Noémie Halioua is a journalist, head of the international service of the online media Factuel. She co-authored Le Nouvel Antisémitisme en France (ed. Albin Michel, 2018), wrote L'affaire Sarah Halimi (ed. du Cerf, 2018) and has just publishedLes uns contre les autres - Sarcelles, du vivre-ensemble au vivre-sépar (ed. du Cerf).
Glory to our Minister of the Interior who decided to take the bull by the horns: to distribute 5 million flyers to fight against sexism, we had to think about it. While more and more women are afraid to walk alone in the evening, Gérald Darmanin and his teams launch a large-scale and targeted operation. A distribution within range of nuclear deterrence. Because it is obvious that pigs, rapists and other perverts will take their legs to their necks at the sight of the piece of paper stretched at the entrance of the metro entrances. Any enlightened mind can predict these crowd movements caused by the distribution of said flyer, the terror that will arouse its appearance and the profound transformation of mentalities that it prepares. With such a measure, feminist associations can anticipate new recruits, the arrival of former repentant sagouins eager to lend a hand to the cause, after suddenly understanding that the woman was not a piece of meat. Let us congratulate its designers, undoubtedly intelligent people, encased in the pretty armchairs of ministerial salons, or communication firms, such as that of McKinsey, copiously paid by the State to think of "effective" strategies. By adopting this measure, we imagine them exclaiming Eureka! like the scholar Archimedes, discovering at the exit of his bath that any body immersed in a fluid undergoes a vertical push.
If the subject were not so serious and the political decision so grotesque, we could talk at length about this little imaginary world. But we are talking here about an everyday suffering that is not amusing and whose political solutions are systematically mediocre. How not to think of these shots of Marlène Schiappa, published by herself in 2017, walking on the sidewalk in a dress like a resistance fighter in the middle of the night in the district of La Chapelle-Pajol, in the north of the capital, known to be a cutthroat. "The laws of the Republic protect women, they apply at all times and in all places," she said on Twitter, calling for the fight against "street harassment". No doubt out of good will, the former Secretary of State for Gender Equality had put in place reports for flagrante delicto of sexist contempt, a law later denounced as unenforceable which was pure communication for police unionist Linda Kebbab. Not to mention the awareness campaign of the "QSR", a neighborhood without relous, whose very title derided on social networks did not inspire the slightest seriousness. It is clear that an increase in the number of infringements and communication campaigns on the subject have so far ended in a bitter failure. Probably because these methods amount to putting ointment on a wooden leg, to avoiding the deep and difficult to tell problem, namely the progression of violence, the "process of decivilization" to use the term recently used by our President of the Republic.
It is obviously by weakness that the Ministry of the Interior comes to announce drumbeating, as the summer of 2023 approaches, a measure to distribute flyers to fight against sexism.
Noémie Halioua
The proof is that if women are privileged targets because perceived as sexual prey by predators in rut, they are not the only ones to suffer aggression, attacks and insults. Street violence is also against men and this is no less serious. The violence of the street, once night falls, first affects the most precarious, in the "lost territories of the Republic", the poor and immigrants, who find themselves on the side of both executioners and victims. The Jews who do not dare to walk around in a kippah, the "whites" who are insulted as "fragile babbles", the grandmothers, like the one who confided in the book Les uns contre les autres (Cerf), on Sarcelles, who cannot open the windows of her home at night in summer because "young people" have fun screaming in the street to ratify their conquest of the territory. Chinese tourists who have their shopping snatched on the Avenue des Champs-Élysées. The issue of street harassment is intimately linked to the increase in violence and insecurity, which criminology professor Alain Bauer quantifies in homicide rates.
Militant feminists, those who have enough media reach to put their finger where it hurts, are too busy tracking down fairytale sexism, blaming gallant men, attacking Johnny Depp and Vincent Cassel, pointing the finger at "Judeo-Christian culture" and "rape culture." Too busy tracking down the grip in love stories, systems of domination in the imagination, producing a victimhood reading of women in history. They prefer to ignore what exposes the global barbarization of society for fear of "stigmatizing" other cultures. As for the public authorities, they vividly show their lack of courage in this area. Because it is obviously by weakness that the Ministry of the Interior comes to announce drumbeating, as the summer of 2023 approaches, a measure to distribute flyers to fight against sexism. The important thing is to "do something" rather than nothing, which costs little, to give the impression that there is still a part of controllable, when everything escapes us. An umpteenth measure announced to mask the impotence of the State to fight against its tiermondization.
