February 12, 2025 • 33 mins
In the second part of our conversation with Dr. Gina Stamm, we get into some of the hot button issues around women and feminism in France right now.
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Speaker 1 (00:05):
Hey, this is Annie and Samantha and welcome to Stuff
I Never Told You production of iHeartRadio. And today we
are bringing you part two of our interview with doctor
Ginas Thom, who specializes in all things intersectional feminism in France.
(00:29):
And before we get into this quick correction, Gina wanted
you to know we misspoke in the last episode and
she has not written any books yet. She's written articles
and academic journals and chapters and edited collections, but no
books again yet, but still a lot to dig into
(00:54):
in the works that she has done. If you didn't
hear part one, go back and listen to that because
it's really gives so much context and it's really a
good foundation for what we're going to be talking about
in this episode where we break down a lot of
the current issues around women in France right now. So
(01:14):
if you haven't listened to that yet, go listen to
that and then come back. But if you have listened,
then let's get into the interview.
Speaker 2 (01:23):
Okay, So we're talking wow, Okay, so much. It's going
to take me like the rest of the day to
chew on all of this information online because again, I'm like,
French culture is not my forte is not something that
I've studied specifically language obviously not. As I said, I
need a lot of note cards and help. But with
all of that, there's some big conversations that are happening
(01:44):
around women and feminism in France right now, right, h
can you kind of give us an overview of the
public discourse around some of that.
Speaker 3 (01:52):
Yeah, so I'll try to do this as efficiently as possible,
and I'm going to leave stuff out, but well, so
I do want to address abortion really quickly. There's been this,
so it wound up in the Constitution after a couple
of attempts, and this is prime. The push for this
(02:14):
primarily came after Roe v. Wade was overturned in the
US and also after there started to be calls on
the far right for limitations on it, and so they
there was this fear. They were like, if Trump can
happen in America, it could happen here. It needs to
go in the Constitution to make it more difficult to
undo the right to abortion. Vaaman did not get in.
(02:37):
The freedom to abortion to have an abortion did get in.
So this isn't nothing, but I want and I want
to tip my hat to a legal scholar named Sabrina.
I don't actually know how to say her name. I've
never done it, said it out loud, but Sabrina Rangin
who explained the different really clearly, the difference between the
(02:58):
freedom and the right. If you have the right to
have something that's a positive entitlement, and not only are
you not going to be punished for it, but you
need to have access to it. If you have the
freedom to do something, you're not going to be punished
for it, but there may not be the concrete protections
(03:19):
for your access to that. And this has become evident
recently one because you've seen despite what are supposed to
be legal protections, you've seen the return of clinic protesters
in France. And you've also seen because the current government
has been starving the public health system in a way
(03:41):
that we've seen We've seen obviously in the US in
what we in so far as we ever had a
public health system. The UK has seen this as well.
The current government Amendumocrants government in France has closed a
lot of hospital beds and they're really understaffed. So there's
(04:02):
a medical desert problem that isn't comparable. Like I live
in Alabama. There are a lot of places where you
cannot get to a hospital within an hour. So distances
in the US mean that medical deserts are bigger and
more serious. But compared to the situation that existed in
France in the past, you're now getting medical deserts. And
(04:24):
so a recent statistic that came out is that one
in four women have to leave their department, which is
the administrative area. So it might be comparable to a county.
I guess, like if we think, but they have to
travel to go get an abortion. Again, the distances in
(04:47):
the US are much bigger. The abortion deserts are much bigger.
But this is a new thing. And also when you
look at the statistics which they do have by economic status,
women who are more financially precarious are more likely to
need abortion care. And so if one in four women
(05:08):
has to travel, that means that a disproportionate number of
financially precarious women have to travel to get abortions. And
while the procedure may be covered by their national health insurance,
that travel is not. So there's that gender based violence,
and I know I brought it up a few times.
(05:29):
I want to put a huge content warning on this
section because it's extremely ugly. So you have a lot
of a pretty comprehensive set of legal protections, but their
enforcement is and the ways in which accusations are taken
seriously is really troublesome. Or not taken seriously, it's really troublesome.
(05:54):
This came up recently in so you know, I'll talk
a little about me too in a minute. But there
was also another sort of social media hashtag that was
started by an activist called anatumas Off called du blue
pen or double punishment, where women who were going to
(06:15):
report sexual assault were being uh basically run through the ringer,
their witness, their testimony was refused.
Speaker 4 (06:28):
They were you know.
Speaker 3 (06:30):
The very traditional sort of oh what were you wearing?
Were you drinking? But even beyond that were like one
woman called to report a rape and they put her
on hold, but she could hear the policeman saying, oh,
it's that sled again.
Speaker 4 (06:44):
Yeah. The numbers of.
Speaker 3 (06:49):
Rapes that are reported and then from report to investigated,
and then from investigation to prosecution, you know that I
don't have these data compared to the US, they're not
good in either place. So and they are also real
you know, very strong social norms that govern that as well.
(07:13):
There's a question of feminist side. So what is feminicide.
It means it's a woman who was being killed for
reasons related to her gender, whether that is that's not
exclusively domestic partner violence, because it can also mean like
when an in cell mass shooter shows up, or if
someone is killed for turning someone down for a date,
(07:33):
things like that. This is where it's really hard to
compare the US to any other country because feminicides are
not tracked in the US. So I can tell I
can give you the data from twenty twenty one, but
the numbers don't match up exactly. So in France in
(07:55):
twenty twenty one, there are nine hundred and thirty homicides,
one hundred and twenty two of those are feminis sides.
In the US that year there twenty one thousand, four
sixty two homicides. So for a country that's about five
(08:15):
times has the populations, that's about five times bigger. We
just in general have twenty plus times the number of
homicides because we have guns mostly.
Speaker 2 (08:29):
Hell, yeah, that was sarcastic.
Speaker 3 (08:33):
Of those twenty one thousand, four and sixty two homicides,
forty nine hundred and seventy were women, and one third
of those are estimated to be domestic partner or intimate
partner violence. But that that's not that doesn't map directly
onto feminicides. So you could look at it as per population,
(08:54):
we have approximately but hard but the numbers aren't the
same twice as many.
Speaker 4 (09:04):
Domestic like intimate.
Speaker 3 (09:06):
Partner murders as you have feminicides in France. But if
you look at the percentage of murders overall that are feminicides,
it's kind of the same. So if some if there's
a listener who's better at statistics than I am, then
(09:28):
those numbers might be make more sense to you. But
so and France within Western Europe is that's an elevated number,
and there have been attempts to address that. It's a
little bit down. Last year, I think there were ninety
(09:48):
three identified. That doesn't that's not again that's not all
women who are murdered, but women who are specifically murdered
for gender based reasons. So it's down, it's not gone.
So moving on me too.
Speaker 5 (10:08):
So I really wish we were recording to like you
should publish this record, and just because our faces and
the reactions we have in the subjects is just like
telling and it's like, so just for your listeners, Gina
just literally covered.
Speaker 2 (10:22):
Their face with a giant's side, wouldn't this subject.
Speaker 3 (10:27):
So it starts to like it gets sort of immediate
uptake in France when in twenty seventeen, when it's with
the ball really got rolling, and especially because there were
some very high profile people, including as r Argento, who
were part of the Weinstein thing but who are very
(10:47):
visible on France, it got also some really immediate backlash,
public backlash from very high profile people and from very
high profile women. There was an open letter signed by
about one hundred prominent women, including recognizable film stars like
(11:14):
Catherine Denov and people who would have in the.
Speaker 4 (11:19):
Past called themselves feminists, who said that the right to impose.
Speaker 3 (11:30):
Oneself sexually was necessary for sexual freedom. So saying that
me too was damaging to sexual liberation of men and women.
And then you also have this discourse where it's like
seduction is a cultural value, and that's where I wish
(11:57):
you could have seen Annie's face right there, because so
there's this meme. I don't know if you remember the
meme of Andrew Cuomo when he got caught having harassed
a bunch of his and the headline was I'm not
a pervert, I'm just Italian, like because he was like,
(12:17):
I'm Italian, I touch people, and people are like.
Speaker 4 (12:19):
Not like that. And this is where there's.
Speaker 3 (12:23):
Using the defense of a cultural identity that values certain
kinds of contact, whether it's Andrew Cuomo saying I want
to touch people, or whether it's people saying we're a
very romantic people. Seduction is important to us, and we
don't want to be Americans and be too puritanical about
(12:47):
these things, which seems to get rid of an awful.
Speaker 4 (12:52):
Lot of gray area in between.
Speaker 3 (12:55):
There you so that happened, so that is not uniform
at all, but that is that was a big part
of the public discourse. So you also get the issue
in that the sesa, which are the French oscars. I
can't then the year is escaping me right now, but
they So France continues to be very friendly to people
(13:17):
like Woody Allen, or people who've been accused of sexual misconduct,
or people like Roman Polanski who have been convicted of
sexual misconduct. And even though they're like, well you need
to separate the man from the artist and he won
his film won Best Director or Best Picture. I think
(13:42):
it was Best Picture at the CESAR.
Speaker 4 (13:45):
And notably.
Speaker 3 (13:48):
The actor Adeleanel, wonderful act. I don't know if you've
seen the movie Portrait of a Lady on Fire. So
the blonde woman in that movie, Adelanel, she got up
and walked out yelling shame, which was extremely brave, and
(14:10):
she basically wound up retiring from making movies shortly thereafter.
She's she's a wonderful sort of lesbian feminist, activist, lover
to pieces. She has done a couple of things that
are really amazing. One is that she has done that
(14:33):
She's spoken out about misconduct over and over again. She
brought a lawsuit against a director that she was working
with for not specifically rape, but like sexual misconduct with
a minor between the when she was between the ages
of twelve and fifteen and last week she won, and
(14:54):
it was not clear that that was going to be
the outcome of that. The court case was so ugly.
This sympathy, the amount of sort of public sympathy for
him was gross. And he's just been sentenced to four
years two of them suspended sentence, two of them in
house arrest and five years of not being able to
(15:18):
work with minors, which I don't think is enough. But
the fact that she went out on a limb and
torpedoed her career and she was like a very well regarded,
you know, young talent.
Speaker 4 (15:34):
To make the point that it's not okay.
Speaker 3 (15:48):
The big me too is children, Like it's not me
saying this needs to be talked about.
Speaker 4 (15:53):
In France.
Speaker 3 (15:54):
This is a number of public figures. Obviously, that's the
case all over. It happens all over, it happens in
churches all over, in families all over. But the cultural
acceptability of sexualization of children has become a big topic
of conversation, and a couple of things have come up.
(16:19):
One is a book called Consent, which is by a
woman named Vanessa springera where she writes about as a child,
like a very young teenager, she was I mean, she
was raped, but in the context of a year's long
(16:39):
relationship with a very famous author who for decades was
very clear that in his part that he was having
relationships with very young girls and very young boys, and
everyone's like, oh, what a creative man. He's just writing
these lovely these wonderful books, and then she came out
(17:00):
with this memoir being like no, no me, it was me,
a real person, and this created a you know, a
public reckoning that has not ended. And then you also
have So there's an edited volume that's come out, directed
(17:22):
by Iris Bray and Juliet I don't know risbre very well, JULIETROI.
