Street harassment of women in France has recently been brought into the spotlight as a huge problem. In a study done in France in 2015, 100% of the women surveyed said they had experienced harassment in the street. Feminists in France are doing their best to fight back and lessen the amount of sexual harassment that happens in public spaces.
In a video on Mademoizelle.com this month, French vlogger and feminist Marion Seclin made a video discussing the issue of street harassment.
To demonstrate the issue, Seclin asked women to use the hashtag #TasÉtéHarceléeMais to describe instances in which people had made excuses for harassment, by saying “Yes, you were harassed but… “ Many women tweeted things that people had said to them that excused street harassment by saying that it is a compliment, or that women were asking for it by dressing a certain way. According to Seclin, no woman ever asks for street harassment, and even if it comes in the form of a compliment, it is unasked for and by definition always harassment.
Of course, not everyone agrees with Seclin and there have been many responses calling her video unnecessarily hostile. One such responder is the French vlogger Le Raptor Dissedent, who while paying homage to the feminists of the past who fought for voting rights and working rights for women, but that feminists these days are a group of bourgeois women focused on non-issues.
