Catherine Deneuve nonapologizes.

From "Catherine Deneuve Apologizes to Victims after Denouncing #MeToo" (NYT):

“I’m a free woman and I will remain one,” Ms. Deneuve said in the letter to Libération. “I fraternally salute all women victims of odious acts who may have felt aggrieved by the letter in Le Monde. It is to them, and them alone, that I apologize.”

Last week’s letter, which said that using social media as a forum for sharing experiences of sexual misconduct had gone too far, drew some praise but also international criticism.... The sentiment of the statement had been misrepresented by some of her fellow signatories, [Deneuve] said. “Yes, I signed this petition, and yet it seems to me absolutely necessary today to emphasize my disagreement with the way some petitioners individually claim the right to spread themselves across the media, distorting the very spirit of this text,” she continued....

Deneuve is not apologizing. Some people got the wrong idea about what the letter meant and she's letting them know she cares about their feelings. She's not saying she did anything wrong, so it's a nonapology.

Deneuve also took a shot at "conservatives, racists and traditionalists of all kinds who have found it strategic to support me": "I am not fooled... They will have neither my gratitude nor my friendship — on the contrary.” The NYT points out (for what it's worth) that Deneuve signed a 1971 letter (along with 343 other women) saying that she had had an abortion (when it was illegal).

The linked NYT article also refers to this NYT op-ed, "Catherine Deneuve and the French Feminist Difference," by the French journalist Agnès Poirier:

Call it a cliché if you like, but ours is a culture that, for better and for worse, views seduction as a harmless and pleasurable game, dating back to the days of medieval “amour courtois.” As a result, there has been a kind of harmony between the sexes that is particularly French. This does not mean that sexism doesn’t exist in France — of course it does. It also doesn’t mean we don’t disapprove of the actions of men like Mr. Weinstein. What it does mean is that we are wary of things that might disturb this harmony.

And in the past 20 years or so, a new French feminism has emerged — an American import. It has embraced this rather alien brand of anti-men paranoia... it took control of #MeToo in France, and this same form of feminism has been very vocal against the Deneuve letter....

To many of us in France, Simone de Beauvoir could have been writing yesterday: “Relations between men and women in America are one of permanent war. They don’t seem to actually like each other. There seems to be no possible friendship between them. They distrust each other, lack generosity in dealing with one another. Their relationship is often made of small vexations, little disputes, and short-lived triumphs.”

I guess that's the sort of thing Deneuve wants to distance herself from. That's the trouble with signing a group letter, joining a movement, or even using a word like "feminist." You empower other people to seem to be speaking for you when they go about saying things that are not precisely what you want to say.

Frenchwomen — including Catherine Deneuve — come out in defense of sexual freedom and the freedom to importune.

Oh, now we must struggle with a long letter, written in French, by some French women who apparently have some reservations about some aspects of the American enthusiasm for something we sometimes call #MeToo. Do they understand us better than we understand them? I don't know! I've seen the full letter in French — here — but I can't read French enough to catch nuance.

Le philosophe Ruwen Ogien défendait une liberté d’offenser indispensable à la création artistique. De même, nous défendons une liberté d’importuner, indispensable à la liberté sexuelle. Nous sommes aujourd’hui suffisamment averties pour admettre que la pulsion sexuelle est par nature offensive et sauvage, mais nous sommes aussi suffisamment clairvoyantes pour ne pas confondre drague maladroite et agression sexuelle.

I can put that into Google translate:

The philosopher Ruwen Ogien defended a freedom of offense indispensable to the artistic creation. In the same way, we defend a freedom to annoy, indispensable to the sexual freedom. We are now sufficiently warned to admit that the sexual drive is by nature offensive and savage, but we are also sufficiently clairvoyant not to confuse clumsy drag and sexual assault.

That's obviously an awful translation. But in what ways is it awful? There is an English word "importune," which means "To ask or request something of (a person) persistently or pressingly; to accost with questions or requests; to beg, beseech" (OED). So why say "annoy"? I've also seen "pester" and "bother"?

The New Yorker article about the letter begins with an anecdote in which a woman leaning against a wall in Paris, suddenly had a man "running his hands over my breasts and my belly." The writer of the article, Lauren Collins, continues with:

I hadn’t thought about it again until I saw, yesterday, that a hundred Frenchwomen, including the actress Catherine Deneuve and the writer Catherine Millet, had signed an opinion piece in Le Monde, defending “a freedom to bother, indispensable to sexual freedom.” “A freedom to bother”—it was the first time I’d heard that one. (The word that the women used, “importuner,” ranges in connotation from bugging someone to really disturbing her. Whatever the level of offense, the behavior is clearly unwanted.) 

