In praise of consent Caroline Fourest May 20, 2011
The American and British media, tabloids in the lead, ironise. How could the French press let DSK become such an important personage without closely investigating his greatest weakness? French journalists, taking the opposite tack, are asking themselves: How can one print a headline "DSK the Perv" on the front page of an American newspaper just twenty-four hours after his arrest, without waiting to find out if he's guilty or not?
Whatever its outcome, the affair has drawn attention to the gap between French and American approaches, between a more Latin culture and a more Anglo-Saxon culture. With their strengths and weaknesses. And the risk, as always, is of going from one excess to the other.
Let's begin with a little self-criticism. The protection of private life or the presumption of innocence in no way justify minimizing a case of sexual aggression, or doubting the innocence of the woman who says she is the victim of it. The little comments about the victim's physical appearance, the way other cases emerging to the surface are treated with contempt, speak volumes about a culture where male power is still sacralized. The legacy of patriarchy, of course, but also of the Ancien Regime.
The members of the Court always have a right to more regard than the people when they do wrong. Especially if the future of other members of the Court depends upon it. Even our justice system, however enviable compared to the American system, has a ways to go in treating the powerful and non-powerful equally. The way the Tapie affair came out is a flagrant example.
In the United States, where money is king, anything can be bought. Especially a prison sentence if one pleads guilty. On condition of doing penance. In New York, that means being paraded like a trophy by the police in Wild West fashion, filmed in shackles or photographed at night in one's cell.
Truly a terrible spectacle, which hides a monstrously unequal society. Where moral punishment, in a religious mode, is supposed to compensate for the absence of social justice. Even freedom of the press a l'anglo-saxonne, is in reality freedom to do business: of selling papers, without regard for private life or the presumption of innocence.
One can question the fact that a man was allowed to represent our political future without any concern for stories which, today, are beginning to emerge. But there is nothing to be ashamed of in belonging to a press that refuses to spend its time rummaging through the beds of politicians. As long as it concerns consenting relations and not sexual aggression or rape, the love life of a public man or woman is a private matter. Otherwise, the press is confused with a league of virtue.
That is no reason to accept the conflation of libertinism with droit de cuissage. Putting aside this particular case, deep questions must be asked about this propensity to describe predatory and compulsive behaviors, having more to do with psychiatry than hedonism, as the behavior of a "jouisseur" or "séducteur." Real libertinism is feminst. It prefers seduction to domination, fusion to conquest. Which is to say that it makes consent an absolute value.
In a society where centuries of male domination have taught women to be ashamed to say yes, and men to be excited by a no, it is sometimes difficult to distinguish white from gray, for all the fog.
Hence the temptation to continue to think in terms of black and white. Machismo or puritanism. Rape or abstinence. Hypocrisy or transparency. None of these two excesses is desirable.