Two events occurring in mid-May in France illustrated a paradox in the contemporary feminist movement, in both Europe and North America. The first was the conviction of the justly celebrated 76-year-old actor Gérard Depardieu on charges of sexually assaulting two women on a film set in Paris in 2021. (One of the women was a set director, the other an assistant producer.)
Prudence, then, would seem to dictate that women … avoid dressing (or “un-dressing”) in public in particularly provocative ways.
While the victims did not immediately report Depardieu’s offenses, the set designer was impelled to do so after Depardieu published an open letter in Le Figaro in October 2023 denying that he had ever abused a woman. The letter was presumably provoked by previous accusations of sexual assault by over a dozen women in the film industry, many of which referred to incidents too far back in time to be triable under French law.
While Depardieu has challenged the verdict, the sheer existence of the previous accusations certainly gives his conviction an appearance of plausibility. But perhaps because the offenses of which he was convicted amounted to forms of “groping,” not violent assault (let alone rape), and also because of the actor’s ill health (diabetes, and a previous quadruple heart bypass), the court issued him an 18-month suspended sentence, rather than imprisonment.
Nonetheless, his prosecution and conviction were widely celebrated by supporters of women’s rights, who denounced what they called endemic sexism and impunity for sex offenders in French cinema and French society. Demonstrators during the actor’s trial had waved placards with messages including, “Victims, we believe you; rapists, we see you” and “Touch one, you answer to all.”
There can be no doubt that mistreatment of women by film executives has been a longstanding problem in the U.S., no less than in France. Starting early in the industry’s history, young actresses were widely reported to have had to perform on the “casting couch” to win a part. The most notorious recent practitioner of forceful sexual assault in the American industry is Harvey Weinstein. Depardieu’s offenses, needless to say, do not rise to Weinstein’s level. It is nonetheless heartening that he has been called to account — thus perhaps deterring others in his position from imitating his actions.
But there is another recent event in France, illustrating a different aspect of the contemporary feminist movement, that stands in striking contrast to the reaction to Depardieu’s conviction. This is the response among self-proclaimed feminists to an edict issued by the organizers of the 12-day Cannes film festival (which began on May 13), probably the most prominent such event worldwide, forbidding attendees, for reasons of “decency,” to practice public nudity.
In reaction, the New York Times ran a story by “fashion critic” Katharine K. Zarrella in its May 18 edition titled “The Indecency of the Cannes Red Carpet’s Indecency Rules.” In it Zarrella denounces the “Cannes power play” as tone-deaf at best and misogynistic at worst.” In support of her denunciation, she quotes “stylist” Karla Welch, said to serve numerous fashion models and actresses, as saying “it’s not up to a governing body to tell us how to be in the world. We [women] don’t need governing bodies governing our bodies.” And an executive at Paper magazine, a publication dedicated to fashion, popular culture, and the arts, laments that the Cannes rule shows how “women get crucified whatever they do.”
Contrary to the fear expressed by another “fashion commentator” that the rule reflects “the rise of the right,” such that “everything is going more conservative,” even Zarrella acknowledges that “there has been something of a naked-dressing race to go viral at major events in recent years,” including the wearing of transparent or translucent outfits at the Met Gala (the prestigious annual fund-raiser of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York) as well as fashion and cinema events. But she then quotes yet another defender of the new fashion in the name of feminism: “Women are empowered. And they don’t want to be told what they can and cannot do.”
Let’s put these two events together. On one hand, the Depardieu verdict exemplifies a rising, and fully justified, movement of resistance to the mistreatment of women by men — whether at work, in colleges, or in various social settings. On the other hand, the question must be posed: if women don’t want to be abused or harassed by men, would it not be prudent for them to avoid dressing in a manner likely to arouse some of them to objectionable misbehavior?
This doesn’t mean, of course, that scenes of nudity at Cannes or even at the Met are likely to generate a fashion for near-nakedness among the vast majority of women. (How many people even care what goes on at those locales?) But fashions do trickle down. (In fact, it has been commonplace in American high schools for decades for girls, during the warm months, to show up in the shortest of shorts, making it all the harder for guys to focus on the books. This is one reason why some highly successful charter schools, typically operating in lower-income areas, have instituted dress codes and even uniforms — formerly associated with ritzy private prep schools.)
In Women’s Best Interest?
But of even deeper concern, the sheer rhetoric of self-ownership employed by those “stylists” Zarrella quotes — which echoes, of course, the slogans of those who deny the legitimacy of any legal restrictions on abortion — indicates an unrealistic view of human society, and in particular of relations between the sexes. Since we are political animals by nature (as Aristotle famously observed), no human being is literally entitled to live without “rules” governing his or her conduct in society.
Additionally, it is a fact of nature that men, as a class, are on the average larger and stronger than women (hence able — if freed from the governance of rules — to impose their will on them), but also that they are far more susceptible, on the average, to being tempted into acts of harassment, or worse, by the appearance of near-naked women than the other way around.
Prudence, then, would seem to dictate that women, merely out of self-interest, avoid dressing (or “un-dressing”) in public in particularly provocative ways. But there is more to the issue than sheer calculation. Anyone who has spent time on a college campus in recent years is aware of how the sheer practice of dating (once called “courtship”) among students has largely been replaced by a “hookup culture,” in which women (not men of course) are pressured into quick sexual activity, which may not result in any follow-up relationship, lest they be dismissed as “prudes.” It is women, far more than men, who find this system repugnant, yet often find it hard to escape, lest they wind up as social pariahs.
In 1999, the young journalist (and recent college graduate) Wendy Shalit published a book titled A Return to Modesty: Discovering the Lost Virtue. (A second edition appeared in 2014.) In it Shalit used the very language of “power” employed by today’s defenders of women’s right to walk around naked in public or otherwise comport themselves in ways that defy traditional notions of decency, but to an opposite end: for women to use their collective capacity to transform society — “socializing” or civilizing men as women had traditionally done in free societies by teaching them that true manliness entails respecting women rather than seeking to use them merely as instruments for sexual satisfaction.
Given our current social situation, and especially the influence of antisocial media, this is a considerable project. But it is a truly feminist one that, to the degree it succeeds, will promote the happiness of both sexes and provide a ground for successful family-building of which America stands in such great need.
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