They are an amazing sort of writer and activist. But
it's the name of the book, is uh, the incest
culture like rape culture, as in a cultural norm that
(17:42):
makes it possible and makes it okay and sometimes romanticized
to abuse children in that way. So again this is
not specific to France, but certain cultural norms around it
are not the same.
Speaker 4 (18:02):
From culture to culture.
Speaker 3 (18:05):
Triuture is also part of a collective volume called Politicizing
Childhood and doesn't have a translation yet.
Speaker 4 (18:13):
I hope it does. It's a good set.
Speaker 3 (18:15):
Of essays by people from a number of different fields
talking about like what are the ways in which we
have taken children's agency away in various different situations. Okay,
coming to the end of this, I'm sorry. So another
thing that's come up recently in the same context is
that she's al pellicoat case so for those who don't know,
(18:36):
this is an older woman. It was discovered because her
husband got caught upskirting someone at a grocery store and
his phone got taken away that he had been drugging
her and inviting strangers from the internet to come rape
her in their home and filming it for about a decade,
(18:59):
and he went to trial this past summer with forty
nine of the men. There are about thirty men who
have not been identified.
Speaker 4 (19:12):
There are so like what to unpack in that one that.
Speaker 3 (19:19):
She had been to the doctor many times to be like,
I'm falling asleep, I have memory loss, I have like
kynecological problems. I don't know what's going on. And at
no point did someone propose to her, Hey, I think
something really wrong is happening. The men who we are
(19:41):
now convicted, because they were all convicted with varying degrees
of severity, were from all walks of life, including one
of her neighbors, so professional men, working classmen, all ages,
fathers married. In addition to the thirty that have not
(20:03):
been identified, there have been several who said I sort
of was into this, or the husband offered this to me,
but I said no. Eventually, and none of them reported it.
The doctor who's who supplied the husband with the sedatives
has not been unidentified or punished. And there were pictures
(20:28):
of their daughter on his phone as well, who had
obviously been drugged and it like, and so a lot
of things were not addressed. There were a lot of
ways in which this was a big wake up call
to many people who, for whatever reason, it had not
occurred to them that anybody could be a rapist, even
(20:49):
if they seem like a nice guy, even if they're
so you know that, you know, a good family man, whatever.
So this is a big wake up call. It also
became an opportunity for some of the most regressive attitudes
about consent to be aired in public, both from the
(21:11):
defense lawyers and you could say that's their job, but
also in the press, etc. So you have the defenses
that were you know, I thought she consented and this
was just some kink that they had that You had
the people whose defense was I thought she was dead.
(21:36):
You had the people whose defense was it didn't occur
to me. Once I had the husband's consent, it did
not occur to me that I also needed the woman's consent.
And you also have the defense attorney, because all of
(21:57):
this is filmed and the the videos are being shown
at the trial, and you have the defense attorney saying, well,
he's caressing her, it's not rape. Yeah, it's also gross,
(22:18):
and so you have a giant point of reckoning. But
what the outcome will be is really unclear, and you
have the current I think he's currently the Minister of Justice.
He used to be the Minister of the Interior, But
who says I think that we should put the idea
of consent into the law. That sounds great. The idea
(22:41):
of positive consent in the law is what it's like
in Spain, it's what it's like in Scandinavia.
Speaker 4 (22:50):
But there are a couple of rounds with that.
Speaker 3 (22:52):
One is he's a credibly accused rapist. The only reason
I didn't go to trial is that the statute of
limitations had run out. His text messages where he was
in charge of social housing and imposing his you know,
(23:14):
favors if you're going to be euphemistic about it, on
women who are trying to get an apartment, those have
been leaked. So I don't think he knows very much
about consent. And the other issue that was also brought
up by Sabrina earn Jen the legal scholar that I
was talking about is that once you have consent that
(23:37):
is written into law in a specific way, then it
becomes a way the question of how to get around
it for defense attorneys, which makes it harder for you
to say I didn't in some.
Speaker 4 (23:48):
Ways to say I didn't consent.
Speaker 3 (23:50):
I don't know if that I agreed without one hundred percent.
But it is something to keep in mind when thinking
about writing positive consent to laws. And then get the
president who comes out and he's like, oh, Gizelle, you're
such because one the only way we know about this
is that she as a victim, was like, I want
it to be an open trial because I don't.
Speaker 4 (24:11):
I don't. I'm not the one who should be a shamed.
Speaker 3 (24:12):
They should be a shamed, right, And so you get
the president who's out there being like, oh, Giselle.
Speaker 4 (24:19):
You're a real hero. We're with you.
Speaker 3 (24:21):
Well, where there were you? Sorry when you were saying
that Jerard Depardieux, who also is facing many charges of
sexual misconduct, is a national treasure. So oh and the
president who was it was recently leaked that he was
(24:41):
using a whole bunch of slurs in uh cabinet meetings,
including calling the feminine female members of the legislature kukut,
which is, by the way, if you're going to use
a derogatory term, nineteenth century prostitute is a weird one.
Speaker 2 (25:02):
So he's throwing it back.
Speaker 4 (25:04):
That's fine.
Speaker 2 (25:06):
Oh there's so much. I didn't I don't know what's
going on, Like I've not heard anything about tip, Like
that's that's news to me.
Speaker 3 (25:13):
You just oh, yeah, he's he's kay, the newsflash.
Speaker 4 (25:16):
It's really gross. Really so uh.
