OPINION ESSAYS
My work over the last two years has focused entirely on the women of Paris, particularly how they are shaping the capital. As the city’s leader since 2014, Mayor Anne Hidalgo naturally factored among them. I was confident she would be the favorite for reelection this year. But what I didn’t expect was that a curveball earlier this year in the form of a sexting scandal with Benjamin Griveaux would mean that all three frontrunners in the two-round mayoral election would be women.
It’s momentous in more ways than one. Barring any other surprises on June 28’s second-round vote, a woman will go on to shape the future of Paris for the second time. And given that it will be my first time voting (municipally) since becoming a French citizen in 2014, I’m eager to participate in an election in which the candidates’ gender isn’t a factor in the decision-making process.
As a municipal election in an important world capital, this vote doubles as the perfect test case for exploring what happens when traditional power structures are upended and men are taken out of the equation. What does the process feel like when the question shifts from can a woman win to which woman is best for the job?
To be sure, the absence of men doesn’t signal the absence of misogyny.
A cover story for Le Parisien newspaper in early March presented the three leading candidates as if they were finalists on a season of “The Bachelor”. Outlined beneath an imposing triptych was each woman’s primary characteristics: Agnès Buzyn, President Macron’s former health minister (unceremoniously thrown in to replace the République En Marche party’s disgraced candidate), was labeled la studieuse, the studious one; Mayor Hildago earned the qualifier la sereine, the relaxed one; and Rachida Dati, the right-leaning former justice minister under President Nicolas Sarkozy and the current mayor of the city’s 7th arrondissement, was curiously defined as la puncheuse, a neologism for the energetic one. All that was missing was the rose ceremony prediction.
On February 29, a date which now feels wholly disembodied from any linear sense of time, influential women in France stood up in outrage in the face of one of many injustices. Their act was poised to become the start of a long awaited public reckoning.
I’m speaking about ‘Portrait of a Lady on Fire’ actress Adèle Haenel and director Céline Sciamma who, in denouncing the nomination and Best Director prize bestowed upon Roman Polanski at the César Film Awards, became the avatars of the ongoing movement against the phallocentrism and male impunity plaguing French cinema. By March 8, the International Day of Women’s Rights, the indignation went well beyond the limits of the film industry as 60,000 women and men took to the streets of Paris to decry a litany of affronts to women’s rights and freedoms.
This momentum was building just before our lives were disrupted. Before the masks and tests (or shocking lack thereof), the measures in social distancing, the televised addresses from President Macron. Before the public discourse shifted solely to the coronavirus and confinement. Before the world stopped moving.
It’s understandable to imagine that the confinement and the ensuing period of vigilance would serve as a reset button; an opportune moment to rethink our most problematic systems and behaviors and vow to do better when the situation improves. We can’t go back to “normal”, or whatever before represented anyway — the very meaning has been upended.