My daughter called me over to listen to a song. Distractedly, I glanced at her phone screen and within a couple of notes, I was transported... back several years and to a McDonalds in Epagny on the outskirts of Annecy.
That perfect first French morning tea in the park-like gardens of our little wooden home had been replaced by treks out to the nearest McDonald’s hamburger store. Neither my husband or I were lovers of the food but they had free Wi-Fi. We would order coffee, which was surprisingly drinkable and affordable, and work hard through our list of 'things to do'. Sometimes, if we didn’t have a lot of things to research, we would just sit in the car park outside the store for a few minutes and hook into the network from there. Of course it felt wrong. We had gone to France for the family-run village cafés with atmosphere-inducing French background music and where the menus would reflect the seasonal produce; not fast food, bright lighting and English pop songs.
On one such visit a sweet-sounding song came onto the radio blaring through the loudspeaker. It was soothing and I was a bit pent up with coping with our new life so I stopped what I was doing and leaned back momentarily on my bench to let the words flow over me. “La, di dah di dah, fuck you, la di dah di dah.” My head jerked up and I looked at my husband. “Did she really just sing what I think she sang?” I asked. How appropriate! Lily Allen was singing for us and sweetly saying what we felt like yelling out loud every time we were told that what we desperately needed to do was not possible. I felt quite elated. Somebody out there understood what we were going through and I found myself humming her tune frequently. I am not good at remembering words to songs but in this case I only needed to know two.
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| Just 6 km - not the full marathon - but super proud, I was |
This time, the song 'Balance ton quoi' by French singer Angèle that my daughter had invited me to listen to was similarly sweet, similarly initially deceptive and equally message laden. She may have brought it to me to follow-up a conversation that we had just had. With the Paris marathon in the news, I had been recalling that this was an event from which women had previously been banned. We had watched together the black-and-white footage from 1967 of the first woman, Kathrine Switzer, to run the Boston marathon, as she was physically man-handled (yes, by a man, the race director) as he tried to stop her from competing. Naturally, our conversation had continued on it's oft-feminist course as we wondered, yet again, about past and current gender inequities around the world.
The #MeToo movement in France goes by the much more aggressive hashtag #BalanceTonPorc (out your pig - expression coined by New York-based French journalist Sandra Muller) but it would seem that the movement has not been seen or followed there in the same way that it has in other parts of the world. In fact, right from the beginning, there was an attempt from some quarters to allow the sexual harassment and abuse of women by French men to continue, with justification that it was 'just part of the French culture'.
In this article of May 19, entitled In France, The #MeToo Movement Has Yet To Live Up To Women's Hopes, we read that
Today, France is still coming to grips with how to acknowledge and prevent sexual harassment and abuse of women.
Where women's equality is concerned, the country presents a mixed picture: Studies suggest France has the highest percentage of women in the workforce in Europe and the country seems to set women up to succeed.
Mothers are able to go back to work if they choose, because of the country's good day care system. And universal public schooling begins at age 3.
Yet the gender pay gap persists: French women earned 15.2% less on average than French men in 2016, according to the European Union's statistics agency.
Overall, many women in France feel the #MeToo movement has fallen short of what they hoped for.
But, back to sweet-sounding sounds: I applaud Angèle for continuing to raise the issue of sexism and for working to not allow the #MeToo movement to simply disappear and for past behaviours to resume. But, as can be heard in this interview, when asked about the clearly sexist (and abhorrently explicit) lyrics in rap music, she was hesitant, still preferring to adhere to a platform of free speech.
Yes, there is still a whole lot more to be done.
PS I have been trying to write this blog for a few weeks now. I did not want the issue to be reduced to a flippant one-liner, but I was not sure that I could quickly do the subject justice without losing your interest. I was a bit lost, too, to know what photos would support the text AND encourage readers to click on, and read, the blog. In contradiction to my theme, please-look-at-me photos won out. Sigh.