Speaker 3 (25:31):
Then we get the terfism or as they've designated themselves,
and they're because they're like, oh, if feminists are trans friendly,
then we're femalists, so that there are a lot of
people who would identify this way. But there are two
sort of public facing figures. One of them is actually
one of the former member of the group Femine, which
(25:53):
is the news a while ago, like a feminist public
activism group. And then she was also one of the
founder of the Feminist Collage group that started actually in
response to feminicides, making these sort of guerrilla graffiti collages
that say like denouncing crimes against women. But there was
(26:14):
a split in twenty twenty between this founder, Margaret Stern,
and the group itself because the group was like, yeah,
we're also defending trans women and she was like, well,
then I'm not part of this group anymore. And she
has since so with another woman named Dora Muteau, who
(26:39):
was a sort of public sex education figure, they have
they've come out against the veil. They've they're very anti
sex work. So turfs were for wherever you want to
say this, And they have gotten as they have been
more and more rejected by sort of mainstream feminist discourse,
(27:03):
They've gotten closer and closer to far right, even neo
Nazi groups. Dora Mutou has gone so far as to
really praise Jordan Peterson. Margaret Stern, who was against it,
has apologized to the Catholic Church for supporting gay marriage.
(27:24):
And yet somehow, when there's this debate over conversion therapy
ban in France, who is getting received by a cabinet
member these two, and they are on the edge of
what's also known as femin nationalism, which is people who
identify as feminists but are saying that in order to
(27:47):
protect women, we have to protect them from basically Muslims.
Speaker 4 (27:53):
And immigrant men.
Speaker 2 (27:55):
What.
Speaker 3 (27:56):
Yeah, they claim to be universalist feminists, so there's like
the same thing is good for all women. That women
are most threatened by Islam and in general non European immigration.
This is represented publicly by the Nemesis collective that has
done a lot of acts of vandalism. They've done false
(28:18):
flag acts where they were like wearing a hitche ab
or burka and being like, yeah, we were Islamisists, we
want Sharia in France.
Speaker 4 (28:29):
Yeah. And they are also very.
Speaker 3 (28:32):
Closely related to some neo Nazi violent extremist groups in France.
They really took ownership they among with other national righting
nationalist groups.
Speaker 4 (28:44):
So a very tragic thing happened.
Speaker 3 (28:46):
A young woman named Philipino nod Carnon was killed last
fall by someone who had been given a deportation order.
This is a similar situation to the Lake and Riley
case and the US, where it's it is a tragedy
and the person who did it committed a crime. But
(29:08):
where this is there is a hyper visibilization of crimes
committed against white women by immigrants, and that is using
as an excuse to do damage to do process for
all immigrants and then Also, in January twenty third, the
(29:33):
current Minister of the Interior Bruno was confronted with a
member of Nemesis and was like, I want to congratulate
this young woman for the uh uh for her activism.
And then later he walked that back because he's like, oh, no,
I'm sorry, and it's like, well so they So those
(29:54):
are kind of some of the hot button issues going
on right now. I know that wasn't a real uh
let's put it this way, not a joyful note to
end on.
Speaker 1 (30:12):
Well, you know that's that's.
Speaker 2 (30:14):
What we are over here right right now?
Speaker 1 (30:18):
Do you have just a brief note about something joyful
you are excited about?
Speaker 3 (30:24):
So I gotta say, the young queer people are awesome.
But the amount of like collaboration and public scholarship and
art production that I see from them is so heartwarming
(30:47):
and like I don't want to be like inspirational in that, like,
but no, it really inspired me to go do stuff.
Speaker 4 (30:55):
And I like, really.
Speaker 3 (30:58):
Interesting writing projects are projects collaborations. I mean like even
the stensil things like that and the way, and so
that's something that I'm I'm very excited about. I am
concerned about our future. I'm concerned about their future, concerned
(31:23):
about a lot of things. But that does make me,
that does make me very happy to see it.
Speaker 1 (31:29):
Yeah, yeah, I think that's I think that's about right.
I think that's how a lot of us feel.
Speaker 2 (31:37):
Well.
Speaker 1 (31:38):
Thank you so much Gina for coming on. Please come back,
because we gave you these huge broad questions. You nailed it,
but we would love to dig in more. But in
the meantime, where can the good listeners find you?
Speaker 3 (31:52):
So I am not on any public facing socials because
that's very badly. But if you want to keep up
with any of my writing, a bunch of it is
an open access So if you google genis Tom you'll
find my professional page. A bunch of the articles that
I've written are linked there. I've translated a really cool
(32:15):
science fiction novel that's already out called Medlito's Dreams. I
don't get any more money from that, but I also
think it's awesome. And then there's another novel that's more
historical fiction by the same author that's coming out in
October that I would encourage everybody to check out. That's
a it's called The Inner Harbor and it takes place
(32:37):
right before the handoff of Macau from Portugal to China
in the late nineties.
Speaker 1 (32:42):
Yes, I'm very intrigued by all of this. Thank you
so much for being here, listeners, go check that stuff out.
And this brings us to the end of our interview
with Gina, who was such a delight, so informative, it's
just so knowledgeable. We had so many questions we wanted
to ask after the interview was over. So hopefully Gina
(33:04):
will come back in the future because there, Yeah, there
was a lot more we wanted to get to, right,
We covered a lot of ground, that's for sure.
Speaker 5 (33:14):
For sure.
Speaker 4 (33:15):
Yes.
Speaker 1 (33:16):
In the meantime, listeners, if you would like to contact us,
you can. You can email us at Hello at stuff
Onenever Told You dot com. You can find us on
blue Sky at mom Stuff podcast, or on Instagram and
TikTok at stuff I've Never Told You. We're also on YouTube.
We have a tea public store, and we have a
book you can get wherever you get your books. Thanks
us always start a super producer, Christenior executive producer and
your contributor Joey, Thank you and thanks to you for listening.