But the English word "importune" is about speech, not touching, and we don't have the same kind of idea that people aren't allowed to say things to us unless we consent. I'd guess that what the letter meant is that people need to be free to ask about sex. How can a sexual encounter begin? Isn't verbal consent what is recommended? It's really wrong to conflate speech and behavior here! The letter itself warns us not to "to confuse clumsy drag and sexual assault" — or so Google translates it. I can see that "drague" doesn't mean "drag" but is slang for "flirting." It seems to me that the letter is trying to preserve the pathway toward sexual behavior and wanting some tolerance about the awkward and imperfect overtures we make toward each other.

There's much more to the letter and to the Collins article, but I'm going to stop here for now. I am very uncomfortable with the translation, and I'm also very uncomfortable with the torrent of English language reports about sexual accusations. It's easy to say no touching without consent. Words are much more complicated, and I've struggled with them enough for one blog post and will self-silence for now.

Deploying the French language when you're trying and not trying to talk about prostitutes.

Here's an article I found in the UK Independent when I googled the awkward French-ish phrase "belle du jour": "The truth about student sex workers: it's far from Belle Du Jour."

"I hate the word prostitute – when you think of a prostitute you think of someone on the street who is causing a public nuisance..."

Sophie* is 22, studying at university and paying for it through sex work... By advertising on an adult site, she can pick who she sees depending on the feedback from girls and customers. They try to establish legitimate clients from potentially dangerous ones, alongside rating and ranking the workers themselves....

Sophie is resigned and bitter about the perception of sex work – particularly the character of Belle du Jour. "I hate it. Because, say I work for a hundred pounds an hour, that it makes it sound very classy, whereas I tend to be going to real s***holes...." 

I take it that by "Belle Du Jour" Sophie and the Independent are referring to the movie "Belle de Jour," in which the young Catherine Deneuve plays "a respectable young wife who secretly works in a brothel one or two afternoons a week." The word between "Belle" (beauty) and "Jour" (day) is "de" (of) not "du" (of the). The title is premised on "belle de nuit," which means prostitute, in the sense of "lady of the night." Deneuve's character works during the day. I don't know why "the" is left out of both "belle de nuit" and "belle de jour," but I don't think "belle du jour" is a phrase that means anything, an opinion I'm basing on Google's changing my "belle du jour" search to "belle de jour" and not even asking if I really meant "belle du jour."

Enter Kathleen Parker, the Washington Post columnist, who's got a new piece titled "The silly, selective 'war on women.'" She begins with the unbelievable assertion: "The war on women is based on just one thing — abortion rights." Maybe no one reads any further after that. (Whatever you think of the packaging of the Democratic Party's gender politics as a "war on women," it obviously includes at least a couple other issues like employment discrimination and violence against women.) But I kept reading until I hit this:

I promise, this isn’t another abortion column, not that the horrific number of abortions performed each year shouldn’t make one’s stomach turn. Instead, extremists on the pro-choice left celebrate the “right” to terminate a 20-week-old fetus. Google an image of this stage of fetal development and try to comprehend the glee we witnessed when state senator Wendy Davis, now running for governor, became the belle du jour upon her filibuster to protect that “right” in Texas.

Belle du jour? You'd think after all the trouble Rush Limbaugh got into when he said something that sounded like he called a young woman a prostitute that conservative pundits would be more careful!

I realize that Parker was slapping "du jour" on "belle" in the old "soup du jour" way and meant to say that Davis is the Democrats' darling "du jour." It's a dismissive way of saying that people keep getting a new (whatever) every day the way a restaurant gets a new soup. And somehow Parker decided that the word before "du jour" ought to be in French too, even though the word "soup" in the phrase "soup du jour" isn't French. (In French, it's "soupe.") If you're going to tart up you prose with French, at least Google you're words and see if you've said something stupid. (Or maybe she didn't think "belle" was French at all and was really using the old "soup" format, and "belle" was the "belle" of "Southern belle" and "belle of the ball.")

And how's old Catherine Deneuve doing these days? Here she is at a fashion show in Paris 2 days ago, wearing, among other things, a sweater with the shape of a marijuana leaf knitted into it. And here she is, almost 50 years ago, as Belle de Jour:

"When you get older, you have to be ready to trade your ass for your face."

