DSK case exposes rift between feminists. I felt queasy at the sight of shaming placards outside the courtroom on his release "What is it about our culture that makes us so quick to judge, and so quick to blame?
" "The media has replaced the congregation in an endless pursuit of moral voyeurism "I cannot accept the idea that womanhood automatically implies victimhood" Lucy Wadham's book "The Secret Life of France" is available on amazon. Her blog, The Secret Life of France, helps to decode the French worldview for Anglo-Saxon readers. (CNN) -- Although I have always considered myself a feminist, I was, in the days following Dominique Strauss-Kahn's arrest, unable to join the sisterhood in condemning a man -- albeit of dubious moral record -- for the crime of attempted rape before he had actually been found guilty. Have I gone native, I wondered? I do not think of myself as a libertine.
The man-hating tirades of my female colleagues are nothing but puritanism in disguise--Lucy Wadham "Forgiveness is good," writes Pearson. La Seduction: How the French Play the Game of Life by Elaine Sciolino – review. Elaine Sciolino knows a thing or two about France.
She was bureau chief for the New York Times in Paris, where she has lived with her family since 2002. She has excellent contacts in French media and politics, and was awarded the Légion d'honneur for services to the Franco-American relationship. So it was with some excitement that I tucked into La Seduction. The opening scene places the author firmly in the corridors of power, with an account of President Chirac kissing her hand during a meeting at the Elysée palace in 2002. In the faintly steamy style that comes and goes throughout the book, Sciolino recalls: "Chirac reached for my right hand and cradled it as if it were a piece of porcelain from his private art collection.
The incident proved epiphanic, the key to Sciolino's thesis, which is that seduction is the driving force behind French life. The verb séduire is, as the author points out, a flexible one. Lucy Wadham is the author of The Secret Life of France (Faber) Lucy Wadham: Why the French still don't get it - Commentators, Opinion. Since DSK's arrest, a trail of stories confirming his profile as a sexual predator have been made public, most of them stories that were, according to that unique French journalistic tradition, known but not reported.
One of them, recounted five years ago on a chat show by Tristane Banon, the alleged victim herself, has morphed into another attempted rape charge, ready to fell DSK as soon as he gets home. A month after DSK's arrest, the first high-profile sexual harassment charge was brought against Georges Tron, Sarkozy's secretary of state for public affairs, a case that has since led to Tron's resignation and left other libidinous French politicians trembling in their boots. Online comments about Le Monde's leading editorial yesterday reveal the shift in sentiment since his arrest. His case may have been dismissed, observe the readers, but he is still a "bourgeois molester of maids", "a grotesque priapic creep". Lucy Wadham is the author of 'The Secret Life of France'