Although rape charges against former IMF chief Dominique-Strauss Kahn may be dropped, the case has triggered a reawakening among French feminists, and according to Le Monde special correspondent Catherine Simon, they have issued a set of demands to put to all candidates in France’s 2012 presidential election.
For Le Monde, from the Summer conference of Feminist Movements in Evry, France, correspondent Catherine Simon writes in part:
‘In a sense, the case has been beneficial. It has awakened the conscience: people are now questioning the reality of the situation of women and the relationship of power and sexuality,’ judges the head of the French Movement for Family Planning, Carine Favier, who nevertheless cautioned against the ‘freedom-killing Puritan discourse’ that the DSK affair has inspired.
‘In France,’ she continued, “as soon as you start talking about sexuality, as soon as you start to mix politics and private life, you hit a roadblock.” She readily admits that this is a complex issue and offers as an example women who press charges for domestic violence: “They do so because there is already a background of assault, insults and humiliation. But they rarely press charges for rape. They don’t immediately perceive it like that, since as everyone knows, sex without desire is just part of marriage,” says the chairwoman of Family Planning. For her, the only question is, “the power that one person exercises over another. For one person to consider someone else just an object is simply unacceptable.’
‘If there was no rape, well, that’s good news!’ exclaims Caroline de Haas, co-founder and former spokesperson for Dare to Be Feminist!. ‘What we reacted to was not what happened – or didn’t happen – in New York. The U.S. justice system will decide that. … Why did it take the DSK affair for the political class and the press to ‘discover’ that 75,000 women are raped in France every year? That professional inequality remains the rule? That parity is a mirage?’
READ ON AT WORLDMEETS.US, your most trusted translator and aggregator of foreign news and views about our nation.
Founder and Managing Editor of Worldmeets.US