This is an old saying, possibly originated by Catherine Deneuve, according to Gawker, which adds "Madonna has chosen her ass, which is why her face looks sucked dry of any possible joy."

Simulblogging the Oscars!

I've got to get home first. The flight to Madison is boarding, so let me get going. Start without me!

ADDED #1: Hey, I made it home. No flight delays, but you should have seen how buried my car was. Well, you will see, because I took pictures. Anyway, I can see you're way ahead of me talking about this. 29 comments as I start. But the TiVo is running, and I've seen the really charming Errol Morris film that kicked things off. A sweet, self-effacing attitude. And now, here's Ellen DeGeneres, continuing the sweet, charming, self-effacing tone. She's wearing a dark red velvet tuxedo -- with white shoes -- and looks very sharp. Her first joke makes me laugh. She has a nice joke about Americans not voting for Jennifer Hudson (on "American Idol") and then how they did vote for Al Gore. For no apparent reason, a gospel choir comes out and Ellen dances and plays tambourine. Now, for the first award, for Art Direction, and it's Nicole Kidman, looking very Barbie-like, all plastic-y and shiny. She's wearing an impossibly tall, thin red dress, with a knot at the side of the neck. The award goes to "Pan's Labyrinth."

ADDED #2: They didn't start with a supporting acting award. Good! Now, there's a comedy song, and I'm using it as a chance to try to catch up with you guys. On to the next award: makeup! Again, with the "Pan's Labyrinth." The makeup did look pretty cool. Ooh, now it's Abigail Breslin and Jaden Smith. Kids. They're short, so they do the nominees for shorts. Sorry, it's another fast-forward opportunity.

ADDED #3: Wow, you guys are up to 43 comments. I'm desperately trying to catch up with you. Ooh, it's Rachel Weisz. She looks just great in a strapless beige dress that has a nice jeweled swirl across the chest. I like her dark red lipstick and piece-y dark brown hair. She's doing the Supporting Actor award. Aw, Eddie Murphy looks like he really wants to win. It's Alan Arkin. My favorite. I love this guy. He puts the Oscar down on the floor so he can pull out his speech. The film -- "Little Miss Sunshine" -- can help us in our "fragmented times." It's a choice not to act out the speech. Surely, he could have memorized it. Maybe he was acting the part of a guy reading a speech.

ADDED #4: Melissa Etheridge performs the song from "An Inconvenient Truth," and then out come Leonardo DiCaprio and Vice President Al Gore. Al looks happy (and carries his great weight well). Leo asks him if he's got anything he'd like to announce. He says he's "just here for the movies." He thanks Leo for being "such a great ally" in his anti-global-warming efforts. Leo's all "thank you, sir," and the camera -- pretty randomly -- goes to Jerry Seinfeld, who's caught looking like this:



Cameron Diaz, who also has piece-y dark brown hair, gives the award for animation to "Happy Feet," and she's unbearable cutesy and phony. Nice clip show about movies about writers. At the end, we see Jack Nicholson -- who was featured in the clips for both "The Shining" and "As Good As It Gets" -- and he's shaved totally bald. (A tribute to Britney Spears?)

ADDED #5: "The Departed" wins Best Original Screenplay. Hey, you guys are up to 75 comments. I'm still not reading them, because I'm trying to catch up. I'm sure it's all clever and stuff. There's a great commercial for American Express -- must be a Jerry Seinfeld thing, explaining the "random" shot noted above. And a beautiful ad for iPhone... of lots of hellos from movies. (No need to convince me to buy one of those things when they are available, so the commercial seems to just be about getting me more excited about it.) They're doing the costumes award now. "Marie Antoinette" wins. Tom Cruise presents the Jean Hersholt "humanitarian" award to Sherry Lansing. We're in the depressing "dead" center of the show now, so let me regale you with pix of my car, as I encountered it after my long trip home. It was in this deep:



And here's how it looked after digging just enough of a space to back it out:



How did I get it dug out? Am I the kind of person who keeps a shovel in the trunk? No, but as I was walking to the car, dreading seeing how locked in it was, I ran across a woman with a shovel, and she loaned it to me. Then, carrying a shovel, I attracted a man who helped me because he needed a shovel and a second man who had his own shovel. These two guys dug out the snow while I scraped the windows and lights. (I do keep a scraper!) And I was out in no time. And don't just say: Guys! Because there was also that woman with the shovel. I asked her, "Do you work here?" And she said no, she just drove over with a shovel because a friend called her up, and she trusted me to return the shovel to a spot in the snow that we agreed on. I left that trust with Guy #1 and I'm sure he kept it.

