from our correspondent
PARIS – «Just dress normally and everything will be fine», says the Minister of Education Jean-Michel Blanquer, hoping to put an end to the controversy. But a phrase that was intended to be relaxing has revived the protest of the French girls, who started going to school on Monday crop-top (with the navel in view), miniskirt, or bare arms. What does it mean to “dress normally?”, in a country where the sense of modesty seems to be changing and the hitherto usual canon is being questioned?
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Alongside these extraordinary cases, which ended up in the newspapers, there is the endless series of petty abuses that French women have forcefully denounced for months now, on the wave of the #MeToo movement: every day, especially in certain suburbs but also in the center of the capital and other metropolises, a short skirt is interpreted as an invitation to express advances, a light dress mistaken for a sexual allusion, a wavy shirt considered a wink that makes any comment permissible. What is happening to France, the country that invented topless and that a somewhat outdated imagination associated with a serene female freedom, sheltered from obscurantism, nervousness and macho frustrations?
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The high school girls protest against rules that in a normal and peaceful context would be “common sense”, as Minister Blanquer says: you don’t go to school dressed like you do on the beach, this should be trivial and apply to both males and females. The problem is that the reference to “correct dress”, in many institutions, is applied only to girls, otherwise deemed guilty of distracting their companions, and of inducing them into temptation because of insufficiently punished clothes. We are at the eternal question of the man who harasses, or perhaps violates, but it is the woman who must prove that she has not encouraged him.
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So French social media since Monday are full of photos of more or less low-cut schoolgirls, with signs saying “Instead of covering the girls, educate your children”, and messages that explain: “Boys can dress however they want, while we are constantly brought back to the question of sexuality. These days it is 30 degrees, we go around uncovered only because it is very hot. Or should we put on a sweater to keep everyone calm? ».
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The protest of the French middle school and high school students embarrasses the government too, because if Minister Blanquer rolls his eyes trying to minimize, he connects it to Citizenship and former Minister of Equality between women and men, Marlène Schiappa, sided with the protest: «Throughout France there are girls who have decided to put on a skirt, décolleté, crop-top or make up, to affirm their freedom from sexist judgments or acts. As a mother, I support them with closeness and admiration ».
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15 September 2020 (change September 15, 2020 | 22:27)
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