(33:39):
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your favorite shows.
Hey, this is Annie and Samantha and welcome to Stuff
I Never Told You production of iHeartRadio. And today we
are bringing you part two of our interview with doctor
Ginas Thom, who specializes in all things intersectional feminism in France.
(00:29):
And before we get into this quick correction, Gina wanted
you to know we misspoke in the last episode and
she has not written any books yet. She's written articles
and academic journals and chapters and edited collections, but no
books again yet, but still a lot to dig into
(00:54):
in the works that she has done. If you didn't
hear part one, go back and listen to that because
it's really gives so much context and it's really a
good foundation for what we're going to be talking about
in this episode where we break down a lot of
the current issues around women in France right now. So
(01:14):
if you haven't listened to that yet, go listen to
that and then come back. But if you have listened,
then let's get into the interview.
Speaker 2 (01:23):
Okay, So we're talking wow, Okay, so much. It's going
to take me like the rest of the day to
chew on all of this information online because again, I'm like,
French culture is not my forte is not something that
I've studied specifically language obviously not. As I said, I
need a lot of note cards and help. But with
all of that, there's some big conversations that are happening
(01:44):
around women and feminism in France right now, right, h
can you kind of give us an overview of the
public discourse around some of that.
Speaker 3 (01:52):
Yeah, so I'll try to do this as efficiently as possible,
and I'm going to leave stuff out, but well, so
I do want to address abortion really quickly. There's been this,
so it wound up in the Constitution after a couple
of attempts, and this is prime. The push for this
(02:14):
primarily came after Roe v. Wade was overturned in the
US and also after there started to be calls on
the far right for limitations on it, and so they
there was this fear. They were like, if Trump can
happen in America, it could happen here. It needs to
go in the Constitution to make it more difficult to
undo the right to abortion. Vaaman did not get in.
(02:37):
The freedom to abortion to have an abortion did get in.
So this isn't nothing, but I want and I want
to tip my hat to a legal scholar named Sabrina.
I don't actually know how to say her name. I've
never done it, said it out loud, but Sabrina Rangin
who explained the different really clearly, the difference between the
(02:58):
freedom and the right. If you have the right to
have something that's a positive entitlement, and not only are
you not going to be punished for it, but you
need to have access to it. If you have the
freedom to do something, you're not going to be punished
for it, but there may not be the concrete protections
(03:19):
for your access to that. And this has become evident
recently one because you've seen despite what are supposed to
be legal protections, you've seen the return of clinic protesters
in France. And you've also seen because the current government
has been starving the public health system in a way
(03:41):
that we've seen We've seen obviously in the US in
what we in so far as we ever had a
public health system. The UK has seen this as well.
The current government Amendumocrants government in France has closed a
lot of hospital beds and they're really understaffed. So there's
(04:02):
a medical desert problem that isn't comparable. Like I live
in Alabama. There are a lot of places where you
cannot get to a hospital within an hour. So distances
in the US mean that medical deserts are bigger and
more serious. But compared to the situation that existed in
France in the past, you're now getting medical deserts. And
(04:24):
so a recent statistic that came out is that one
in four women have to leave their department, which is
the administrative area. So it might be comparable to a county.
I guess, like if we think, but they have to
travel to go get an abortion. Again, the distances in
(04:47):
the US are much bigger. The abortion deserts are much bigger.
But this is a new thing. And also when you
look at the statistics which they do have by economic status,
women who are more financially precarious are more likely to
need abortion care. And so if one in four women
(05:08):
has to travel, that means that a disproportionate number of
financially precarious women have to travel to get abortions. And
while the procedure may be covered by their national health insurance,
that travel is not. So there's that gender based violence,
and I know I brought it up a few times.
(05:29):
I want to put a huge content warning on this
section because it's extremely ugly. So you have a lot
of a pretty comprehensive set of legal protections, but their
enforcement is and the ways in which accusations are taken
seriously is really troublesome. Or not taken seriously, it's really troublesome.
(05:54):
This came up recently in so you know, I'll talk
a little about me too in a minute. But there
was also another sort of social media hashtag that was
started by an activist called anatumas Off called du blue
pen or double punishment, where women who were going to
(06:15):
report sexual assault were being uh basically run through the ringer,
their witness, their testimony was refused.
Speaker 4 (06:28):
They were you know.
Speaker 3 (06:30):
The very traditional sort of oh what were you wearing?
Were you drinking? But even beyond that were like one
woman called to report a rape and they put her
on hold, but she could hear the policeman saying, oh,
it's that sled again.
Speaker 4 (06:44):
Yeah. The numbers of.
Speaker 3 (06:49):
Rapes that are reported and then from report to investigated,
and then from investigation to prosecution, you know that I
don't have these data compared to the US, they're not
good in either place. So and they are also real
you know, very strong social norms that govern that as well.
(07:13):
There's a question of feminist side. So what is feminicide.
It means it's a woman who was being killed for
reasons related to her gender, whether that is that's not
exclusively domestic partner violence, because it can also mean like
when an in cell mass shooter shows up, or if
someone is killed for turning someone down for a date,
(07:33):
things like that. This is where it's really hard to
compare the US to any other country because feminicides are
not tracked in the US. So I can tell I
can give you the data from twenty twenty one, but
the numbers don't match up exactly. So in France in
(07:55):
twenty twenty one, there are nine hundred and thirty homicides,
one hundred and twenty two of those are feminis sides.
In the US that year there twenty one thousand, four
sixty two homicides. So for a country that's about five
(08:15):
times has the populations, that's about five times bigger. We
just in general have twenty plus times the number of
homicides because we have guns mostly.
