The Purloined Gender: American Feminism in a French Mirror

Uncle Sam and Love: thus begins, with a droll though ominous title, an editorial by Jacques Julliard, in left-wing weekly Le Nouvel Observateur. this piece on feminism and sexuality, French historian focuses on America's public enemy since days of stagecoach: today no less than yesterday, it's love. He then goes on: Everything has been attempted in order to eradicate it: first repression, i.e., Puritanism. Then trivialization, i.e., sexual liberation, with its flood of scientific surveys and sexual prattle. And ultimately, final solution, i.e., American-style feminism. Of course, this could be irony-were it not for allusion to Holocaust, which is usually no joking matter. The shrill tone and radical rhetoric do strike reader as unnecessarily extreme. When Julliard reports on the hysterical climate that astonishes all travelers in United States, why should he use a hysterical tone in supposedly gentler climate of France? ' Indeed, after a short visit to a New England college, this eminent intellectual can confirm worst fears of his readers and darkest reports of his fellow travelers. I can assure you that unfortunate boys who ventured into enemy territory had a cowered look-while girls could only talk about one thing. Moreover, in order to escape alleged lust of these males, women had managed to hide their secondary sexual characteristics so well that it felt like Mao's China, and not heart of Massachusetts. After journalist's facts comes man's opinion: In my view, under circumstances, sexual assaults whose threat these women feared weren't so much criminal as