ADDED #6: Speaking of movies, I got my little movie up at last in the previous post. You can hear me and my long-time ex-husband RLC talking about things seen in a record store window. Whoa! You guys are up to 119 comments! Okay, I've gotta rush. Visual Effects. Doesn't Naomi Watts look lovely in that yellow-gold, strapless dress with a thick black band under the breasts? "Pirates of the Caribbean" wins. Now, we see Catherine Deneuve for... what the hell is this? Ah! There's Sacha Baron Cohen in the audience. He's so adorable! "Best Foreign Language Film. "The Lives of Others." Oooh! It's George Clooney. He's handsome! Best Supporting Actress!!! Jennifer Hudson!!!!! She says: "Look what God can do!"

ADDED #7: It's Jerry Seinfeld. He's doing the Documentary award. Oh, so they showed him before when Al was on stage because later he was going to present the award for which Al is nominated. Seems too fix-y to me. And Al wins the Oscar!!!!! Closeup of the oh-so-pleased Steven Spielberg. Why did they make the film? Because of the problem of global warming??? Oh, no: "We were moved to act by this man." So says the director, reaching over to touch the hem of Al Gore's garment. He's gasping with awe. It's kinda embarrassing. He pumps the Oscar weirdly twice in Al's direction and he says "We share this with you." The camera goes to Larry David, clapping righteously. Now, Gore speaks: global warming is "not a political issue, it's a moral issue." I like Al. He makes his wooden squareness hip and cool.

ADDED #8: Kirsten Dunst is wearing a beautiful, witty dress. It's gray and has a see-through section at the top with a collar that seems to belong on a prim blouse. It's intelligent. And the dress makes me love Kirsten! The award is Original Screenplay, and it goes to "Little Miss Sunshine." Now, we see Jennifer Hudson sing a song, which must be fun for her, having already won the Oscar. I try to imagine how Simon Cowell would detect deficiency. Beyonce joins her, and -- isn't it true? -- Beyonce is the better singer. Does Beyonce feel she needs to prove her superiority?

ADDED #9: There's a Michael Mann montage about "America." We're racist war mongers, you know. Then the elegant Thelma Schoonmaker wins the editing award for "The Departed." Now, we see Jodie Foster, dragging excess yards of slate-blue fabric along with her. But she's introducing my favorite segment, In Memoriam. I'll impolitely name the ones that had the most effect on me: Don Knotts, Sven Nykvist, Robert Altman.

ADDED #10: Phillip Seymour Hoffman arrives to give the Best Actress award. It's no surprise that the wonderful Helen Mirren wins. I love the array of actresses as the award is announced. They all do a perfect performance of the thought: Indeed, Helen Mirren is grand! I love the way Mirren "salutes" Elizabeth Windsor.

ADDED #11: It's Reese Witherspoon, here to give the award for Best Actor. She's got major hair extensions and a simple black strapless gown. Oh, don't you want Peter O'Toole to win? Yikes, what is that incredibly smarmy look Jada Pinkett Smith gives Will? Does she hate him + is a terrible actress? And it goes, as expected, to Forest Whitaker. The look on Peter O'Toole's face says: And now, it's impossible. He's very old. Whitaker raves -- touchingly -- about how acting is the belief that we can connect to others and create a new reality.

ADDED #12: Coppola, Lucas, and Spielberg gang up to deliver the long-awaited Oscar to Martin Scorsese, and the Oscar really does go to Marty. Li'l Marty hugs C, L, and S. He stammers and just thanks a lot of people. "So many people over the years have been wishin' this thing for me."

ADDED #13: Damn! I never caught up! I've been struggling and fast-forwarding, but I never could make it. I hope you accept my belated scribblings! Well, Best Picture now. Presenting: Diane Keaton (swathed in black) and Jack Nicholson (gloriously bald). I'm just thinking about how nobody made a political statement tonight. They kept it clean and elegant. And the winner is... "The Departed." Excellent!

ADDED #14: I turn off the lights and collect my bags to trudge upstairs after a long day. I peer out the front door and see the people came to shovel my walks as I was watching the Oscars. I'd parked my car in the street and stalked through foot high snow when I got home tonight. So I put on my big down coat and went outside to pull my car into the driveway. Let me leave you with one last shot of my car at the airport. Actually, this one is so abstract, I'm not positive it is my car:

Lips.

