DSK.

"DSK": a household reference for the man in la belle France.

Three rather surprising and general reactions from the French in Paris since I am on the ground and working here right at the moment of this scandal (reactions of co-workers & friends, taxi drivers, the French papers, tabloids, etc - all sorts of discourse about the subject):

1. The obvious one: what happened was some sort of organized effort to frame DSK and to bring him down just before his moment of glory in politics. This is everywhere. This reaction is understandable, if you take into account timing and if we were talking about another man. Unfortunately, that DSK is in a position to be defending his behavior in this circumstance is not even slightly surprising given his history with women and sexual aggression. When DSK became the head of the IMF, what was written in French papers? A cautionary tract, insisting that DSK's approach with women would not be tolerated in an Anglo-American setting. He was literally called on this before it happened. This says nothing of the incident in 2002 with the French journalist (and his wife's goddaughter, no less), Tristane Banon, who claims to have been sexually assaulted by DSK and then subsequently told by her own mother to hold her tongue and not publicly speak out. The man has a history of a perverse way of thinking about women, which in no world means that he is guilty, but rather, that the immediate French assumption that he must not be is odd. Tristane Banon's mother's reaction also symbolizes something perverse in French culture. Perhaps DSK found himself in a context where his behavior would not be tolerated and that is the difference between his ability to act with impunity in the past and the position in which he finds himself today.

2. The second reaction (almost everyone mentioned this): American puritanism will taint the judicial process (so even if he is found guilty, he won't be - the verdict will merely be evidence of the American obsession with puritanism in public sexual affairs). The fact that the French choose to turn a blind eye to consensual sexual behavior by their politicians really has nothing to do with whether this person committed a crime or not. Analogously, the fact that Americans care whether or not their elected leaders engage in sexual trysts on the side is totally irrelevant as to whether DSK will be found guilty of a crime in this country. That the conversation turns to American puritanism when discussing a crime is a strange reflection on the way sexual harassment is viewed in France. In fact, I was baffled when a colleague chimed in on the DSK discussion with, "And they haven't even shown us a picture of the woman yet!" As if by viewing a photograph it could be determined whether or not she would be a worthy target for such a man as DSK.

3. The most absurd: that DSK devised this plan himself and acted as a means of wriggling out of his current political track. Tactical genius. The poor man - driven to such behavior.

The theme of all three of these reactions? DSK is not to blame. Whether this is true or not, it is fascinating that the French could be so unequivocal in their response and their defense of such a reputable figure.

French Feminism.

My dad sent me this article: "Where Having It All Doesn't Mean Having Equality" from The New York Times a couple of days ago.

I've written about how perplexing French femininity was to me while living in France. French women are the ultimate gate keepers of a traditional notion of femininity and yet, employment rates for women in France are among the highest in Europe and so are birth rates. This article from the Times addresses exactly these seeming contradictions. It sites that France is number 46 on the World Economic Forum's gender equality report list - dragging behind its European neighbors, and countries like Kazakhstan and Jamaica (and the US). And despite high employment rates, French women earn far less than their male counterparts and work far more hours in the home and with their children.

The article opens citing the state-paid program designed to rejuvenate women's vaginas after birth - a series of guided exercises with practictioners to make women both ready to make love more quickly and have more children. It sounds outrageous, but it is consistent with the idea that women are expected to be both objects of desire and vessels of the next generation. France, like everywhere else, is part of a demographic battle but neither femininity nor laborers should be the casualties of that struggle.

The article also addresses the most pressing issue in the post-feminist game in my opinion: men. While women may generally be granted more rights and occupy larger spaces in the employment/political world (albeit token at times), men, largely, haven't budged. The article sites that even when there are institutional means of taking time off for childcare when children are young, the only people who take advantage of these provisions are women. Women spend the majority of the hours outside work on housecare/childcare, whereas the hours spent by men on these activities is nominal in comparison (even when both individuals put in the same hours at their jobs). France does have phenomenal infrastructural support in terms of things like childcare, but that does not account for how work gets distributed after-hours.

The ending sentence of the article is a quotation from a Geneviève Fraisse (philosopher), "We had one revolution, now we need another one - in the family." (Her reference is not to the feminist revolution, of course, but to 1789). And, with this statement, je suis d'accord. Couldn't agree more completely. This is the heart of the issue - not whether women should work or shouldn't work, not whether babies should go to daycare, but that feminism (to me) is about changing the geography of responsibility in the home and the possibility of expression for individual people, regardless of whether they are male or female.

French Femininity Continued...

Cringed and laughed out loud at the same time when I saw this...the horror. Why? Why are the heels necessary for pitching a women's sporting event? Is it the preposterous nature of the idea of women removing such things to engage in sport? Or is it to attract viewers who otherwise would have no interest? Or is it the insistence that femininity means only a very limited range of things in France? Whatever was behind this, it is beyond me.

