old-fashioned concept of male gallantry, which makes this the country where a woman is most likely to have the door opened for her by a man”.

00:52

Crabb and Young at café

ANNETTE YOUNG: “I think it has a lot do to with the notion of Frenchmen being great lovers, you know the notion that this is a…”.

ANNABEL CRABB: “Is it a Pepé Le Pew thing?”

ANNETTE YOUNG: “Exactly”.

01:09

Pepé Le Pew cartoon

PEPÉ LE PEW: [cartoon] “It is love at first sight, is it not?”

ANNABEL CRABB: Once a upon a time, this horny skunk cartoon parody seemed innocent enough,

01:18

Paris GVs

and for many French women today, being hit on in the street is an all too real part of life. 

01:29

Crabb out of metro

Will #MeToo finally subdue Pepe Le Pew?  I’m in Paris to find out.

01:38

Title:
Foreign Correspondent

Music

01:44

Paris GVs

01:50

Title: 
The French Letter

01:55

Reporter:  Annabel Crabb

ANNABEL CRABB:  I’m on my way to meet a slightly controversial woman, and one of the signatories to that Le Monde letter. 

01:59

Lahaie in bookshop

Brigitte Lahaie is a well-known French radio host, running talkback about sex and relationships. 

02:06

Excerpt. Lahaie in film

But she’s most famous for her earlier career, as an actress with starring roles in more than 40 French pornographic films.

02:16

Crabb walking to La Musardine

We’re meeting at La Musardine, a famous erotic bookshop.

02:32

Lahaie greets Crabb in bookshop

[greeting each other]

ANNABEL CRABB: I want to know why she signed that letter and what she thinks French seduction is all about.

02:42

Lahaie interview

BRIGITTE LAHAIE: “Well, French seduction for me is a homage to femininity.  I worked a lot in London for example and I was very surprised that men, English men, would not let you take their turn.  Whereas in France, perhaps not so much now, men would let a woman go ahead of them in a queue.  That’s French seduction, a sort of homage.  Our femininity gives us a sort of preferential treatment”.

02:55

Archival. Paris, 1960s

Music

03:43

ANNABEL CRABB: Brigitte was a teenager when she first moved to Paris.  It was shortly after the 1968 revolution which changed France forever.

03:50

Archival. Paris '68 riots

Back then, students and workers rioted to overthrow the conservative social order in all kinds of ways – including a new wave of sexual freedom.

04:03

Archival. Paris night

Music

04:16

BRIGITTE LAHAIE: “There was a joie de vivre and a way of life which felt free. 

04:21

Lahaie interview

You could dress any way you liked in the street without being harassed”.

04:36

Paris. Young women

ANNABEL CRABB:  That freedom from harassment is not something young French women talk about today.  Quite the opposite.

04:41

Music

04:51

Crabb to camera walking down street

ANNABEL CRABB:  “Whether or not you believe in a Frenchman’s right to pester, there’s little doubt that it’s widely exercised here in Paris. A recent government survey of female public transport users, found that 100% of them reported that they’d been sexually harassed while travelling”.

05:00

Crabb catches train

Music

05:17

ANNABEL CRABB:  I’m going to meet one of France’s most passionate young YouTube stars, Marion Seclin. 

05:25

Crabb out of railway station

Music

05:31

Marion Seclin YouTube video

ANNABEL CRABB: In 2016, she posted this video with a direct appeal to French men, to stop hassling women in public places.

05:35

MARION SECLIN: [YouTube] “Even if you are nice, even if you love your mum and all the other women in the world.  Even if you are respectful, even if your intentions are good, even if you recite Baudelaire, even if you are sorry to bother them you bother them! If you call out to them on the street!”

05:46

Young women

ANNABEL CRABB: The video went super viral,

06:00

Crabb and Seclin walk

but Marion received death threats and stopped counting the abusive comments when they passed forty thousand.

“When French women step out on the street, do they make plans, like do they wear something to try and make it less likely that they’ll be bothered?  Is that a fact, does that happen?”

06:07

[walk continues]

MARION SECLIN: “Yes it does.  It actually is way more like weirder than this.  It’s that they will wake up in the morning and ask themselves, what will I wear today because what will the weather be like?  So that’s a question that everyone asks themselves, but also what neighbourhood am I going through and at what time am I going to be back home, and can I afford an Uber or a taxi or anything, because they know this is going to happen.  This is something pressuring them. It’s something that you know is going to happen, you just don’t know where, when or what.  So you’re kind of thinking as a woman, let’s make it that it does not happen to me today”.