Speaker 2 (08:29):
Hell, yeah, that was sarcastic.
Speaker 3 (08:33):
Of those twenty one thousand, four and sixty two homicides,
forty nine hundred and seventy were women, and one third
of those are estimated to be domestic partner or intimate
partner violence. But that that's not that doesn't map directly
onto feminicides. So you could look at it as per population,
(08:54):
we have approximately but hard but the numbers aren't the
same twice as many.
Speaker 4 (09:04):
Domestic like intimate.
Speaker 3 (09:06):
Partner murders as you have feminicides in France. But if
you look at the percentage of murders overall that are feminicides,
it's kind of the same. So if some if there's
a listener who's better at statistics than I am, then
(09:28):
those numbers might be make more sense to you. But
so and France within Western Europe is that's an elevated number,
and there have been attempts to address that. It's a
little bit down. Last year, I think there were ninety
(09:48):
three identified. That doesn't that's not again that's not all
women who are murdered, but women who are specifically murdered
for gender based reasons. So it's down, it's not gone.
So moving on me too.
Speaker 5 (10:08):
So I really wish we were recording to like you
should publish this record, and just because our faces and
the reactions we have in the subjects is just like
telling and it's like, so just for your listeners, Gina
just literally covered.
Speaker 2 (10:22):
Their face with a giant's side, wouldn't this subject.
Speaker 3 (10:27):
So it starts to like it gets sort of immediate
uptake in France when in twenty seventeen, when it's with
the ball really got rolling, and especially because there were
some very high profile people, including as r Argento, who
were part of the Weinstein thing but who are very
(10:47):
visible on France, it got also some really immediate backlash,
public backlash from very high profile people and from very
high profile women. There was an open letter signed by
about one hundred prominent women, including recognizable film stars like
(11:14):
Catherine Denov and people who would have in the.
Speaker 4 (11:19):
Past called themselves feminists, who said that the right to impose.
Speaker 3 (11:30):
Oneself sexually was necessary for sexual freedom. So saying that
me too was damaging to sexual liberation of men and women.
And then you also have this discourse where it's like
seduction is a cultural value, and that's where I wish
(11:57):
you could have seen Annie's face right there, because so
there's this meme. I don't know if you remember the
meme of Andrew Cuomo when he got caught having harassed
a bunch of his and the headline was I'm not
a pervert, I'm just Italian, like because he was like,
(12:17):
I'm Italian, I touch people, and people are like.
Speaker 4 (12:19):
Not like that. And this is where there's.
Speaker 3 (12:23):
Using the defense of a cultural identity that values certain
kinds of contact, whether it's Andrew Cuomo saying I want
to touch people, or whether it's people saying we're a
very romantic people. Seduction is important to us, and we
don't want to be Americans and be too puritanical about
(12:47):
these things, which seems to get rid of an awful.
Speaker 4 (12:52):
Lot of gray area in between.
Speaker 3 (12:55):
There you so that happened, so that is not uniform
at all, but that is that was a big part
of the public discourse. So you also get the issue
in that the sesa, which are the French oscars. I
can't then the year is escaping me right now, but
they So France continues to be very friendly to people
(13:17):
like Woody Allen, or people who've been accused of sexual misconduct,
or people like Roman Polanski who have been convicted of
sexual misconduct. And even though they're like, well you need
to separate the man from the artist and he won
his film won Best Director or Best Picture. I think
(13:42):
it was Best Picture at the CESAR.
Speaker 4 (13:45):
And notably.
Speaker 3 (13:48):
The actor Adeleanel, wonderful act. I don't know if you've
seen the movie Portrait of a Lady on Fire. So
the blonde woman in that movie, Adelanel, she got up
and walked out yelling shame, which was extremely brave, and
(14:10):
she basically wound up retiring from making movies shortly thereafter.
She's she's a wonderful sort of lesbian feminist, activist, lover
to pieces. She has done a couple of things that
are really amazing. One is that she has done that
(14:33):
She's spoken out about misconduct over and over again. She
brought a lawsuit against a director that she was working
with for not specifically rape, but like sexual misconduct with
a minor between the when she was between the ages
of twelve and fifteen and last week she won, and
(14:54):
it was not clear that that was going to be
the outcome of that. The court case was so ugly.
This sympathy, the amount of sort of public sympathy for
him was gross. And he's just been sentenced to four
years two of them suspended sentence, two of them in
house arrest and five years of not being able to
(15:18):
work with minors, which I don't think is enough. But
the fact that she went out on a limb and
torpedoed her career and she was like a very well regarded,
you know, young talent.
Speaker 4 (15:34):
To make the point that it's not okay.
Speaker 3 (15:48):
The big me too is children, Like it's not me
saying this needs to be talked about.
Speaker 4 (15:53):
In France.
Speaker 3 (15:54):
This is a number of public figures. Obviously, that's the
case all over. It happens all over, it happens in
churches all over, in families all over. But the cultural
acceptability of sexualization of children has become a big topic
of conversation, and a couple of things have come up.
(16:19):
One is a book called Consent, which is by a
woman named Vanessa springera where she writes about as a child,
like a very young teenager, she was I mean, she
was raped, but in the context of a year's long
(16:39):
relationship with a very famous author who for decades was
very clear that in his part that he was having
relationships with very young girls and very young boys, and
everyone's like, oh, what a creative man. He's just writing
these lovely these wonderful books, and then she came out
(17:00):
with this memoir being like no, no me, it was me,
a real person, and this created a you know, a
public reckoning that has not ended. And then you also
have So there's an edited volume that's come out, directed
(17:22):
by Iris Bray and Juliet I don't know risbre very well, JULIETROI.
