Aude Picard-Wolff, the mayor of Morette, in Isère, Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes, emailed her colleagues to say she would no longer be kissing each of them and would prefer to ‘shake hands’ in the future
A French mayor has announced that she will no longer give a ‘la bise’ greeting kiss to her 73 colleagues every morning.
Aude Picard-Wolff, the mayor of Morette, in Isère, Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes, emailed her colleagues to say she would no longer be kissing each of them and would prefer to ‘shake hands’ in the future.
‘I have enough of giving la bise to dozens of people,’ she wrote. ‘I hope that my action will contribute to making people think so that everyone can feel free to give or not give la bise as an elected official, in his or her profession or in any other situation.’
In France, men generally only give the kiss greeting with close friends and at home, while women are expected to do give the greeting more widely.
Picard-Wolff, a Greens Party member, admitted that she had arrived late for meetings and used a cold as an excuse to avoid the kiss greeting.
It ‘always felt wrong to be doing the bise with people I barely knew’, Picard-Wolff told Dauphiné Libéré.
She added: ‘I found it disagreeable. It annoyed me. We’re not as free as all that when someone sticks their cheek in your direction.
‘Even though we had done the bise for years I wanted to say that from now I would like to shake hands, like men do.’
Picard-Wolff said that she discussed the issue with several officials before sending the email to her colleagues.
‘This is a minimal, but daily issue of gender equality,’ she said of the greeting kiss.
The Harvey Weinstein scandal in the United States has accelerated a rethink of attitudes toward sexual harassment in France.
In France, men generally only give the kiss greeting with close friends and at home, while women are expected to do give the greeting more widely. Pictured above, President Emmanuel Macron greets UK Prime Minister Theresa May
French women have taken to social media to share tales of sexual harassment, outstripping the #MeToo campaign with a name-and-shame hashtag #BalanceTonPorc – or ‘expose your pig’.
French President Emmanuel Macron unveiled measures in November aimed at educating the public and schoolchildren about sexism and violence against women and improving police support for victims. He also proposed criminalising street harassment.
He noted that violence takes on other forms, notably in the workplace, a result of inequality and a false sense of men’s superiority.
‘What should be sanctuaries today becomes a hunting ground simply because (men) can use … age, authority, their post, or simply force,’ the French president said.
But Macron cautioned against France becoming a society where every interaction between a man and a woman can come under suspicion. ‘We are not a Puritan society,’ he said.
Among proposed measures, Macron said legal complaints will be rushed through the system, and the statute of limitations for suspected sexual crimes against minors would be moved to 30 years from 20 currently as part of a bill to be presented in 2018.
Macron also wants to rectify ‘intolerable ambiguities’ in the penal code surrounding the legal age of consent. Outrage followed a ruling in an assault case that an 11-year-old was of the age of consent. He suggested the age of 15 – the legal age of sexual adulthood in France, and the age at which Macron met his future wife, Brigitte, his school’s drama teacher.
Picard-Wolff, a Greens Party member, admitted that she had arrived late for meetings and used a cold as an excuse to avoid the kiss greeting. Pictured above, Macron greets German Chancellor Angela Merkel
To encourage more women to speak out, Macron said that from the start of next year, an online alarm system will be set up for instant contact with police.
Nursery school teachers will be trained to address ‘non-negotiable’ equality between the sexes.
Macron said violence against women is most often committed where women ‘should feel protected’ – be it at home, in the street or in the office – and the ‘deafening silence’ must end.
Meanwhile, French Prime Minister Edouard Philippe clamped down on attempts to make French more female-friendly by issuing a ban on so-called ‘inclusive writing’ in official texts.
At the centre of the row is the growing use of formulations to embrace both genders in the plural form, which requires full-stops being inserted in the word – to the horror of purists.
For example, the word for a mixed-gender group of ‘readers’ is usually written as ‘lecteurs’, even if the women outnumber the men, rather than with the feminine plural ‘lectrices’.
Using inclusive writing, the word would be written as ‘lecteur.rice.s’.
In a memo to his ministers in Novembeer, Philippe issued a diktat, insisting: ‘The masculine (form) is a neutral form which should be used for terms liable to apply to women.’
Stressing the need to use formal language in legally binding texts, he demanded government ministries avoid inclusive writing, ‘notably for reasons of intelligibility and clarity’.