06:23

[walk continues]

ANNABEL CRABB: “So it’s like a strategy for damage control”.

MARION SECLIN: “It is”.

ANNABEL CRABB: “Right, okay”.

MARION SECLIN: “So the fact that we have on our mind a load superior than boys than just the weather, it’s something that disturbs me a lot and this is why I made the video is that”.

07:07

[walk continues]

ANNABEL CRABB: “Can you see, can you look at a guy in the street and know that that’s the guy that’s going to come and say something to you?”

MARION SECLIN: “No, you can never know”.

ANNABEL CRABB: “Right”.

MARION SECLIN: “It’s like, surprise!”

ANNABEL CRABB: “I’m that guy”.

MARION SECLIN: “Yes, you don’t know”.

07:21

Paris. Train passes Eiffel Tower

Music

07:34

Café video

ANNABEL CRABB: Marion’s point was proven in dramatic style recently when another video went viral.  This time a Frenchman punching a young woman, a stranger who had rejected his advances.  This doesn’t look like the kind of equality envisioned by the protestors of 1968.

07:39

Le Monde letter. GFX

So what was actually in that notorious open letter that inflamed so much passion?  The letter expressed sympathy for, “Men who’ve been disciplined in the workplace when their only crime was to touch a woman’s knee or steal a kiss”.  It complains that the #MeToo Movement was “Puritanism in the name of a so-called greater good”.  And perhaps most controversially, it pledged to “… defend freedom to bother as indispensable sexual freedom”.

08:00

Paris GVs

The signatures of screen goddesses, Catherine Deneuve and Brigitte Lahaie added heat and star power to the mix. 

08:40

Sastre working on laptop

But much of the actual writing was done by this woman, scientist and philosopher, Peggy Sastre. 

08:51

Crab meets Sastre

She says it was a response to the excesses of the #MeToo Movement and its French equivalent, #Balance Ton Porc, which translates to 'call out your pig'.

08:59

Sastre interview

PEGGY SASTRE: “We must not go back to some medieval logic about reputation and ostracism.  We know it doesn’t work.  It leads to witch hunts, a lot of excesses, a lot of people wrongly accused.  We know it’s harmful.  History is full of terrible examples of this.  So let’s not go on this way”.

09:13

ANNABEL CRABB: “Peggy, do you think that the relations between men and women in France are different from other countries in the world?”

09:38

PEGGY SASTRE: “I feel that relations between men and women in France are perhaps simpler.  There’s more good sense, more simplicity, less fear. 

09:45

We shouldn’t follow the example of American puritanism, where the standard belief is that there’s a problem in the relations between men and women and there must be one more complex and happen on an individual level”.

10:05

Crabb in car – Paris GVs

Music

10:22

Crabb walking around Paris

10:32

ANNABEL CRABB: Everywhere I go here, I encounter this horror at the prospect of moral censorship. This is a country where marital infidelity among political leaders is the rule, not the exception.  Emmanuel Macron is reportedly faithful to his wife, but he’s the first French President in 50 years of whom this can be said.

10:36

BRIGITTE LAHAIE: “It is important to understand that sexual liberation and transgression

11:09

Lahaie interview. Super:
Brigitte Lahaie
Radio host

are particularly important in France.  There’s nothing shocking about a man who has lots of affairs.  I think it’s more to do with our eroticism, our culture, which makes us very lenient towards a politician’s affairs”.

11:15

Marlene Schiappa walks to car

Music

11:38

ANNABEL CRABB: The French Minister for Gender Equality, Marlene Schiappa, is unworried by the intrusion of sex into the workplace, even for politicians.

11:45

Schiappa interview

MARLENE SCHIAPPA: “No, we are not animals.  We normally manage to control ourselves.

11:58

I’m not in favour of regulating relationships between people. The only regulation that must exist is consent and in the case of two consenting adults, in my opinion, nothing is forbidden”.

