They meet for the first time this Saturday morning, November 13th. Two years that they patiently mature their shot. But the five of them had never physically met before. By preparing for the launch, scheduled forty-eight hours later, of the political #metoo, they hope – at last – to shake up this often brutal and still largely masculine environment that they know intimately.
Elected or collaborators of elected officials (environmentalists, “rebellious” or socialists), they did not want to let slip the first presidential election since #metoo to make themselves heard. “We still promote politicians who trample on consent”, “Predators”. For them, “It is a democratic scandal”.
A climate of trivialized sexism
Fiona Texeire is the first to arrive at the rendezvous, in this small house in the north-east of Paris where Hélène Goutany, a journalist, with whom she has just launched a podcast on sexism entitled “welcomes her” There is no death of man “. At 35, she speaks in the name of her personal experience, that of a collaborator who has seen and sometimes suffered sexual and gender-based violence, and who works to prevent others from this “Rough entrance” in political life: “Me, nothing prepared me for this. “
It started with his first job in a town hall in the Paris suburbs, at age 23. “At the end of two weeks, I was blown up by my hierarchical superior”, she remembers. The impression of being “ a piece of meat “ never really left her. For seven years, she worked in the Senate and made herself ” a shell “. Sexist remarks and inappropriate gestures are therefore not “Not a subject”, rather ” A fatality “.
It was only when she arrived in the ministerial cabinet of Bernard Cazeneuve in January 2017 – for whom she was going to work for three years – that she really understood. The, “No remarks on the physical, no parties that go wrong, no elected to whom you hold out your hand and who licks your cheek, no hand in the ass at a Christmas party” … She then realizes that she has bathed in a climate of trivialized sexism. And that she has “Cashed”. The #metoo wave, coming from the United States, is also coming “To dispel this diffuse feeling of embarrassment: it was not my fault. And it was not normal ”.
Testimonial campaign
It was the Denis Baupin affair that brought these five activists together. At the defamation lawsuit brought and lost in 2019 by the former EELV deputy to the eight women who accused her of sexual assault and harassment, Fiona Texeire meets Mathilde Viot. Parliamentary assistant, she is there on behalf of Chair collaborator, a collective that she co-founded in 2016 to report sexist behavior within the National Assembly. On leaving the hearing, the two women go for a drink with the victims and witnesses of the trial.
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