French Femininity and Elsa Joly.

Meet Elsa Joly.

Elsa is Xavier's cousin. Elsa is, quite obviously, magnetically beautiful. Impressively, her personality is equally pulling. Elsa is the most accurate apotheosis of French femininity I know of. Personally. She does it so well.

French femininity has always eluded me. From the day I arrived in France I bristled against the depictions of women everywhere - the classic issues of feminine representation: impossibly thin, perfectly sculpted, ridiculously seductive - all of it looked like simulated femininity to me - the gross production and reproduction of some myth. These images are everywhere - not just in France, but there exists a special institution surrounding these images here. I didn't understand why French girls don't play sports (then I realized that French boys don't either). I was amazed that gender roles have been left untouched, despite the fact that so many women are in the work force. I was astounded that when I mentioned the word 'feminism' French women would immediately respond with distance. Most of all, I had the distinct impression that femininity had very few forms in France.

All of this is complicated by the fact that in many ways, I fit a classic representation of femininity myself. It has always been a squirmish struggle for me - how I do gender. I hate the idea that a feminist has to look bedraggled. But I also hate the idea that a woman must look femininely beautiful in a prescribed way to be a woman. I was fascinated in France that liberation for women has never involved stripping femininity of its meaning, as it so often has in the Anglo-American context. I've personally always just wanted an expanded version of what the notion of femininity meant - a greater stretch of possibilities in expression and performance...of how gender is 'done,' in the classic Judith Butler-ian sense. French women seemed, to me, to be so reigned in by femininity in its most time-honored form.

When I was a student at Brigham Young University I spent time as the president of the feminist club there. One of the issues we took up was the long line of beauty queens donning the walls of the Wilkinson Center (student center). We wanted the portraits down. The problem wasn't so much that they were hanging there, but that they were some of the only hanging women at Brigham Young University. I remember the pursuing conversation - the printed editorials in the papers that claimed that I and the others must be fat and ugly to take issue with the beauty queens...that it was an issue of jealousy. I was highly amused by this take, but it was symptomatic of the running belief that anyone who is a feminist must be a woman who simply can't do femininity.

So, in a country where femininity is embraced and patrolled, above all, by women themselves, I've been fascinated to exhume what exactly it means in France and whether it is discordant with emancipatory politics for women.

Hence, I turned to the best representative of French femininity I knew: Mlle. Joly.



This summer we spent time together in the south of France and I remember a specific conversation about a woman whom Elsa described as being not feminine. In fact, according to Elsa, it was her chief deficiency. I was absorbed by Elsa's description just of this woman's hair. Hair, as Elsa described it, is the root of a woman's femininity. It is the soul of her femininity - how she uses it, plays with it, has it cut. There were other things too - this woman's insecurity, her unease with her body, etc., which all added up to equal this woman's lack. For Elsa, femininity is not on a continuum with masculinity - the girl was by no means masculine either.

So, after this conversation, I decided to sit down and ask Elsa about the subject. I went to Elsa's house last night to chat (where her new baby puppy was such a splendid distraction).

I think the most fascinating part of what Elsa described when she talked about femininity is that there was never any tension between a very traditional idea of femininity - of difference between men and women - and equality. Elsa opened her story of feminity with an insistence that being a woman is something inherent, something deep inside. She said that women give life - and that this quality is instinctive in their interactions well beyond birth itself. She also said there is something carnal, even animal chez les femmes. She went on to say that women are sensitive beacause they understand the true nature of things and also because they are weak - they have weakness. In her weakness she also finds her strength, said Elsa.

Then we moved on to beauty. Elsa claimed that fashion and makeup - tools of beauty - are a huge advantage for women. My eyebrows raised when she said this, having heard so many times the divergent view that these things are harnesses women bear.

Her idea of femininity and its uses were based on inherent and well accepted differences between men and women. So much of the feminist struggle (at least in Anglo countries) has been about denying or minimizing or explaining away these differences. Difference has often been seen as the justification for unequal treatment or for injustice. In contrast, the French, like French Elsa, have not denied difference. Femininity in France has the same definition today as it had in the 1950's or 60's. Interestingly the connection between difference and inequality has not been conscripted as the problem.

So, here is Elsa and her version of femininity. Here am I, sitting across from her, listening to her words. I like Elsa's take - shockingly, it amuses me. I can find too many examples of women and men who don't fit into these descriptions to embrace it wholeheartedly, but her telling is compelling.

I am most amused when I ask Elsa how she found women in New York while she lived there. She replies, 'masculine - very sexy, but masculine.' She also says that most French men think that these women will eat them. They are not sufficiently playful, subtle or submissive in their femininity.

So, I haven't solved the quandary. Femininity, to me, remains baffling and thorny in France, equally so in America and most of all in me.


(The top photo is from Elsa's collection. The other two I took of her last night).