International Women's Day: More to be angry about than celebrate

Cue the flowers, chocolates, make-up offers and discounts on irons, vacuum cleaners and kitchen appliances, renewed galanterie and dinners in fancy restaurants, as if it was Valentine’s Day. This isn’t a day for cheap marketing operations and caricatural romance. And to be honest, as on every International Women’s Day, I am certainly not in the mood for a party.

There’s nothing to celebrate in the fact that barely three months into 2020, 16 women have been killed by their partner or ex-partner, and last year 151 women lost their lives in my home country.

In the UK, the gender pay gap for all employees was 17.3% last year. I am still hearing stories of girls being catcalled while going to school, men flashing their penis in trains and touching women because they feel they can.

I am still hearing friends saying their size, their afro hair, their lack of makeup or heels has been commented on and criticised in a professional environment. I am still hearing that they are judged because they don’t have children yet and/or don’t want any. I am still seeing that we are awarding prizes and honours to directors and writers accused of rape and assault on minors, and they are excused for their actions because “we need to separate the man from the artist”... But really, because they are rich and famous.

Seeing Roman Polanski being nominated in 12 Cesars, the French equivalent to the Oscars, and subsequently winning best director for his film J’accuse, made my blood boil. Without any sense of shame or decency the man accused of raping a dozen women and girls as young as 10 years old has drawn a parallel between what he considers to be a witch hunt against him and the antisemitism that Alfred Dreyfus endured in 19th-century France.

If this wasn’t revolting enough, the solidarity that he still enjoys makes me want to scream. Famous actresses such as Fanny Ardant and Isabelle Huppert both defended Polanski publicly. Lambert Wilson said that the “political correctness” used against Polanski “is terrorism”. Can you imagine that? Saying that grown men shouldn’t attempt anything sexual with a child or anything non-consensual with anyone has directors and actors shaking in their boots.

And then there’s Gabriel Matzneff. Until very recently, Matzneff, now 83 years old, was hailed for his novels in which he openly tells everything about his sexual encounters with girls he picked in Parisian middle schools, or with eight-year-old boys in Asia.

But earlier this year, editor and director Vanessa Springora broke her silence with a book, Le Consentement (Consent), in which she tells the story of her affair with Matzneff when she was just 14 and how the elitist literary world tolerated it. To have an idea of how normal Matzneff’s acts were seen, watch an interview he did on national television in 1990, in which he gladly confesses his attraction to young girls: “A young girl is generally nicer, even if she will very quickly become hysterical and crazy as she grows older,” he explains, calmly and expertly, smirking.

The interviewer, Bernard Pivot, laughs and calls him a “pussycat collector”. It really is very painful to watch a known paedophile telling stories about using his reputation to put children in his bed.

And don’t tell me these were the old times, and things have changed. They haven’t, and Roman Polanski proves it. Abuse on women and girls is still rife and widely tolerated, especially if you are from a certain social class and have powerful friends, as the #JeSuisVictime hashtag shows.

In Scotland, more than 40% of sexual crimes recorded by the police are related to victims under the age of 18, according to Rape Crisis Scotland.

And this is just the tip of the iceberg. Even if we are having more conversations about consent and women are more open to talk about deeply traumatic experiences, we still try to blame survivors for the attack they experienced and find excuses for the attackers. Attackers, who by the way are most of the time not lunatics unexpectedly jumping on you from a bush while you are walking your dog after nightfall.

We all know someone who has been harassed on their way to school or in the bus, or abused by a person they trusted, in a circle of friends, even in a family environment. Abusers are in every country, every social class, every race, every creed of belief. This is the epidemic I am most worried about, and so should you be.

If you think this is an exaggeration, then you haven’t been paying attention. You haven’t been listening to the women and girls in your life, and you haven’t created a safe environment for them to be able to speak out.

I am one of these women. Believe me when I say the 10-year-old girl inside of me is still trembling and terrified of speaking out about the sexual assaults I survived as a child, the catcalls from men the age of my dad when going to my gymnastics practice as a 12-year-old, the fetishisation I endured when I was 14 from white men telling me that they knew I was “a freak in bed” because I was black. Mostly, as I am writing those lines, my heart is racing, the palms of my hands are sweating, and my teeth are clenching with rage.

By God, I am furious. There isn’t one day where we get a break from the sexism, the racism, the hate and the consequential violence.

Fortunately, as always, author and full-time feminist warrior Virginie Despentes transformed my messy formless pile of anger into a masterpiece of channelled wrath in Liberation last week, following the Cesars ceremony.

“You, the powerful, demand constant unbending respect,” she writes. “And you also want victims to remain silent.”

But then, along with millions of women, she found comfort and inspiration in what actress Adele Haenel – who has recently spoken out about director Christophe Ruggia who abused her when she was a teenage girl – did when Polanski received an award: she got up and stormed out of the ceremony, soon followed by director Celine Sciamma, signalling that we have no reason whatsoever to just put up with this. “We get up and we leave. It’s over. We get up. We leave. We shout. And we f*ck you.”

This sums up everything for me. If these abusers think protecting their reputations is a priority, meaning our lives do not matter and we are never going to get the justice we deserve, then let’s do what they dread most – speak out, and not give them the admiration and adoration they so crave.

I have an infinite admiration for those women who dared denounce them, endangering their careers and their lives, even seeing some of their relationships with their loved ones change. This is an incredibly difficult conversation to have, and it took me 20 years to tell my own mother.

So for this year’s International Women’s Day you can keep your flowers, your candy and your sexy lingerie. We are not interested in your chivalry and you doing some house chores just on this Sunday.

We don’t want your pity, we don’t want excuses for abusers, whether they are self-proclaimed genius directors, writers, journalists or politicians. We want equal pay and equal opportunities. We want respect and we want to matter.

We want you to listen to our stories, even if they make you uncomfortable, understand the anger and the frustration, and to say, I believe you.Challenge everyday sexism and rape culture wherever you can. Especially if you are a man.

To anyone reading these lines and who has survived sexual assault, irrespective of their gender, I believe you, and you are not alone.