The Woman Who Still Finds Louis C.K. Lovable

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/24/opinion/sunday/louis-ck-blanche-gardin-metoo.html

Version 0 of 1.

PARIS — In May 2017, the comedian Blanche Gardin appeared onstage at the Molières, the awards show for French theater, and said that when it comes to directors who are accused of sexual violence, “You have to know how to separate the man from the artist.”

“Still,” she added innocently, “It’s funny that this separation applies only to artists. For example, no one says about the baker, ‘Yes, O.K., it’s true, he rapes kids in the bakehouse, but come on, he makes an extraordinary baguette.”

That segment went viral in France. When the Harvey Weinstein scandal broke five months later, Ms. Gardin seemed poised to become France’s new feminist hero. But then in March she appeared at the César Awards — France’s version of the Oscars — wearing a button with a photo of Louis C.K., the American comedian who’d recently acknowledged asking female colleagues to watch him masturbate. The two are now reportedly dating.

Ms. Gardin has recently risen to fame in France by provocatively calling attention to problems faced by women, and then refusing to follow the feminist party line on how to solve them. The controversy she has generated helps explain the ambivalent French response to the #MeToo movement, and how they view relations between women and men.

“We should rejoice — from now on it’s clear for everyone that producers no longer have the right to rape actresses,” Ms. Gardin told an audience of French luminaries at the Césars. “But there’s something that isn’t clear, and that we need to clarify quickly: Do we still have the right to have sex in exchange for roles? Because if we can’t do that anymore, we’ll have to learn lines and go to casting calls, and frankly we don’t have time.”

Ms. Gardin, 41, grew up in a tony suburb of Paris, the daughter of well-off leftists (she jokes that she used to march past her housekeeper chanting denunciations of the bourgeoisie). As a teenager, she suffered from depression and ran away from home. She eventually returned and got a degree in sociology. She worked with children and, on the side, made comedy videos with friends. In her early 30s, when she was hospitalized after a breakup, a psychiatrist suggested that she write about her own life.

Around the same time, Ms. Gardin began watching videos of Louis C.K. on stage. French humorists then still mostly performed as characters or did sketches mocking others. It was closer to theater or satire than to American-style stand-up. Ms. Gardin was struck by how Louis C.K. simply stood at the microphone and described his own life, flaws and all. “It was Louis C.K. and the psychiatric hospital” that saved me, she later explained.

By 2014, Ms. Gardin was doing a one-woman show in a small theater on a barge on the Seine. Wearing belted A-line dresses and red nail polish and matching lipstick, she bracingly described her romantic failures and her feeling of being desperately alone. When I first interviewed her and saw her perform back then, she wondered offstage whether her act was too melancholy to be entertaining. “It took me a long time to be funny,” she told a magazine.

Louis C.K. remained hugely influential. “I am obsessed with Louis C.K., his series and shows,” she told another interviewer. “I’ve watched everything eight or nine times. He’s a monster of sincerity.”

Her own audience was growing. A subsequent show was picked up by Netflix. Parisians — who typically confine private feelings to a “secret garden” — were fascinated by Ms. Gardin’s self-deprecating, stream-of-consciousness style, in which she seemed to be confessing dark thoughts to a close friend. Critics compared her to Louis C.K.

Then #MeToo happened. President Emmanuel Macron moved to strip Mr. Weinstein of his Legion of Honor. French lawmakers passed legislation banning street harassment. A French journalist urged people to tweet the names of those who’d sexually harassed them at work under the hashtag #BalanceTonPorc — expose your pig.

But the movement never reached the fever pitch that it did in the United States. Some Frenchmen lost their jobs, but there was nothing like America’s mass takedown of prominent men — often without any due process. In a much-criticized open letter in Le Monde, a group of high-profile Frenchwomen wrote that rape is a crime, but gallantry and even awkwardly hitting on a woman ought to be O.K.

Ms. Gardin defended Louis C.K. after his fall from grace. “Obviously, people need to speak up. Women should feel free to make denunciations,” she told the magazine Télérama. “But the fact that we put a producer who rapes actresses in the same bag as a guy whose fetish is to masturbate in front of women, after asking if he can do it, means our modern society has a big problem with nuance.”

She argued that it’s hypocritical to shun Louis C.K. His humor, she noted, “explored his dark side, his perversions, and deciphered the darkness of the human soul.”

“People loved him for that,” she said, “because it made them feel better about their own dark sides.”

In Ms. Gardin’s newest show, which I saw recently here, gender relations are a major theme. Her message: They’re complicated.

You can pass a law against street harassment, but when a woman decorates herself like a Christmas tree, “you have to risk that someone says you’re well-decorated,” she says. “That’s the game.”

Sexual violence is unacceptable, but she had to stop reading the #MeToo articles — often sultry tales of gorgeous actresses being ravished — because “they got me too excited.”

Ms. Gardin also has words for actresses who lament the dearth of leading roles for women over 40. “I know that at 41, I’m not as attractive as I was at 20,” she tells the crowd. “People tell me, ‘You say that because you’ve integrated a masculine vision of desire.’ No, not at all.” It’s because, she says, “We’re born, we grow up, we get stronger, we have a peak of physical and sensual power. And then we get older, and become weaker, and uglier, and we die. We need to digest that.”

Whereas the American version of #MeToo often seems like a battle of the sexes or a story of male domination, Ms. Gardin expresses sympathy for men. She describes how their desires can make them vulnerable, and how this can give women power. Men are driven to have sex, she says, while “we just need to get to the point where we can sense, in the man’s eyes, that we can ruin his life.”

Lines like these infuriate some French feminists, who understandably feel that their complaints about sexual violence have been sidelined by a defense of gallantry and flirtation. One of them is Sandra Muller, the journalist who created #BalanceTonPorc and just published a book defending it. The hashtag movement is about the abuse of power: “It has never been against flirting, seduction or sex,” she told L’Obs magazine. “France has mixed everything up and embarrassed itself in front of the world. It’s a bit heartbreaking in the country of Simone de Beauvoir.”

A survey published last Monday found that 86 percent of Frenchwomen have been harassed on the street. Feminist groups have organized a march against sexism and sexual violence for this weekend.

But Ms. Gardin is more popular than ever. This year she became the first woman to win the Molière for humor. In March, her new show will be broadcast live to more than 150 movie theaters in three countries. One Parisienne told me she started a WhatsApp group to discuss the comedian with friends, because she “manages to convey that things are more complex than what activists want us to believe.”

In an era of so much exhausting groupthink, Ms. Gardin is refreshing because she doesn’t seem to belong to any camp. She’s what the French admiringly call a femme libre — a free woman. When she and Louis C.K. were photographed holding hands in New York in October, some on Twitter accused her of betraying #MeToo. But there’s also a belief in France that everyone, even sinners, is entitled to love, and the French press has mostly been neutral or defended her. A writer in Marianne magazine quoted Victor Hugo: “The freedom to love is no less sacred than the freedom of thought.”

Pamela Druckerman is a contributing opinion writer and the author of “There Are No Grown-Ups: A Midlife Coming-of-Age Story.”

Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram.