“Don’t erase Gérard Depardieu” – an open letter by 56 prominent French figures published in Le Figaro newspaper on 25 December 2023 – claimed that the star, age 75, was the victim of a “torrent of hatred”.
Signatories – including actors Charlotte Rampling and former first lady Carla Bruni – were accused of attempting to drown out #MeToo voices. Depardieu has been accused of sexual harassment and assault by over a dozen women.
President Emmanuel Macron sparked anger by leaping to Depardieu’s defence after a documentary, Depardieu: The Fall Of An Ogre, showed footage of the actor on a 2018 trip to North Korea making obscene comments to and about women, sexually harassing a female translator and making sexual comments about a child at an equestrian centre.
The open letter said: “Gérard Depardieu is probably the greatest of all actors. When you attack Gérard Depardieu like this, it is art you are attacking. By his genius as an actor, Gérard Depardieu contributes to the artistic brilliance of our country.”
Professor Bérénice Hamidi said the letter showed that “French cinema… refuses to consider acts committed by artists as violence and condemn them.
The scale of values is clear: the lives of the women who claim to be victims of ‘Depardieu the man’ are worth nothing compared to what ‘Depardieu the artist’ is worth.
To denounce the actions of this person is to attack art: according to this idea, ordinary laws don’t apply to artists.”Emmanuelle Dancourt of the #MeTooMedia group, who was “appalled” by the letter, said: “The people who do this are our friends, our fathers, our husbands, our neighbours, our colleagues, people we know.”Depardieu, who had written in October: “Never, ever have I abused a woman”, called the signatories “courageous” and the letter “beautiful”.In France the #MeToo movement has often been portrayed as American sexual puritanism
WORDS Celebrities’ letter defending Gérard Depardieu causes outrage in France (Guardian, 27/12/23)
🌈 Director Andrew Haigh, age 50, on All of Us Strangers, his ghost story/LGBT+ coming-of-age film with Paul Mescal of Normal People and Andrew Scott of Fleabag…
“Growing up I felt: ‘If I’m going to become a gay person, I’m not going to have a future and the only alternative is not to be gay’ – which of course you can’t not be.
I was about 9 & the kids around me knew something was different about me before I really did. So you’re like: ‘I don’t understand why you’re calling me these names.’
If you’re a queer kid, you don’t want to tell your parents you’re being bullied, because they’re going to think you’re different and that’s the last thing you want.
It’s the hardest thing, sometimes, about being queer within a family – you’re not like your parents and you have a secret.
[His father, who has dementia, forgot Haigh was gay] My dad was quiet then said: ‘Well, as long as you have found love.’ He just understood what was the important thing.
My kids are 10 and 12. A lot of queer people with kids are trying to navigate: ‘Are we different? Do we have a new way of being?
A different way that our families can exist, because we don’t have a model? Are we trying to be like our parents were to us or to be something else?’
Pop music gave me hope as a kid. I’d sing The Power of Love to myself in my bedroom, not really understanding anything about myself but knowing that it was longing for something and believing that something could be possible.
I know a lot of young gay people who do not feel alienation. Also people close to me, younger than me, have found it very difficult. But it’s important to me that both characters in the film are not lonely because they’re gay – they are lonely because the world has made them feel different.
I want 15-year-olds to see this movie, not just people my age. If I had seen this film when I was 15, it would probably have made a big difference to me.
My childhood self would have been so amazed that I was able to tell a story about queerness and not be terrified”
🌈 WORDS “A generation of queer people are grieving for the childhood they never had”: Andrew Haigh on All of Us Strangers (Guardian, 29/12/23)
ON THE NEW COOLNESS OF GIRLS
“I am 50. But in 2023 girlhood is where the party is and you don’t have to be young or female to be invited.
Like lads in the 1990s, girls have main-character energy in pop culture. This year’s biggest cultural touchpoints are a film (Barbie) and a stadium tour (Taylor Swift) about celebrating amd questioning what it means to be a girl.
‘Girl culture is dominant,’ says ex-Vogue editor Samhita Mukhopadhyay.
Sometimes this feels a lot like misogyny just got a cute new name. ‘Girlboss was a privileged, vertical idea of success for millennial women,’ says Lucie Greene of Light Years.
‘If you wouldn’t substitute boy for man, don’t say girl when you mean woman,’ says Susan Madsen, leadership professor at Utah State University.
‘Girl, to most adults, has associations of “less or weaker than”. Language is part of Everyday Sexism.’
‘It’s old-fashioned to think being a girl is an insult,’ says Hannah Martinson, a 25-year-old intern at a TV company. ‘I’ve got my book-club girls, my going-out girls, my film-nerd girls and not all are female. I use girl as an endearment and to say: “We are the same tribe.”’
For generation Z, girl is gender neutral, a cipher for fellowship, support, intimacy and in-jokes.
