France's "Me too" campaign may come with legislation

France is having its own “Me too” moment.

Just as American women have taken to Facebook and Twitter using the hashtag #MeToo to share their own stories about harassment, assault, and rape in the wake of the Harvey Weinstein sexual assault scandal, women in France are speaking out.

Tweeting with the hashtag #BalanceTonPorc — “expose your pig” — women in France have swamped social media with hundreds of stories of aggression, assault, and harassment. French journalist Sandra Muller started the campaign with a tweet in which she shared her own experience with a man who lewdly told her, “You have big breasts. You are my type of woman. I will make you orgasm all night.”

“Balance ton porc” is the latest anti-sexism salvo in a country that has long struggled over a where to draw the line in a culture of where celebrating sexual freedom can tip over into widespread permissiveness for inappropriate behavior and unwanted advances.

All of which may soon face a new legal challenge.

Marlène Schiappa, France’s gender equality minister (yes, that’s a thing), has proposed putting forward a bill in parliament that would fine people for engaging in street harassment — including aggressive catcalls.

“The point is that the whole of society has to redefine what it will accept and what it will not,” Schiappa told La Croix, a French Catholic newspaper. On French radio she explained that policing behavior on the street is “completely necessary because at the moment street harassment is not defined in the law. … We can't currently make a complaint.”

Pressed on what behaviors would be considered harassment, she replied, "We know very well at what point we start feeling intimidated, unsafe, or harassed in the street."

Harassment often goes unaddressed in France

A 2016 study by the French polling firm IFOP found that of 1,048 cases of sexual harassment in France, only 65 led to a conviction. And a 2014 French government poll found that one in five French women had experienced harassment at work. Of that group, 30 percent never shared their stories.

Schiappa pointed out in the interview with the newspaper La Croix that 84,000 women in France are raped each year and 220,000 will experience assault. “We want to reduce those statistics for violence,” she explained.

But Schiappa’s ideas go further than just the street. She has also proposed extending the statute of limitations on assault cases that involve minors. Currently, French law allows underage victims to file charges for sexual assault up to 20 years after the victim turns 18. Schiappa wants that stretched to 30 years. She’d like to raise the age of consent as well.

Schiappa has reached out to the public for comment, and to legal and psychiatric professionals to weigh in during conversations on how far legislation should extend. The law itself won’t be debated until next year.

A mother of two and former blogger and author, Schiappa has a number of other big ideas for advancing the rights of French women. She’d like to get the state to cover maternity leave for the self-employed, and to amend French law to give lesbians and single women the right to conceive through artificial insemination.

But street harassment is first on the list. In a long Guardian profile of Schiappa that ran last June, she mused that charging piggish men 5,000 euros might just sting enough to get those men to pay attention.

The Weinstein scandal has reached the French, too

Over the weekend, French President Emmanuel Macron expressed the entire country’s horror over Harvey Weinstein. He announced that Weinstein would be stripped of the Légion d’honneur, the country’s highest civilian honor, which the disgraced producer received in 2012.

Several French actresses have recently shared their own stories of Weinstein’s advances.

Photo by Pascal Le Segretain/Getty Images

“We were talking on the sofa when he suddenly jumped on me and tried to kiss me,” actress Léa Seydoux wrote in the Guardian last week. “I had to defend myself. He’s big and fat, so I had to be forceful to resist him. I left his room, thoroughly disgusted. I wasn’t afraid of him, though. Because I knew what kind of man he was all along.”

Speaking to the press, Macron’s wife Brigitte Macron lauded women for sharing their stories. “I'm very happy that women are speaking out. It could be a cloud with a silver lining,” she said.

“I urge them to break their silence. It's wonderful. Something is happening, really,” she added.

The Weinstein case is hardly the first sexual harassment and assault scandal that has rocked France

Among the most lurid of French scandals is the case of Dominique Strauss-Kahn. The former head of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) — and one-time French political luminary — was charged with attempted rape in 2011. (The charges were eventually dropped.) In 2012, he was accused of having literally pimped out prostitutes for parties. After four years of court battles, during which France — and the world — became privy to his world of sex parties, he was acquitted of wrongdoing.

But the Strauss-Kahn story opened up a conversation in France about the limits of both private life and propriety.

In 2015, the French government tried stopping street harassment with a poster campaign called “Stop — Ça Suffit!” (“Stop — that’s enough!”), which showed gradations of street harassment laid out on a line, like stops on a bus. It began with “Mademoiselle!” (Miss!) and ended with “Réponds Sale Chiens!” (“Say something, you filthy bitch!”).

The poster campaign ran after a poll conducted by a women’s rights group in France found that 100 percent of French women had been harassed on public transport. (That’s not a typo, but the results were contested.)

Then, in 2016, several female members of parliament accused fellow MP Denis Baupin, of the Green Party, of a range of crimes including assault, untoward texting, and other forms of harassment. "One day in October 2011 he pressed me against the wall, holding my breasts, and tried to kiss me," a Green party spokesperson, Sandrine Rousseau, told French radio.

Elen Debost, a fellow member of parliament also from the Green Party, reported having received more than 100 texts from Baupin with messages such as, “I am on the train and I’d like to sodomize you wearing thigh-high boots.” Other women reported cases of similar harassment. Baupin’s lawyer called the accusations defamatory and mendacious. Baupin resigned but, as of now, he has not suffered further consequences.

DOMINIQUE FAGET/AFP/Getty Images

Just this week, in the midst of the “Expose your pig” campaign, a French rock magazine, Les Inrockuptibles, put a once-disgraced French pop star Bertrand Cantat on the cover of their newest issue in advance of a new album set to drop later this fall. The reaction has been swift, and angry, among French women.

That’s because Cantat’s story is an egregious one: He was convicted of killing his girlfriend, Marie Trintignant, in 2003; she was beaten to death. He was released from jail on good behavior after serving only four years. To expose this hypocrisy, French Elle countered the rock magazine by running an image of Marie — Cantat’s victim — on its cover, and the stark phrase “In the Name of Marie.”

Les Inrockuptibles issued a somewhat half-hearted mea culpa. “To put him on the cover was questionable. To those who felt wounded, we express our sincere regrets."

Expose your pig, indeed.