They are an amazing sort of writer and activist. But
it's the name of the book, is uh, the incest
culture like rape culture, as in a cultural norm that
(17:42):
makes it possible and makes it okay and sometimes romanticized
to abuse children in that way. So again this is
not specific to France, but certain cultural norms around it
are not the same.
Speaker 4 (18:02):
From culture to culture.
Speaker 3 (18:05):
Triuture is also part of a collective volume called Politicizing
Childhood and doesn't have a translation yet.
Speaker 4 (18:13):
I hope it does. It's a good set.
Speaker 3 (18:15):
Of essays by people from a number of different fields
talking about like what are the ways in which we
have taken children's agency away in various different situations. Okay,
coming to the end of this, I'm sorry. So another
thing that's come up recently in the same context is
that she's al pellicoat case so for those who don't know,
(18:36):
this is an older woman. It was discovered because her
husband got caught upskirting someone at a grocery store and
his phone got taken away that he had been drugging
her and inviting strangers from the internet to come rape
her in their home and filming it for about a decade,
(18:59):
and he went to trial this past summer with forty
nine of the men. There are about thirty men who
have not been identified.
Speaker 4 (19:12):
There are so like what to unpack in that one that.
Speaker 3 (19:19):
She had been to the doctor many times to be like,
I'm falling asleep, I have memory loss, I have like
kynecological problems. I don't know what's going on. And at
no point did someone propose to her, Hey, I think
something really wrong is happening. The men who we are
(19:41):
now convicted, because they were all convicted with varying degrees
of severity, were from all walks of life, including one
of her neighbors, so professional men, working classmen, all ages,
fathers married. In addition to the thirty that have not
(20:03):
been identified, there have been several who said I sort
of was into this, or the husband offered this to me,
but I said no. Eventually, and none of them reported it.
The doctor who's who supplied the husband with the sedatives
has not been unidentified or punished. And there were pictures
(20:28):
of their daughter on his phone as well, who had
obviously been drugged and it like, and so a lot
of things were not addressed. There were a lot of
ways in which this was a big wake up call
to many people who, for whatever reason, it had not
occurred to them that anybody could be a rapist, even
(20:49):
if they seem like a nice guy, even if they're
so you know that, you know, a good family man, whatever.
So this is a big wake up call. It also
became an opportunity for some of the most regressive attitudes
about consent to be aired in public, both from the
(21:11):
defense lawyers and you could say that's their job, but
also in the press, etc. So you have the defenses
that were you know, I thought she consented and this
was just some kink that they had that You had
the people whose defense was I thought she was dead.
(21:36):
You had the people whose defense was it didn't occur
to me. Once I had the husband's consent, it did
not occur to me that I also needed the woman's consent.
And you also have the defense attorney, because all of
(21:57):
this is filmed and the the videos are being shown
at the trial, and you have the defense attorney saying, well,
he's caressing her, it's not rape. Yeah, it's also gross,
(22:18):
and so you have a giant point of reckoning. But
what the outcome will be is really unclear, and you
have the current I think he's currently the Minister of Justice.
He used to be the Minister of the Interior, But
who says I think that we should put the idea
of consent into the law. That sounds great. The idea
(22:41):
of positive consent in the law is what it's like
in Spain, it's what it's like in Scandinavia.
Speaker 4 (22:50):
But there are a couple of rounds with that.
Speaker 3 (22:52):
One is he's a credibly accused rapist. The only reason
I didn't go to trial is that the statute of
limitations had run out. His text messages where he was
in charge of social housing and imposing his you know,
(23:14):
favors if you're going to be euphemistic about it, on
women who are trying to get an apartment, those have
been leaked. So I don't think he knows very much
about consent. And the other issue that was also brought
up by Sabrina earn Jen the legal scholar that I
was talking about is that once you have consent that
(23:37):
is written into law in a specific way, then it
becomes a way the question of how to get around
it for defense attorneys, which makes it harder for you
to say I didn't in some.
Speaker 4 (23:48):
Ways to say I didn't consent.
Speaker 3 (23:50):
I don't know if that I agreed without one hundred percent.
But it is something to keep in mind when thinking
about writing positive consent to laws. And then get the
president who comes out and he's like, oh, Gizelle, you're
such because one the only way we know about this
is that she as a victim, was like, I want
it to be an open trial because I don't.
Speaker 4 (24:11):
I don't. I'm not the one who should be a shamed.
Speaker 3 (24:12):
They should be a shamed, right, And so you get
the president who's out there being like, oh, Giselle.
Speaker 4 (24:19):
You're a real hero. We're with you.
Speaker 3 (24:21):
Well, where there were you? Sorry when you were saying
that Jerard Depardieux, who also is facing many charges of
sexual misconduct, is a national treasure. So oh and the
president who was it was recently leaked that he was
(24:41):
using a whole bunch of slurs in uh cabinet meetings,
including calling the feminine female members of the legislature kukut,
which is, by the way, if you're going to use
a derogatory term, nineteenth century prostitute is a weird one.
Speaker 2 (25:02):
So he's throwing it back.
Speaker 4 (25:04):
That's fine.
Speaker 2 (25:06):
Oh there's so much. I didn't I don't know what's
going on, Like I've not heard anything about tip, Like
that's that's news to me.
Speaker 3 (25:13):
You just oh, yeah, he's he's kay, the newsflash.
Speaker 4 (25:16):
It's really gross. Really so uh.
