Would you like to see my French postcards?

Unfortunately, I have none. Instead, I want to comment briefly on the remarkable letter that appeared in the French newspaper Le Monde this month and has now been translated into English. Attributed in the American press to the actress Catherine Deneuve, who is actually only a signatory but is the one best known here, the letter represents a perhaps distinctively European backlash against the perceived witch-hunt mentality toward alleged sexual harrassers in the U.S. More sweepingly, it's a critique of the "triggered" mentality that seeks to purge the public sphere of anything that might disturb it. The letter has attracted considerable attention here, and probably considerable sympathy from the American right, because it attacks what it describes as an anti-harrassment "puritanism," exemplified by the #MeToo meme, that unfairly seeks to suppress any expression of male sexual desire. It's not intended as a defense of Harvey Weinstein, whose fall from grace began the current reign of terror -- just this week, men ranging from James Franco to Stan Lee have joined the ranks of the accused -- but a warning against the blanket indictment of every man who's ever "bothered" a woman. For the authors, the right of men to "bother" women is as "indispensable to sexual freedom" as the right to "offend" is to artistic creation, not to mention political expression. They deplore a mentality unable "to tell the difference between an awkward attempt to pick someone up and what constitutes a sexual assault."Such a mentality reduces womanhood to victimhood and encourages "a hatred of men and sexuality." The authors argue for a more sophisticated feminism that recognizes that "sexual impulses are, by nature, offensive and primitive," but refuses to reduce sexuality to a perpetual power struggle.

A woman can, in the same day, lead a professional team and enjoy being a man’s sexual object, without being a "whore" or a vile accomplice of the patriarchy. She can make sure that her wages are equal to a man’s but not feel forever traumatized by a man who rubs himself against her in the subway, even if that is regarded as an offense. She can even consider this act as the expression of a great sexual deprivation, or even as a non-event.

The letter draws a distinction similar to the one I find increasingly definitive between left and right in the U.S., if not around the world. The right sees the world as tough while the left sees it as cruel.  For the right, the answer to toughness is toughness; one must adapt and discipline oneself to deal with the world as it is. For the left, the answer to cruelty is revolution or, on a smaller scale, litigation; the world (and its cruelest people) must be tamed so we can be what we want to be or were meant to be. In the French context, the authors, Deneuve and the other signatories are basically asking American women, and those influenced by them in Europe, to toughen up and deal with sexuality as it is, in all its offensive primitiveness, instead of trying to purge the primitive from the arts or the arts community.

The obvious riposte from #MeToo types will be that the French women are, ironically misogynist in their implicit assumption that men can't be better, or can't be made better than they are. Whatever the truth on that point, the Americans certainly will reassert their right to demand better, as well as their contempt for anyone who questions their demand. The perception of world cruelty is linked to the belief that the world, or at least human nature, can be changed without limit; a cruel world would not seem so unacceptable if we didn't assume that it didn't have to be that way. In any event, I don't think the French women are saying it "has to be that way." Their argument is that #MeToo is forcing the sexual world into a rigid "that way" position in which men are always predators, women always prey, objectification is always evil, and the only remedy is a sexual police state, while their own perspective recognizes a wider range of give-and-take. The #MeToo view seems to the French writers too close to a truly anti-sexual attitude that #MeToo would consider antithetical to their own, but is, in the French view, the grim and more likely alternative to sexual freedom and its irreducible messiness.

This frenzy for sending the "pigs" to the slaughterhouse, far from helping women empower themselves, actually serves the interests of the enemies of sexual freedom, the religious extremists, the reactionaries and those who believe — in their righteousness and the Victorian moral outlook that goes with it — that women are a species "apart," children with adult faces who demand to be protected.

#MeToo certainly will protest this dystopian portrayal, if it hasn't done so already, if only because it exists to protest. That's only fair, though, since I don't think the French letter is the last word on the subject. It is, however, an intervention that should not be dismissed as readily or contemptuously as some would like.