Different Definitions of Sexual Harassment

In France, we have a tendency to make theater out of life and politics. It is a society steeped in literature, which explains in part the incomparable role intellectuals and writers have played throughout history. In the Parisian world, we make or break reputations for the fun of it, but more importantly, we come to the defense of the so-called leftist elite as soon as they come under attack by the media or the judicial system. For a week now, we haven’t been spared in this shabby story concerning Dominique Strauss-Kahn (DSK), the ex-director of the IMF.

I’ve overhead, during a dinner party resembling an unorthodox mass, that “a forced fellatio cannot be compared to rape.” I’ve met many people who strongly believe in a conspiracy and who spit on the American judicial system. I’ve listened to Bernard Henri-Lévy denounce “the knitter at the feet of the media scaffold,” who has the audacity to speak ill of his friend of 25 years, a palace neighbor at Marrakesh, and demand special treatment for the ex-future French presidential candidate. I’ve listened, flabbergasted, to famous feminist friends praise Dominique Strauss Khan, “the victim,” while ignoring the presumed real victim, the housemaid, as though she was a character in a French novel, in which “the man of the house does her doggy-style.”

I’ve assisted, without surprise, to the partisan alignment of ones and of others, but mostly to the leftist speech whose sentiments barely veiled disdain for lower social classes. How can a powerful man with a stellar performance be accused by an African housemaid? What is this American equality in which a peasant or a nobody has the same rights as the brilliant leaders of our planet? What I’ve heard brought me years back, when on the Bernard Pivot show I had denounced a pedophile writer, who wrote, in a memoir published by Gallimard, how he used to sodomize young school girls. On that occasion “open-minded” individuals heaped opprobrium on me, saying I was “sexually frustrated,” among other insulting terms.

The media-literary Paris loves the sulfurous, the perverse, the mischievous, all attributes given to sexual harassers. “A flirter and a seducer … beyond that which is reasonable,” wrote a journalist for Le Monde in 1999 about DSK.”A victim of his sex-appeal,” says Michel Traubmann, his official biographer, who claims that DSK was “more flirted with, than the flirter per se.” A close friend said that in the presence of young women, “the instruction was to keep him at a distance from them, a way of protecting him from his own devils.” As to his wife Anne Sinclair, a former TV journalist, she declared to the magazine L’Express in 2006 that she was rather proud of her husband’s reputation as a life-long seducer, adding that “the art of seduction is important for a politician.”

The journalist Tristane Banon, who is about to file legal proceedings for attempted rape, got a taste of “his art of seduction” during an interview with DSK in 2002. “He was like a chimpanzee in heat,” she related. “It ended very violently. We were fighting on the floor…. He unhooked my bra, he tried to remove my jeans.” Her mother, a member of the socialist party, convinced her at that time not to sue “for family and amicable reasons.”

The future doesn’t matter. The whole of France has entered into another dimension. And we can reckon that the “Gallic roosters” won’t be singing to applause or to smiles. Women that have been harassed will become more talkative and will come out of the closet. The “droit du seigneur,” once a privilege accorded to monarchs but now extended in democratic societies to men due to their sex and the power they exert, should be proscribed just as slavery was. In Quebec, we are engaged in this difficult and complex battle, and few are those who, as in France, find randy devils sympathetic.

I’ve known sexually insisting politicians throughout my career: ambiguous bosses in their relations with female employees. And a colleague of mine, one among many, was assaulted by our former Prime Minister René Lévesque. The whole journalist order buried the event and my colleague preferred to keep quiet lest she suffer the same fate. Since then, Quebec society has become more civilized; respect of women is now part of its culture.

During public interventions this week in France, too many commentators were describing North America, including Quebec, as a prudish and puritan society when it comes to sexuality. As if licentiousness and sexual harassment would be means to expressing a form of liberation and of progressive emancipation. The Latin lover à la Berlusconi and the praising of depravity in the Parisian circles rather conceals a violence towards women that relates to the most archaic of male chauvinism.

The equality of sex that is present in Quebec does not always preclude machos from proliferating, nor sexual abusers from attacking women. But our society limits the radius of action of these individuals who are in fact the antithesis of real seducers. And more importantly, victims of sexual violence are treated with respect, something the French would be envious about.