‘For older generations, girl feels like the opposite of everything they fought for,’ says Molly Logan, 50, of Irregular Labs. ‘A guy I work with, age 20, said: “Shall we have a girls’ dinner?” To him it meant a casual meet-up, a hangout. To him girl is a vibe.’
My daughter is 17. Pearl and her friends embrace girlhood as an identity: ‘Woman is the word people use when they talk about rights, struggling against the patriarchy. It doesn’t sound much fun, Mum,’ Pearl says. Girlhood is ‘a romanticised fantasy, nostalgic for childhood and noughties films we love, like Mean Girls’.
There is a power and humour in reinventing girliness as an alpha identity.
Maybe girlhood-for-all can be both an infuriating symbol of our ageist culture and a well-meaning gesture.
As Gloria Steinem reminds us, women ‘lose power as they age’. A big tent of girlhood where everyone is welcome can align more of us with being fun, attractive, vital”
WORDS Move over, lads! How the world turned girly (Guardian, 2/12/23)
WHITE RIBBON DAY – 25 November – empowers boys and men to stand up against violence. Because it’s NOT
a women’s issue.
Respect to the Football Association of Wales for dedicating its Wales v Türkiye match in November to White Ribbon Day.
Nearly 1 in 4 girls have experienced unwanted sexual touching in UK schools.
Let’s #ChangeTheStory!
Kids aged 14+ can take the White Ribbon Promise:
“I promise to never use, excuse or remain silent about men’s violence against women.”
With kids of any age, how can you talk about challenging gender stereotypes – and standing up for, supporting and not hurting others?
We’re fans of parents using the White Ribbon UK school activities (under Working With Young People) to talk about gender equality, sexual harassment and more…
ON FROZEN’S EFFECT ON GIRLS – AND BOYS
“It’s 10 years since the premiere of Frozen. Like Star Wars, it’s part of our cultural wallpaper and a multibillion-dollar industry.
Princess Elsa struggles to control her powers when angry or afraid, so her parents teach her to ‘conceal, not feel’ emotions.
Her storyline – being sent away for accidentally hurting her sister Anna – is recognisable to any child banished to their room for fighting with a sibling. Watching Elsa struggle sends kids a message that you can experience dark, angry feelings and still be loved.
‘It’s comforting to a child who hasn’t learned emotional regulation,’ says behavioural scientist Pragya Agarwal, ‘and for them to see that you can make mistakes and be a bit weird.’
In 2008 Emma and Abi Moore co-founded the Pinkstinks campaign against gender-stereotyped marketing – eg science kits ‘for boys’ vs pink toy kitchens. Pinkstinks got hate mail but their I’m No princess T-shirts were popular.
In 2011 Peggy Orenstein’s Cinderella Ate My Daughter captured a backlash against the passive, often oddly sexualised ideas of femininity peddled to girls.
Anna and Elsa embody the wasp-waisted, white beauty of Snow White (1937). Girls had to wait for the more athletic, brown-skinned 2016 @Disney princess Moana and Mirabel Madrigal in 2021’s Encanto to see more realistic body shapes.
A 2016 study of 3- to 6-year-olds led by Sarah Coyne of Brigham Young University found that engaging with Disney princesses was associated with gender-stereotypical behaviour in preschool girls but had no impact on body image.
But princess culture offers girls ‘storylines where they’re the protagonist’ while boys exposed to it ‘do a better job of expressing emotion in relationships’.
The power ballad Let It Go has been adopted as a coming-out song, with the pressure to hide Elsa’s nature seen as code for suppressing her sexuality.Some feel the walls of ice between Elsa and the world are evidence that she’s autistic.
Frozen proves the box-office value of strong female leads, eg Marvel’s female avengers, She-Ra, Jodie Whittaker’s Doctor & Barbie”
WORDS “It’s about owning your power!” How Frozen changed a generation of girls. And boys. And Hollywood (Guardian, 16/11/23)
Before Cara Natterson & Vanessa Kroll Bennett did the rounds of TV shows to discuss their smash-hit book This Is So Awkward – Modern Puberty Explained, the very dynamic duo told us…
CARA Every adult looking back at puberty cringes. Those experiences, traumas & joys inform their life essentially forever.
Puberty used to be a time when you’d cringe for 2 years and you were good.
Some kids now start it at age 7 & others at 12, 13 or 14.
If you don’t talk openly with your child, someone else will – like the internet & Dr Google or a 12-year-old on the bus.
You take off your professional hat at home. I’m doing the best with all the information I have, but my kids will tell you that I screw it up all the time. I’ve gotten #puberty things and a million-and-one parenting things wrong. In my house it’s: “The cobbler’s children certainly have no shoes.”
VANESSA I have 3 sons and a daughter in some stage of adolescence & not one fits any stereotype of how kids feel or act according to gender.