Speaker 3 (25:31):
Then we get the terfism or as they've designated themselves,
and they're because they're like, oh, if feminists are trans friendly,
then we're femalists, so that there are a lot of
people who would identify this way. But there are two
sort of public facing figures. One of them is actually
one of the former member of the group Femine, which
(25:53):
is the news a while ago, like a feminist public
activism group. And then she was also one of the
founder of the Feminist Collage group that started actually in
response to feminicides, making these sort of guerrilla graffiti collages
that say like denouncing crimes against women. But there was
(26:14):
a split in twenty twenty between this founder, Margaret Stern,
and the group itself because the group was like, yeah,
we're also defending trans women and she was like, well,
then I'm not part of this group anymore. And she
has since so with another woman named Dora Muteau, who
(26:39):
was a sort of public sex education figure, they have
they've come out against the veil. They've they're very anti
sex work. So turfs were for wherever you want to
say this, And they have gotten as they have been
more and more rejected by sort of mainstream feminist discourse,
(27:03):
They've gotten closer and closer to far right, even neo
Nazi groups. Dora Mutou has gone so far as to
really praise Jordan Peterson. Margaret Stern, who was against it,
has apologized to the Catholic Church for supporting gay marriage.
(27:24):
And yet somehow, when there's this debate over conversion therapy
ban in France, who is getting received by a cabinet
member these two, and they are on the edge of
what's also known as femin nationalism, which is people who
identify as feminists but are saying that in order to
(27:47):
protect women, we have to protect them from basically Muslims.
Speaker 4 (27:53):
And immigrant men.
Speaker 2 (27:55):
What.
Speaker 3 (27:56):
Yeah, they claim to be universalist feminists, so there's like
the same thing is good for all women. That women
are most threatened by Islam and in general non European immigration.
This is represented publicly by the Nemesis collective that has
done a lot of acts of vandalism. They've done false
(28:18):
flag acts where they were like wearing a hitche ab
or burka and being like, yeah, we were Islamisists, we
want Sharia in France.
Speaker 4 (28:29):
Yeah. And they are also very.
Speaker 3 (28:32):
Closely related to some neo Nazi violent extremist groups in France.
They really took ownership they among with other national righting
nationalist groups.
Speaker 4 (28:44):
So a very tragic thing happened.
Speaker 3 (28:46):
A young woman named Philipino nod Carnon was killed last
fall by someone who had been given a deportation order.
This is a similar situation to the Lake and Riley
case and the US, where it's it is a tragedy
and the person who did it committed a crime. But
(29:08):
where this is there is a hyper visibilization of crimes
committed against white women by immigrants, and that is using
as an excuse to do damage to do process for
all immigrants and then Also, in January twenty third, the
(29:33):
current Minister of the Interior Bruno was confronted with a
member of Nemesis and was like, I want to congratulate
this young woman for the uh uh for her activism.
And then later he walked that back because he's like, oh, no,
I'm sorry, and it's like, well so they So those
(29:54):
are kind of some of the hot button issues going
on right now. I know that wasn't a real uh
let's put it this way, not a joyful note to
end on.
Speaker 1 (30:12):
Well, you know that's that's.
Speaker 2 (30:14):
What we are over here right right now?
Speaker 1 (30:18):
Do you have just a brief note about something joyful
you are excited about?
Speaker 3 (30:24):
So I gotta say, the young queer people are awesome.
But the amount of like collaboration and public scholarship and
art production that I see from them is so heartwarming
(30:47):
and like I don't want to be like inspirational in that, like,
but no, it really inspired me to go do stuff.
Speaker 4 (30:55):
And I like, really.
Speaker 3 (30:58):
Interesting writing projects are projects collaborations. I mean like even
the stensil things like that and the way, and so
that's something that I'm I'm very excited about. I am
concerned about our future. I'm concerned about their future, concerned
(31:23):
about a lot of things. But that does make me,
that does make me very happy to see it.
Speaker 1 (31:29):
Yeah, yeah, I think that's I think that's about right.
I think that's how a lot of us feel.
Speaker 2 (31:37):
Well.
Speaker 1 (31:38):
Thank you so much Gina for coming on. Please come back,
because we gave you these huge broad questions. You nailed it,
but we would love to dig in more. But in
the meantime, where can the good listeners find you?
Speaker 3 (31:52):
So I am not on any public facing socials because
that's very badly. But if you want to keep up
with any of my writing, a bunch of it is
an open access So if you google genis Tom you'll
find my professional page. A bunch of the articles that
I've written are linked there. I've translated a really cool
(32:15):
science fiction novel that's already out called Medlito's Dreams. I
don't get any more money from that, but I also
think it's awesome. And then there's another novel that's more
historical fiction by the same author that's coming out in
October that I would encourage everybody to check out. That's
a it's called The Inner Harbor and it takes place
(32:37):
right before the handoff of Macau from Portugal to China
in the late nineties.
Speaker 1 (32:42):
Yes, I'm very intrigued by all of this. Thank you
so much for being here, listeners, go check that stuff out.
And this brings us to the end of our interview
with Gina, who was such a delight, so informative, it's
just so knowledgeable. We had so many questions we wanted
to ask after the interview was over. So hopefully Gina
(33:04):
will come back in the future because there, Yeah, there
was a lot more we wanted to get to, right,
We covered a lot of ground, that's for sure.
Speaker 5 (33:14):
For sure.
Speaker 4 (33:15):
Yes.
Speaker 1 (33:16):
In the meantime, listeners, if you would like to contact us,
you can. You can email us at Hello at stuff
Onenever Told You dot com. You can find us on
blue Sky at mom Stuff podcast, or on Instagram and
TikTok at stuff I've Never Told You. We're also on YouTube.
We have a tea public store, and we have a
book you can get wherever you get your books. Thanks
us always start a super producer, Christenior executive producer and
your contributor Joey, Thank you and thanks to you for listening.
(33:39):
Stuff I Never Told You is production by Heart Radio
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