40 female political reporters in a petition demanded an end to "roving hands" and "lewd remarks", by male politicians. France's male politicians must end their sexist, lecherous ways, a group of leading female political reporters has demanded in a petition entitled Get Your Paws off Me!, published in a Liberation newspaper. 40 female journalists said they had had enough of Gallic macho male politicians' "roving hands" and "lewd remarks" and felt obliged to speak out.
One journalist describes waiting in the National Assembly's famous Quatre Colonnes hall, where MPs come to issue press statements, only to be told: "Ah, but you're on the game, hustling for a client." Another recalls an MP running his hands through her hair, because "spring is in the air", and a minister's adviser asking a journalist upon her return from holiday if she was "tanned all over". Such sexist behaviour crossed the entire political spectrum of France, they said. Anecdotes included a "friend of the president" declaring that journalists are "much more interesting when they have big breasts", while a political spokesman was said to have taken photos of sleeping female journalists on board a plane during the last presidential campaign.
Little has changed, the women journalists lament, since the downfall of Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the former International Monetary Fund chief and one-time French presidential favourite, whose sexual appetite was notorious. "We thought that the DSK case had shifted the line and that chauvinist attitudes were on the verge of extinction. Alas!" declare the petitioners.
More recently Le Canard Enchaine, the satirical weekly, recounted an episode in which Bernard Roman, a Socialist MP, asked Marisol Touraine, the health minister, whether she knew the difference between a clitoral and a vaginal orgasm. "Give me two minutes, and I'll explain," he said. Ms Touraine threw a glass of water over him, to applause, but back in parliament she endured chants of "Marisol, two minutes".
In the petition, the journalists described insistent text messages offering "info for an apero", late-night meetings or popping into a nearby hotel "for a bit of fun". One official, they said, would only keep his hands to himself after the reporter threatened to press charges for sexual harassment. The petition was signed by 16 reporters from top French media organisations including Le Monde and Le Parisien newspapers, Radio France International and Agence France Presse. A further 24 journalists preferred to remain anonymous due to their "complicated professional situation". Male politicians' claims, that their behaviour is just a bit of "saucy fun" or represents "the art of seduction a la francaise" no longer wash, the petition warns.
By Premji