12:03

Young women on Paris streets

ANNABEL CRABB:  After his election in 2017, President Macron declared gender equality the “Grande Cause Nationale” of his government.  He promised penalties for companies paying women less than men, and tougher sentences for sexual offences.  Plus an on the spot fine of 90 Euros for sexual harassment in public places.

12:16

Seclin interview

MARION SECLIN: “I think it was something, that it was like a first step.  The problem is that,

12:46

Super:
Marion Seclin
Anti-harassment campaigner

how is it going to work?  It’s the same you know you’re not allowed to pee in Paris streets, have you smelt Paris streets?  It smells like pee.  Why?  It’s because every guy now and then when they’re drunk or when they just want to pee, they pee in the street, so you’re supposed to pay 80 Euros if someone finds you peeing in the street, but there’s no one to have this rule work.  There’s no one here to look around a street corner and say, ho what you do is forbidden”.

12:52

ANNABEL CRABB: “It seems that part of the mystique of 'la seduction Francaise' is that it’s kind of all about what men are doing to women, like this idea of gallantry and opening doors and saying, you have beautiful legs or something like that”.

13:19

MARION SECLIN: “My generation, I think the boys and the girls they don’t have that thing anymore, where they want to keep these things, where you open the door, you pay for dinner, you’re being really polite, you’re being like a… I don’t know… if it was something bigger.  It’s like in French seduction a boy had to build a house for a woman, I’d say sure I’d keep it because that would be a big privilege for me.  But someone opening the door, it’s not even helpful more than just three seconds in my day so… yeah”.

13:33

ANNABEL CRABB: “So paint my house.  Now we’re talking”.

14:07

MARION SECLIN: “No, but just do something that is really helpful and that I need, but I don’t need someone to open the door for me or pay for dinner for me because I earn my own money.  I have a job”.

14:09

Graffiti/ Young men on Paris streets

Music

14:19

ANNABEL CRABB: So how are young French guys dealing with #MeToo, and will the new laws really cramp the average Frenchman’s amatory style. 

14:32

Crabb with Victor, Xavier and Arnaud in café

Risking a 90 Euro fine, I’ve approached some French men and invited them for lunch.

14:44

Meet Victor, Xavier and Arnaud.

14:52

XAVIER: “Girls like, prefer to meet someone in the street”.

ANNABEL CRABB: “Right”.

XAVIER: “Because there is something magic”.

14:57

ARNAUD: “I think in their imagination, in everybody’s imagination is like something very romantic to be approached and like, ‘Oh you look beautiful’ or ‘I’d love to offer you a drink’ and that’s so lovely and I think in everybody’s imagination you want to meet the princess or the prince that would you know sees you, where no one sees you, you know?”\

ANNABEL CRABB: “Yeah”.

15:04

ARNAUD: “But in fact it’s more so than that and it’s true that you can see a woman here in the street walking really fast just because they don’t want to be you know approached”.

15:27

ANNABEL CRABB: “But do you ever think that you’ve… I don’t know, like that it’s… the person didn’t want you to come up and say anything.  Like maybe they’re just like ‘argh’.”

15:38

ARNAUD: “Yeah but don’t you even like… if someone goes to you and tells you like, ‘Can I buy you a drink?  You’re beautiful’.  You say no, say piss off.  But inside yourself you’ll be happy, no?  That someone walked to you and said, wow, he likes me.”

ANNABEL CRABB: “Not necessarily

15:48

because maybe for a lot of women who it happens to all the time, they find it hard to have to deal with that all the time and to make the response, and like ‘Oh… hm mm’. They maybe don’t want to go and have a drink or be even told what they look like. I don’t know, I think women often get told what they look like either positively or negatively all day long and maybe sometimes they get sick of it.”

16:03

XAVIER: “That’s, in fact, all people meet in I think now 80% of the case on the application”.

16:34

ANNABEL CRABB: “Are on Tinder.  So Tinder is big in France, I mean these sort of dating apps”.

16:47

XAVIER: “Because it’s… you don’t have to go out and you can stay lonely at your own and just on your phone”.

VICTOR: “The thing is on Tinder is that you know when,

16:51

you’re sure that the other person you will be talking to, are free and are looking for the same kind of stuff that you are looking for.  But if you are going on the street and asking for a girl like that, I don’t know the word in English but we say, ‘pendre un vent’.”

17:02

ARNAUD: “Yeah it’s like piss off”.

