Wednesday, January 10, 2018

#MeToo? French Goddess Catherine Deneuve and 100 Other French Women in Arts and the Media Say, ‘Count Us Out!’

 

Catherine Deneuve in Belle du Jour (1967)
 

By Grand Rapids Anonymous
Wednesday, January 10, 2018 at 12:55:00 A.M. EST


French actress Deneuve denounces “Me Too.”

(AP) In the wake of the rampaging sexual harassment scandal in Hollywood, French actress Catherine Deneuve is taking a different tack, saying that men should be “free to hit on” women.

“Rape is a crime, but trying to seduce someone, even persistently or cack-handedly, is not – nor is men being gentlemanly a macho attack,” said Deneuve.

 

 

According to The Guardian, Deneuve and 100 other French women who work in arts and media, wrote an open letter in French newspaper, Le Monde, shutting down the “denunciations” following Harvey Weinstein’s plethora of rape and sexual assault allegations. In the letter, the women claim the “witch-hunt” following Weinstein’s allegations is a threat to sexual freedom.
 

 

“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,” the letter reads.
 

With just eyeliner
 

GRA: An excerpt from a Fox story. She'll probably be forced to apologize, as another European actress, Charlotte Rampling, had to do in 2016.

Rampling had made a similar statement against the crowd alleging racism in Hollywood awards shows (“#Oscarssowhite”). The crowd made Rampling “adjust” her initial response to avoid further attack—and probably unemployment.

Of course, Deneuve is not a sex symbol—at age 74—and will be ignored by most as “an out of touch old person.” Still, when someone sticks their neck out, I think it’s worth a blog.

 

On the beach
 

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Have you ever done it ze French way. I bet Kathy has. Belle du jour. Lady of the day. I bet she was too.

Anonymous said...

jerry pdx
Deneuve made some valid points but still shied away from certain issues. To illustrate better: Harassment is nebulous and subjective and the people who are in charge of defining what it is are the female of the species. The young females particularly. Deneuve alludes to this but doesn't clearly elucidate it.

The reality is that men want to engage in sexual relations more than women do and primarily want to do it with younger women in the reproductive age category. As a result it's men who have to ask and attempt to get women to have sex with them, women receive the attention and decide if they want to comply. This is reflected in the behavior of most animal species on the planet. It's the males who come begging for action.

It's the reluctance of women to define the boundaries of what is acceptable and what is not in the game of seduction is why the debate about harassment remains primarily accusatory, hysterical and rhetorical. Few women want to honestly admit that they do want men to pursue them aggressively, or that they are turned on by those aggressive men who "don't take no for an answer", they just want them to be the men they are interested in, not the betas or unattractive ones. Even though the line between attractive and non attractive can also be undefined, women expect men to "know" if it's appropriate for him to pursue her, and if he's wrong he's guilty of "harassment". Some women will accept gifts from unattractive men, playing them along, eventually though women may turn on him and accuse of him of "harassment" to obscure the fact she accepted gifts from him knowing all the while she had no interest in him. I don't think women will ever voluntarily give up their privilege as women to manipulate male desire for them by being more honest and up front about what they want, as long as that continues this harassment issue will never truly end.