Who decided -- in this age of scientific lip plumping -- that the female should ideally have the top lip much larger than the bottom lip and the male should have the bottom lip much larger than than the top? If you don't believe me that a decision has been reached, examine this poster:

It was not always so. Greta Garbo, long the standard of perfect beauty, had a notably larger lower lip. Ingrid Bergman, the actress with the most beautiful lips, had a much larger lower lip. And look at Sophia Loren's lips. (I mean it. Look at her lips.) Look at Catherine Deneuve, famously the most beautiful woman in the world in the 1960s, at the time of "Belle de Jour." Have I proved my point?

You might say, all of those beautiful women had a larger lower lip because nearly everyone does, and that the new look exists now simply because it has become possible through technology, but I would say that the great beauties of the past had unusually large lower lips in proportion to their upper lips. Why am I obsessing about lips? Because that "Closer" poster has been bugging me! Presumably, they want it to drive you a bit nuts. We see only one eye of each of the four actors, and those eyes are almost -- but not quite -- lined up. The image is supposed to be disconcerting, to go along with the movie's tag line, "If you believe in love at first sight, you never stop looking." But it's the eyes that you should feel compelled to "never stop looking" at, and it should be because you are contemplating the characters. I find myself staring at the lips and thinking about collagen injections.

UPDATE: An emailer writes:

I think the full upper lip trend springs from Angelina Jolie. While it certainly works for her, I can't think of many others for whom it does. Generally the person appears as if they took a "poke" in the mouth -- very sexy!

Well, here is a topic that has spawned many a feminist essay! Who was the first to write that beauty standards imposed on women create the look an assault victim, thus demonstrating the immense problem we have with eroticizing violence? I can't think how many times I've read that blue eyeshadow resembles bruising. And that high heels excite men because they disable the woman from running away. And those oversized lips are the boxer's "fat lip."

The classic way to refer to puffy women's lips, is "bee-stung," which sounds more painful than collagen injections. I think the original beautiful puffy lips woman is Brigitte Bardot. (What a perfect early sixties look! Do you know how hard it is to tease -- torment! -- your hair to get it that big?)

Here are the annals of collagen abuse, for your amusement and to serve as a warning.

Rituals of the beauty culture.

Laura Kipnis explains the "irreconcilable contradiction between feminism and femininity":

The reason they're incompatible is simple. Femininity is a system that tries to secure advantages for women, primarily by enhancing their sexual attractiveness to men. It also shores up masculinity through displays of feminine helplessness or deference. But femininity depends on a sense of female inadequacy to perpetuate itself. Completely successful femininity can never be entirely attained, which is precisely why women engage in so much laboring, agonizing, and self-loathing, because whatever you do, there's always that straggly inch-long chin hair or pot belly or just the inexorable march of time. (Even the dewiest ingénue is a Norma Desmond waiting to happen.)

Don't any dewy ingénues get to be Jeanne Moreau or Catherine Deneuve?

Feminism, on the other hand, is dedicated to abolishing the myth of female inadequacy. It strives to smash beauty norms, it demands female equality in all spheres, it rejects sexual market value as the measure of female worth.

That's awfully pre-Madonna.

[F]or all feminism's social achievements, what it never managed to accomplish was the eradication of the heterosexual beauty culture, meaning the time-consuming and expensive potions and procedures...

Note that Kipnis can't just say feminism failed to extinguish the human love of beauty. It's not beauty, it's a beauty culture that is the problem, and a heterosexual one at that. There's some sort of crushing patriarchy imposing something on women, something unnatural, involving "expensive potions and procedures." The assumption – actually quite incredible – is that empowered women would not care how things looked. I think it's more likely that empowered women would demand that males meet a higher standard of beauty.

What if women really didn't care about winning the sexual love of men? How would they look?

Women here may pant, "I'm doing it for myself" while strapped to their treadmills…

Strapped?

… but the fact is that the beauty culture is a heterosexual institution, and to the extent that women participate in its rituals, they, too, are propping up a heterosexual society and its norms.…

You can make a lot of thudding assertions like that, but it doesn't make them true. Don't homosexuals love beauty too? If you fix your hair and put on makeup and choose your clothes with some care, are you participating in a ritual? Is the heterosexuality that most of us feel a "society" that needs "propping up"? And really why must we say all these tedious things all over again?

Oh, I can answer that last question: Eve Ensler has a new play. I'd rather be strapped to a treadmill than sit through it.

UPDATE: Thanks to Instapundit for linking. And note that I have more to say on the subject in the next post.