Beware the new puritans

2017 was a massive year for women’s rights. In the summer, Rose McGowan and others went public about the obnoxious behaviour of movie mogul Harvey Weinstein. It quickly emerged he liked to use the ‘casting couch’ to get his way with young actresses, a practice deployed since Hollywood’s earliest days, but more or less accepted as part of the game until last year. No longer.

Then tales of Kevin Spacey’s drunken and rather sordid exploits came to light, and like Weinstein, he fell dramatically from grace. From being one of the most celebrated actors in the world, he became untermensch, in a matter of days. The next development was the ‘Me Too’ movement, actually around for nearly ten years, but only brought to prominence since the autumn of last year. So many brave women came forward to tell their stories of harassment and abuse that the movement as a whole was awarded ‘Person of the Year’ on the front cover of Time Magazine.

Finally, over the weekend, Oprah Winfrey, speaking at the Golden Globes, spoke with such eloquence on the subject of ‘Time’s Up!’, referring to the time called on (mainly male) sexual oppressors, that people have started talking about her running for president in 2020.

However, just this morning a letter co-signed by a hundred notable French women, headed up by the great Catherine Deneuve, sought to put the whole matter in perspective, lest the whole rush to expose sexual harassment and abuse by men runs out of control completely.

The thrust of this thoughtfully argued letter is as follows: that it isn’t actually wrong for a man to place his hand on a woman’s knee, steal a kiss or even proposition a woman, provided he respect her feelings should he receive a negative response. And that by labeling all these actions as unacceptable threatens to undermine the whole intricate web of sexual politics, transforming men into pariahs when they they are really doing nothing wrong. She has received a torrent of abuse from the feminist movement in France for her forthright views, but I am inclined to agree with her. We must be very careful before we condemn relatively innocent behaviour, because if we aren’t, we may overlook the far worse abuse of women and children that goes on all the time, because it will all be seen as all part of the same thing. And it isn’t.