>France's most revered actress Catherine Deneuve hit out Tuesday at a new "puritanism" sparked by sexual harassment scandals, declaring that men should be "free to hit on" women.
>She was one of around 100 French women writers, performers and academics who wrote an open letter deploring the wave of "denunciations"
>They claimed that the "witch-hunt" that has followed threatens sexual freedom.
>"Rape is a crime, but trying to seduce someone, even persistently or cack-handedly, is not -- nor is men being gentlemanly a macho attack," said the letter published in the daily Le Monde.
>"Men have been punished summarily, forced out of their jobs when all they did was touch someone's knee or try to steal a kiss,"
>Men had been dragged through the mud, they argued, for "talking about intimate subjects during professional dinners or for sending sexually-charged messages to women who did not return their attentions."
>"What began as freeing women up to speak has today turned into the opposite -- we intimidate people into speaking 'correctly', shout down those who don't fall into line, and those women who refused to bend" to the new realities "are regarded as complicit and traitors."
>"Instead of helping women, this frenzy to send these (male chauvinist) 'pigs' to the abattoir actually helps the enemies of sexual liberty -- religious extremists and the worst sort of reactionaries," the collective of women who signed the letter said.
>"As women we do not recognise ourselves in this feminism, which beyond denouncing the abuse of power, takes on a hatred of men and of sexuality."
>They insisted that women were "sufficiently aware that the sexual urge is by its nature wild and aggressive. But we are also clear-eyed enough not to confuse an awkward attempt to pick someone up with a sexual attack."
afp.com
