Catherine Deneuve, the 74-year-old French actress known for her decades-long career, has joined 99 other women in signing an open letter that challenges the #MeToo movement and its French counterpart #Balancetonporc, claiming that the public campaigns infantilize women, limit sexual freedom, and contribute to “puritanical” and “totalitarian” thinking.
The letter was published Tuesday in French newspaper Le Monde, and its signatories are academics, entertainers, and writers, including author Catherine Millet, psychoanalyst Catherine Robbe-Grillet, and actress Christine Boisson.
“Rape is a crime. But insistent or clumsy flirting is not a crime, nor is gallantry a chauvinist aggression,” the women write, according to a translation printed in The New York Times. “As a result of the Weinstein affair, there has been a legitimate realization of the sexual violence women experience, particularly in the workplace, where some men abuse their power. It was necessary. But now this liberation of speech has been turned on its head.”
In the letter, the women also denounced #MeToo for punishing men too abruptly. Likening the public reckoning that’s ousted many high-profile men from positions of power to a “witch hunt,” they lamented that “expedited justice already has its victims, men prevented from practicing their profession as punishment, forced to resign, etc., while the only thing they did wrong was touching a knee, trying to steal a kiss, or speaking about ‘intimate’ things at a work dinner…”
The letter is likely an example of problematic generational divides that complicate the #MeToo conversation and fail to hold men accountable for their behavior: Last year, designer Donna Karan, 69, apologized after saying that women who were assaulted by film producer Harvey Weinstein were “asking for it.” Ninety-two-year-old actress Angela Lansbury also made the world cringe when she said women “must sometimes take blame” for harassment. And, in an interview with The Sunday Times Magazine back in 2015, rocker Chrissie Hynde, 66, said she took “full responsibility” for a sexual assault incident she experienced at age 21, in which she was raped by a motorcycle gang member who offered her a ride to a party.
Plus, as The Atlantic points out, there are also cultural differences at play here. While women in the U.S. may feel a strength in numbers and solidarity in speaking out French women may fear that “naming names will more likely win you accusations of being a ‘collabo,’ or turncoat, not to mention an affront to your own sex appeal.
Needless to say, Le Monde letter met with a wave of backlash that was swift and biting.
Italian actress Asia Argento—one of the first women to accuse Harvey Weinstein of sexual misconduct—tweeted “Deneuve and other French women tell the world how their interiorized misogyny has lobotomized them to the point of no return,” while a group of about 30 activists, led by French feminist Caroline De Haas, responded by saying that Deneuve and the co-signers had conflated flirting and sexual violence.
“One means treating the other as your equal, respecting their desires, whatever they may be. The other is treating them as an object at your disposal, paying no attention to their own desires, or their consent,” they wrote.
Deneuve has spoken about women’s issues in the past, even admitting to having an illegal abortion in France in the 1970s. However, it’s not the first time she’s denounced #MeToo—she called the movement “excessive” last fall. She’s also been criticized for defending the director Roman Polanski, who pleaded guilty to unlawful sexual intercourse with a minor.
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