(no subject)

Happy birthday, major_clanger!

Do the French have a word for 'cancel culture'?

(I should remark at the outset, that the canceling is being directed downwards, by the powerful, as is so frequently the case, whatever their horrified screams actually claim...)

'We should have the right not to like men': the French writer at centre of literary storm

When Pauline Harmange, a French writer and aspiring novelist, published a treatise on hating men, she expected it to sell at the most a couple of hundred copies among friends and readers of her blog.

Instead, a threat by a government official to take legal action to ban Moi les hommes, je les déteste (I Hate Men) has made it a sellout. The first 450-copy print run was quickly snapped up, as was the following two reprints. Now 2,500 copies have been sold.
....
Harmange said she was asked to write I Hate Men after someone spotted a blog she had written on misandry, or man-hating.

The 96-page essay opens with a quote from Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar – “The trouble was, I hated the idea of serving men in any way” – and it explores whether women have good reason to hate men.
“I am married to a man, who is great and really supports my writing. But in general I mistrust men I don’t know,” Harmange said.

“I just don’t have confidence in them. This comes less from personal experience than from being an activist in a feminist organisation that helps the victims of rape and sexual assault for several years. I can state for a fact that the majority of aggressors are men.”

She added: “If we are heterosexual we are encouraged to like men, but we should absolutely have the right not to like them. I realise this sounds like a violent sentiment, but I feel strongly we should be allowed to not love them as a whole and make exceptions for certain men.”

Honestly, I think Valerie Solanas would consider this a fairly wimpy statement and practically colluding with the patriarchy?

But Ralph Zurmély, an adviser to France’s gender equality ministry, encountering the work, reacted in the way of a man who has exhorted a woman to 'smile, luv!' (whatever that is in French) and got silent bitchface in response, i.e. she has committed an act of gender violence against him, the poor duck:

“This book is obviously an ode to misandry (= hatred of men), both in terms of the summary on your site and in reading its title. I would like to remind you that incitement to hatred on the basis of sex is a criminal offence! Consequently, I ask you to immediately remove this book from your catalogue under penalty of criminal prosecution,” Zurmély wrote.

Waaah, waaaah...

We feel that that men are not yet a poor beleagured minority when we come across the following: a festival in Verona on 'Eros and Beauty' which a) appears to be heavily dominated by middleaged white males and b) is using without permission in their publicity materials images by woman artist Maggie Taylor