17:18

VICTOR: “So we are afraid of having that”.

17:21

ANNABEL CRABB: “How often does that happen?”

VICTOR: “I would say all the time”.

ANNABEL CRABB: “And what’s your response if you get the ‘Piss off’.”

VICTOR: “I’m fine”.

ARNAUD: “Then you just piss off”.

[all laugh]

17:23

Paris GVs

Music

17:34

ANNABEL CRABB:  We keep coming back to this idea of how the French want to see themselves, as a country of freedom and equality, and where women and men have a special kind of arrangement.  I can’t tell if this is genuinely changing.  Maybe I need to stop asking French people. 

17:41

Crabb and Young at outdoor restaurant table

Annette Young is an Australian born journalist, who now presents 51% - a show about women’s issues on French TV.

18:01

“What did you notice about living in France when you first arrived?”

ANNETTE YOUNG: “I think for me the most interesting revelation was the interaction between men and women. 

18:13

There was much more flirtation, open flirtation that goes on without any hesitation.

18:22

ANNABEL CRABB: “So what is it that makes a guy feel in this country able to just walk up by himself to a woman who’s minding her own business and start kind of asking for her phone number and… it just seems very bold”.

18:29

ANNETTE YOUNG: “I think it has a lot to do with the notion of Frenchmen being great lovers, you know the notion that…”

18:41

ANNABEL CRABB: “A sort of Pepé Le Pew thing”.

ANNETTE YOUNG: “Exactly.

18:49

That this is a culture that celebrates love and seduction. So I feel you are witnessing in this country a generational shift and also the fact that more women than ever are working.   They’re having to work.  And so they’re coming into work places where the culture has not changed for decades, and they’re not happy,

18:51

and they want that to change.  They want that gender pay gap to be addressed.  They want discrimination to be dealt with and they certainly want sexual harassment to be looked at as a serious crime”.

19:14

ANNABEL CRABB: “So one of the other elements of the Le Monde letter is this idea that the #MeToo Movement and its cognates around the world, compromise sexual freedom.  Which is something that’s very precious in this part of the world, right?”

19:25

ANNETTE YOUNG: “I think it comes from the 1968 revolution where you’ve got to remember at that time across the world you know it was free love and the French took that up with a massive hurrah because it celebrated everything that they view about love and romance.  And that is the reason I would say that there is no age of consent.

19:41

ANNABEL CRABB: “I was so surprised to learn that about France”.

ANNETTE YOUNG: “It is extraordinary”.

20:00

ANNABEL CRABB: “Is that a reaction to the sort of overthrow of bourgeois idealism that happened in 1968?”

20:05

ANNETTE YOUNG: “Absolutely and I think it’s all part of that social revolution, challenging the norms and so on”.

20:11

Paris GVs

Music

20:16

ANNABEL CRABB: In May, the Macron government attempted to legislate 15 as the legal age of consent in France, meaning that sex with a child below that age would automatically be classed as rape.

20:25

Crabb walks with Young

But after criticism that this would offend the presumption of innocence, the government retreated.  Under the revised law, sex with a child under 15 is a crime but not necessarily rape.

20:39

Crabb and Young at outdoor restaurant table

“There was a case last year where an 11-year-old girl was raped but the attacker’s defence was that she’d consented”.

20:55

Super:
Annette Young
TV host

ANNETTE YOUNG: “That she consented and they got the lesser charge of sexual assault, as opposed to rape so therefore you know their penalty was going to be far lower than obviously if they’d been charged or found guilty of rape. And so women’s groups have been pushing very hard for this age of consent to be changed.  Macron, when he came to power, promised that he would do this, but at the very last minute, they walked back, and as you can imagine, there was a great deal of anger among many women’s groups here in France and extreme disappointment that he didn’t go through”.

21:03

Crabb walks with Adelaide Bon

Music

21:34

ANNABEL CRABB: The government’s retreat on the age of consent legislation was disappointing but not a huge surprise to some. 

21:39

Adelaide Bon is a former actress and now an activist and writer.  She has just published a novel based on her own life and a terrible experience she had at age nine.

21:53

Bon interview

ADELAIDE BON: “When I was a little girl, I was raped by a man who fooled me in the street and raped me in my parents' building, and it took me years and years and years to understand that what happened to me in those stairs was rape and then to understand that it wasn’t me that was violent, perverted, guilty, shameful, but that all those things belong to him”.

