FROM PARIS WITH YAGG

Every year, the participation numbers for the Paris gay pride (Marche des Fiertés) given by the police are way beneath those given by the organizers, but this year, the difference is spectacular between the 800,000 people calculated by the Inter-LGBT (a group of 50 LGBT French organizations) and the 99,000 – of which 34,000 demonstrators and 65,000 “onlookers” – computed by the Prefecture of Police. Yagg tried to understand why by letting both sides comment on this surprising discordance. Vincent Loiseau, Inter-LGBT’s spokesman, responded very quickly, stating that the numbers given by the Prefecture were  “scandalous and unrepresentative”, but the Prefecture, after many solicitations from Yagg, eventually answered… that it didn’t wish to answer. Neither about the figures, nor about this distinction between demonstrators and “onlookers”, which had never been made before. (more...)

After the rape of a 32 year-old woman in Béziers (near Montpellier in South France) believed to be motivated by the woman's homosexuality (read the first Yagg article on the rape here): Two gay activist groups in France, The French Lesbian Association (CLF) and the Inter-LGBT, came together in a joint statement to the press to remind the public that "this act is not an isolated case".

"PATHOLOGICAL SOCIETAL PROBLEM"
"Every year, many lesbians are attacked, insulted and molested by men, most of them young, who use these heinous acts to express their view of women, and their perception of homosexuality", reads the press release. "The refusal to question the archaic social models wherein a dominant masculine social pathology engenders hatred of women...can only lead to such crimes".

THE WAY FORWARD: “NON-SEXIST PUBLIC DESENSITIZATION"
The two groups went on to stress government involvement and the French public's collaboration in questioning the sexism involved in the act of rape. "It is time to combat these social models, with a drive toward developing a non-sexist public outreach effort, in order to stop women from being viewed as sexual objects for men. Failure to do so makes women susceptible to being chastised if they don't conform to sexist social mandates. The struggle to end violence against women must be taken up by police, the legal system, and the education system, in a collective effort to end such destructive behavior. The (CLF) and the Inter-LGBT call on all publicly-elected officials to lead the way in this fight."