Learning how to have hard conversations with your kid about bras, vaginal discharge, erections etc is a training ground for having lifelong conversations on tricky topics.You can say: “I’m uncomfortable, but this topic is so important I’m going to get over my discomfort.” Kids appreciate that.
[On having Nick Kroll, Big Mouth creator, as a brother] At sleepovers we pored over the book What’s Happening To Me?, which in the early 80s was pretty risqué. Not having parents breathing down our necks allowed for openness and humour, though our mom was upfront about bodies and sexuality. Nick’s work is the soul-baring expression of his youth.
My kids have a real sense of humour about having a mom who works with sex-ed stuff. When I said to my 17-year-old: “Your body language is telling me something’s going on” he was like: “Mom, can you leave your Puberty Podcast crap at the door?”This work is actually about closing our mouths and listening better. That’s made me a better parent…
WORDS “Living with a brain under major construction”: how This Is So Awkward helps parents handle puberty (Outspoken Sex Ed, 9/11/23)
Vagina Museum founder Florence Schechter on using the correct terms for body parts, like vulva…
“Vulva shame contributes to body dysmorphia and body dissatisfaction.
Vulva shame and stigma make it harder for us to talk about bigger things in our lives, like reproductive rights, abortion, healthcare and sex.
Why does vulva shame exist? The patriarchy.
The Number 1 way to fight vulva shame is normalisation!
Teach your child the proper anatomical words from as young as possible.
You have to get there early before shame sets in and your child picks up on societal messages.
And target teenagers so they will have a lifelong love of vulvas!”
We were fascinated to hear Florence – author of V: An Empowering Celebration Of The Vulva And Vagina – this month at the WOW (Women of the World) 2023 festival!
In her talk The Big V, she set out to “smash stigma, label your labia and fight for your vulva’s rights”.
In March 2017 Florence tweeted: “PEOPLE There is a penis museum in Iceland but no vagina museum ANYWHERE. Who wants to start one with me?” After the Vagina Museum set up camp in London’s Camden Market, by March 2021 some 120,000 people had visited the site.
EXTRA CREDIT! Read Campaign begins to save world’s first Vagina Museum” – where exhibits include giant glittery tampons – after founders’ property guardianship ends at short notice (Daily Mail, 31/1/23) and our blog post Vulvas vs vaginas – what can I say? (31/1/22)
East London student Zaara Chadda, 16, discusses the new show Consent – which Channel 4 calls a “bold, authentic drama about an elite school where lines of sexual consent are dangerously blurred” – and her own lived experiences…
“You can’t even eat a banana at school these days, it’s become so overtly sexualised.
Snide provoking comments like ‘she knows what she’s doing’ and ‘girls are so dramatic’ and ‘girls are so sensitive’ are common. Boys will say things like: ‘Sure, the stuff [Andrew Tate] says about women is wrong, but he motivates people to go to the gym, so it’s not all bad.’
Consent portrayed the pressures we face as teenagers today: that boys need to have the confidence to make the first move; and girls need to be attractive enough that boys will make that first move on them.
It also accurately shows how many teenagers make decisions based on receiving validation from their friends. These pressures are timeless, but the rise of social media, porn culture and toxic misogynists like Andrew Tate has only made things worse.
Naturally my mum found the show shocking, but vital. She says it’s helped her to feel she can protect me better as a daughter, and it opened up a conversation between us regarding party culture. It might have been uncomfortable viewing, but it’s certainly helped me to feel free to tell her about any experiences I may have at parties or elsewhere in the future”
WORDS & IMAGE Consent: “I’m a London sixth former and Channel 4’s new drama felt very real – that’s what made it horrifying” (Evening Standard, 17/2/23)
Teach Us Consent founder Chanel Contos, who made the BBC 100 Women 2022 list, age 24…
“Once I was kissing someone (quite casually, I might add) and he put his hand around my neck and started to choke me. I moved his hand away from me and said: ‘Why are you doing that?’ and he said: ‘I dunno, I thought you’d like it.’ When I told him I didn’t, he seemed genuinely surprised.
It made me sad to think about the amount of girls who would have just ‘gone along with it’ in that moment – including myself a few years ago. I would have known myself well enough to know that being choked wasn’t something that sexually turned me on, however I don’t know if I would have been able to distinguish between enjoying a sexual encounter because the man I was with was enjoying it, or because I truly enjoyed it myself.
Separating true consent from the desire to give your male partner sexual satisfaction is difficult.
But I suggest that a good place to start is to equip young girls and women, who have grown up in an era where pornography has shaped every inch of their sexual landscape, with the capabilities to decide if it is an act they truly want to engage in”
WORDS Sexual choking is now so common that many young people don’t think it even requires consent. That’s a problem – by Chanel Contos (Guardian, 7/12/22) IMAGE India Hartford Davis for Side-Note