A male-dominated clique of journalists, advertisers and digital consultants mobbed women for years, spread defamatory photomontages, coordinated targeted attacks against female creators, journalists, presenters - at least two women withdrew from the net public. What astonishes many in the case of the French "League du LOL" is that they are not the kind of men who associate many with misogynist prototypes.
No old hung white men who no longer understand the world and no young Arab men (thank God - then we would not talk about sexism that affects everyone but a racist discussion about the image of women in Islam). No, the "League du Lol" was composed of a liberal media elite who appeared self-assured and was admired as "cool kids" with "keen humor" by others - one of the men sometimes worked as a community manager for Emmanuel Macron, one between Paris and Berlin, many of them are only in their mid-30s today.
In fact, it is not surprising that even supposedly enlightened men act misogynously. The systematic silence of women in the public space - in the net, but also in talk shows, in parliaments, at work meetings, at small talk at parties - has influenced our culture unquestioned for millennia in all areas of society. And that's why it's so powerful. Behind it stands a concept of authority, which until today knows above all the male interpretation sovereignty over the world.
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Angela Merkel with men: "women's niche"?
In her analysis "Women and Power", the ancient historian Mary Beard impressively demonstrates how, even in antiquity, women were systematically excluded from public discourse. Just one example: The Greek poet Aristophanes dedicated a whole comedy of the idea that women take over the government of a state in the 4th century BC. The punchline of the piece was that they can not express themselves properly, can not switch from private "female" speech to rational, "male" political rhetoric. Also, women who seized power, such as Medusa or Antigone, were never role models, but portrayed as people who abuse power, cause perdition and death - and have been punished.
In the US election campaign of 2016, Trump supporters used exactly this idea: numerous photomontages showed Hillary Clinton with snake curls, in the worst of which was also the head of Trump over that of Perseus, beheading Medusa with Clinton's face.
Not only do we often glorify antiquity as a democratic ideal, although in reality it was an epoch of bondage for many people, and the public devaluation and defamation mechanisms are much more similar to those of the past than we would like to admit.
In only two exceptions, writes Beard, public speaking women in antiquity were not met with disgust: when they spoke as victims or martyrs to announce their own death, and when they spoke specifically for themselves - for their family, other women or her husband. But a capacity for analysis that relates to the universal, not to the "women's niche" in which power never resides, was never allowed.
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This is still the case today when the "League du LOL" distributes women from Twitter - the social network in which above all the political and media elite express themselves. Men, on the other hand, are not sanctioned. When they express themselves, an item of property automatically becomes a matter of general negotiation. Behind this is, again, unspoken, the assumption that if the men are silent, it would "only" be a "women's issue".
A perfidious tactic
This is currently also clear in the debate on the paragraph 219a: The battles for a liberalization of the abortion ban are classified as general, because here actually power is negotiated, specifically images of women and men. Men, of course, have their say here, even though it's about engaging the women's bodies. At the same time, however, when a woman invades a masculated area, she is immediately asked if she is allowed to do so, because she is perceived as general, not as the niche she belongs to - remember the debate about that Football commentator Claudia Neumann.
The authority of the deep male voice was also emphasized in ancient literature, while writers inferred from cowardice on cowardice. Is that different today? Margaret Thatcher, for example, once did a special training to get a deeper voice. And still loud or even furious men are considered "passionate" or "fighting for the cause".
Negatively connoted adjectives such as "shrill", "hysterical" or "bitchy", on the other hand, are intended to devalue the loud woman after her speech - and so do the words. They shift the debate from the public to the private, pointing out not to factual errors, but to individual characteristics: The "League du LOL" attacked women because they found them "stupid", "embarrassing" or "fat".
The perfection of this tactic: The speaking woman must not only ward off objective attacks, in contrast to the talking man, but also still deal with these devaluation mechanisms, which always aim at the personal - it develops a Zweifrontenkampf, which selects no woman, but they as soon as she sits in a meeting where men make up the majority.
Fear of emasculation
It is therefore plausible that so many women become silent, and perhaps even become complicit in a power structure that always subordinates them in the end: they have much to lose in this struggle. Because even that was no different in antiquity than it is today, the exclusion of the feminine is also publicly demonstratively flaunted to hedge a certain concept of male power.
One in which it is necessary to turn down women in front of other men because it is so fragile that it would otherwise break. It is not a contradiction in this concept to be "cool kid" and a sexist at the same time, it is rather necessary to be a sexist, if one wants to be recognized by the other men as a "cool kid".
The philosopher Kate Manne recognizes here a secret feminine power: women, writes Manne, can publicly shame men by ridiculing or lecturing them. This leads to a loss of face in front of other men, who is perceived as so offensive that the man in the most harmless case only gets angry, in the worst case violent.
So read the "League du LOL" was not a club "cool kids", but a club of high-profile dudes, full of fear of women. The loud man who drowns out the woman and prefers to remain below himself is always weak, because he is afraid of emasculation.