22:06

ANNABEL CRABB: Her parents called the police and reported the crime.

22:40

ADELAIDE BON: “And 26 years after that, the cops called me and told me, well we’ve got a suspect and a trial is going to take place. And this is all thanks to DNA”.

22:43

Copy of Bon's book. Bon at computer

ANNABEL CRABB: A further 80 charges of rape and sexual assault were made against Adelaide’s attacker, but many fell outside France’s 20-year statute of limitations.  The Macron government has since extended it to 30 years.  Adelaide believes the French don’t take the crime of rape seriously enough.

ADELAIDE BON: “Most of the time,

22:56

Bon interview

someone who’s been the victim of rape will see the rape downgraded to just harassment, because it’s not the same court.  It’s a court that takes a lot less time and so the penalties are going to be fewer.  Rape is minimised in France.  Most people think it’s not such a big deal and yeah”.

ANNABEL CRABB: “Okay, so what is it about France

23:22

and French culture that makes people think that rape’s not a big deal?”

23:51

ADELAIDE BON: “In France, we are so keen on the words, on seduction, on what we call ‘gallantrie’ where there is something about this game around the man and the woman, where the man is leading and the woman is accepting.  What I think is that when you talk about sex, you’re going to use exactly the same words than when you’re talking about sexual violence”.

23:55

ANNABEL CRABB: It’s an issue Adelaide faced as a child when describing her own attack to police.

24:26

ADELAIDE BON: “For example, in French, we have to say caress, right?  Caress means a gentle touch.  And so the officer said, “So it’s like caress?”  And I said, ‘No’.  We are missing words to say those things and I really think that’s part of the misunderstanding between people who’ve been a victim and people who have not been”.

24:32

Crabb walking down street

ANNABEL CRABB: The spectacle of French women arguing with each other about harassment has been uniquely titillating to some.  But I wonder if everyone is being heard.

24:55

Seine-Saint-Denis GVs

On the outskirts of the city, lies the working-class suburb of Seine-Saint-Denis. 

25:08

Under French laws, the government is not allowed to collect any population data about race, ethnicity or religion.  But the proportion of immigrants here is high, and so are poverty levels.

25:23

Dr Ghada Ha Tem in clinic

Gynaecologist, Dr Ghada Ha Tem has established a special clinic for women who have experienced trauma.

25:38

Dr Ghada interview

DR GHADA HA TEM: “Genital mutilation, rape, they were forced marriage.  So many hard things that talking about harassment in the public spaces, it’s not a topic for them”.

25:48

ANNABEL CRABB: “When those 100 high profile French women wrote the letter to Le Monde denouncing the #MeToo Movement, what did you make of that?”

26:05

DR GHADA HA TEM: “I thought it was quite ridiculous.  I mean we’re fighting for freedom, we are fighting for, empowerment, we are fighting for equity and we can't stay with this very old-fashioned image of women.  So I didn’t like this letter”.

26:13

ANNABEL CRABB: "Do you feel like this debate is confined to a restricted group of women in French society?"

26:33

DR GHADA HA TEM: “Of course, because so many women doesn’t have, don’t feel concerned by this movement. For them, it’s a movement for actresses or rich women and they’re not, their life doesn’t match with these women’s lives so they don’t, absolutely don’t feel concerned.  Our patients here, they don’t feel concerned with that at all”.

26:40

Montage of women who appeared in program

Music

27:09

ANNABEL CRABB: The international shout of protest that is the #MeToo Movement has meant different things to different people.  For some, relief, for some, fear and for others, nothing at all.

27:14

Music

27:32

Crabb at outdoor café

ANNABEL CRABB: Here in France, I think it’s brutally articulated, some questions which once were lost in an ornate code of seduction. It’s hard to imagine that they will ever be silenced again.

27:34

Credits:

Reporter           Annabel Crabb

Producer          Bronwen Ree

Research          Anne Worthington

                        Paula Rosas

Camera            Timothy Stevens

                        Victor Rault

Editor               Garth Thomas

Assistant editor Tom Carr

Executive Producer       Marianne Leitch

Foreign Correspondent
abc.net.au/foreign

ABC © 2018

27:48

Outpoint

28:13