Humiliation is, in the full sense of the word, inhumane, and the perp-walk pictures of Dominique Strauss-Kahn were repugnant, writes Michel Broué. But shutting one's eyes to sexual aggression must stop, and it is certainly not by ignoring the grave nature of the charges levelled against DSK that his ordeal, whatever he did, can be changed.
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Yes, humiliation is unacceptable. Humiliation is, in the full sense of the word, inhumane. Whoever the person may be, whatever crime or atrocity he may or may not have committed, humiliating him is absolutely forbidden. There should be no need to add that it is all the more so while he is still presumed innocent - it quite simply should not happen and that's that.
Yes, the images, the vilification, the whole situation set up by the New York police are horrible, reprehensible and repugnant, whatever their motives may be.
Yes, whatever the outcome, the affair is a terrible tragedy for Dominique Strauss-Kahn's family, for his friends, and for himself, guilty or not. All of us, to different degrees, feel great sadness and disgust.
But this affair is also a tragedy for a whole nation, a political tragedy, so it's one that we need to think about and talk frankly about, and from which we absolutely must draw some conclusions.
In the first place, it's a tragedy because the way ‘DSK's friends' at first insisted on proclaiming him totally innocent - to the point of neglecting to say a single word about the plaintiff (perhaps the victim of a monstrous act) - has further tarnished the image of an oligarchy ‘who are allowed and forgiven for everything'. There is no doubt about who capitalizes on this image of ‘the establishment'.
What's more, this neglect is not just a tactical error, it's morally and politically wrong. Very wrong. The ‘Socialist' Party should have something to say about a maid who says she was attacked by a rich and powerful hotel guest.
And then it's a tragedy because a ‘DSK sex scandal' was a predictable event - even if we didn't expect such a very serious incident, even if we still need to hear his defence to assess its enormity. Yes, it was predictable. And yes, the Socialist Party leadership turned a blind eye to the danger even though some had pointed to it.
They turned a blind eye for reasons of strategy, party line and political hopes, for reasons of opinion polls, competence, for all sorts of reasons that there is no point in enumerating or discussing here.
But they also turned a blind eye for reasons more subtle, more cultural, more ‘French' (or ‘Latin'?), reasons relating to gender issues, sex, our mores, mindsets, reflexes, blind spots. I'd like to briefly look closer at these reasons here.
They turned a blind eye, we are told, because marital infidelity, sexual attraction between consenting adults, and private life are still protected in France and, fortunately, have no bearing on politics. If it were that, if that were all, then yes, they were right to ‘remain silent'. Thank God - or rather secularism and the Republic - the Lewinsky affair couldn't happen in France, where politicians do not have to answer for their private lives, sexual preferences, obsessions or fetishisms. Whether they ‘cheat' on their spouses has nothing to do with their competence, their political commitment and political integrity, and concerns only themselves. So yes, fine, a philandering president of the Republic, why not? I really don't care if he's a philanderer or not, because it's beside the point.
But that isn't all this is about. To put it in rather simplistic terms, it's about the relation between ‘hitting on' and harassing a woman, between seduction and ‘coming on too strong', between the expression of desire and an act of violence.
This relation is not simple, or rather it's the boundaries that cannot be simply defined. In the US, the boundaries laid down by the law often seem outrageous to us, and DSK had been warned about that. But this isn't merely a legal issue, it is also, and above all, a moral issue, which I would like to address now.
The ‘drawing of the boundary' is generally a red herring. It makes no sense to stipulate how few hairs a man has to have on his head to be called bald or not; on the other hand, we can usually tell whether he's bald or not. Now where exactly an allowable ‘come-on' ends and harassment begins I don't know; but one knows when there's harassment, the attacker and the victim know.
When [Editor's note: the late and celebrated French singer-songwriter Georges] Brassens writes:
Sternly did she say
how dare you go so far
but she let me have my way
that's how girls are1
he is of course on one side of the boundary, that of mounting desire expressed in conflicting terms, that of the intimacy of love about to be made, by two people. But when a woman Socialist Party Member of Parliament recalls an awful memory of an "attempted come-on that was very heavy-handed, way over the top" during a meeting with DSK, then we're on the other side of the boundary, where a man tries to force a woman to do something she doesn't want to. This is the side of ‘one-sided' sex - which has nothing to do with shared desire.
Of course, she may ‘want to' and nonetheless say no, as in the Brassens song. But a man knows, feels, whether she ‘might' want to or whether she ‘definitely' doesn't want to. There are some even more ambiguous and horrible situations in which the woman submits (often in cases where she has previously been subjected to assaults of this kind, or the man is her superior), out of trauma, self-contempt, fear, whatever. The other realizes she is ‘submitting', and if he refuses to admit that, if he takes cover in denial, then he is overstepping the line, he becomes an attacker. Yes, one can attack and humiliate someone who doesn't resist (think of the libertines scene in the movie Black Venus). We men and women know all that full well, don't we?
That far side of the boundary is where a man stops being a ‘partner' and becomes a harasser, even an attacker. That is where he gropes a breast, sticks his hand under a skirt, or even simply grabs the hand of someone who doesn't want him to, and who, in many cases, says so or clearly shows it. That is where a form of violence already sets in.
That, my friends, is not a ‘come-on'. It's not ‘seduction', not even a ‘heavy-handed advance', let alone a love of women or libertinage. It's aggressive, disrespectful and sometimes downright disgusting behaviour. Which doesn't deserve a knowing smile, admiration or indulgence, but disapproval, even contempt, although French law is less strict on these matters than American law. Now it does seem - and this you know - that DSK has often found himself, with various women, overstepping the line. And it is this sort of behaviour (which, once again, whatever you may say, has nothing to do with an ‘excessive love of women', but is the exact opposite) to which a blind eye should not have been turned.
Turning a blind eye must stop, wherever it happens - and many women know it happens a lot, in numerous environments - especially if we're ‘socialists' and lay claim to wanting to change the world. Humiliation, which has so moved us in the images from New York, is also inflicted on a woman whom one tries to take by force. Let's hope this tragedy helps change attitudes in this regard. To be sure, a harasser is not a rapist, and I certainly wasn't expecting this horrendous account of events at the Sofitel. Like many others, however, I feared there'd be trouble - here in this country, the USA, where the lines are so fine, and during the [French presidential] campaign, where no holds (and no eye-witness accounts) would be barred.
We still don't know exactly what happened with the young woman in New York. But at any rate it does appear very serious. Denying the grave nature of it, shutting our eyes to reality, won't change the world, and it won't make any less harrowing the ordeal inflicted on DSK, whatever he did.
Translated from the original French by Eric Rosencrantz.
1: Elle m'a dit d'un ton sévère
qu'est-ce que tu fais là
mais elle m'a laissé faire
les filles c'est comme ça
From the song 'Je suis un voyou'