Rose Lamy has a problem: by her own admission, she “See[t] evil everywhere ”. She made the sexist quirks of the mainstream media a real personal obsession. In March 2019, this 37-year-old young woman went on the offensive and created an Instagram account, “Prepare for the fight”, which has 181,000 subscribers. Today she is publishing a book, Prepare for the fight. Defeating sexist discourse in the media published by JC Lattès.
The fight of Rose Lamy (a pseudonym) was born in 2003. When the actress Marie Trintignant dies under the blows of her companion, Bertrand Cantat, the young woman, indignant, feels that something is wrong with the way in which the media present the case. She was then a history student in Tours, after a childhood spent in the Center region with a mother, three sisters and a grandmother. Her father died when she was 4 years old. She did not grow up in a family of feminists, did not read the great classics of the cause of women. ” My political and feminist consciousness was built at university ”, she explains.
In 2011, she was surprised again with the DSK affair. Debates on the morality of Nafissatou Diallo, strange expressions used, as “Servant’s troussage”, cries of oration from relatives of the President of the IMF… Then, in 2016, it was the deputy Denis Baupin who made the headlines. Intuitively at first, then in a more and more deliberate way, she identifies the thousand ways, more or less subtle, by which speech, often, exonerates the guilty and blames the victims.
Immersed in the “very dark” universe of misogyny
In 2019, Rose Lamy worked in the SNCF’s digital crisis communication service when she decided to “Bring it all together in one place”. “One day, it was a news item that dealt with domestic violence from the angle of humor, and the next day, a guy who said an anti-feminist aberration on TV …”, remembers the young woman. A great consumer of the written press, television and radio, and an expert in communication, she understands that there is no “No coincidence in the way we express ourselves in public, that each word has a weight, a color”.
So she creates her Instagram account as a “Whistleblower”, and there compiles the figures of speech, deceptive phrases and frank insults that pollute the perception and presentation of women in the media. All over the Internet, activists are doing the same thing: on Tumblr, Sophie Gourion’s blog, “Words kill”, wage war on “Murderous language” ; Founded in 2014, the association of journalists Take the One is fighting for a better representation of women in the media.
You have 45.26% of this article to read. The rest is for subscribers only.