r/feminisms

Hi, I'm French, and I want to talk about something that bothers me every time i come across a comment or a post or a line in a movie (!) about it :

We all know the stereotype : French women are "naturally" sensual, sexually available, always up for it. You see it in movies, in jokes, in how foreign men sometimes approach French women abroad. It feels harmless, even flattering to some. It isn't.

This stereotype has a specific historical origin that has been deliberately buried.

During and after the Liberation of France in 1944, American soldiers committed mass rapes against French women. This is documented by historian Mary Louise Roberts in "What Soldiers Do" (2013). Military publications, soldiers' letters home, and internal communications actively described French women as "easy", "welcoming" and "sexy" , a narrative that served two purposes simultaneously: recruiting enthusiastic soldiers and retroactively erasing the violence committed.

This is a mechanism feminists of color have analyzed extensively for other groups, the hypersexualized Black woman, the exotic Indian woman, the "passionate" Latina. Violence is rewritten as natural availability. The stereotype erases the crime and then legitimizes its repetition.

The silence of the women concerned reinforced this erasure. In 1944, denouncing your liberator was socially and politically impossible. The gratitude owed to the Allies suffocated any possibility of naming what had happened. Those women took that silence to their graves.

What remains is a stereotype so naturalized that a 1997 blockbuster like Titanic can casually drop "it's easy to find a woman in Paris who's okay with getting her clothes off" and nobody blinks. Because nobody in that 1997 audience made the connection between "the sexually available Frenchwoman" and the military construction of 1944. The original violence has been completely laundered through decades of repetition.

The practical consequences are real. French women abroad regularly face harassment from men who have internalized this stereotype as a description of reality. Men who "know" that French women are "like that."

In France ( north west ) the saying still is " In front of Boches( germans/ nazis) hide your jews, in front of the americain hide woman/ your woman ".

I avoided the film for years thinking it was going to be a woman power cringe fest, but after seeing it I feel the film thinks less of women more than Donald Trump.

It’s a universal issue- when people (also including women, somehow) see other women driving- they’re extremely quick to assume that she’s a “bad driver” all because of her gender. I’ve heard it myself, and each time i try to correct the person who said it, i somehow get the blame put on me.

It’s basic decency to respect everyone- the people who say stuff like this must agree, but then again, these are the same people who make fun of women drivers/riders because of a stupid stereotype because “women aren’t smart enough to drive” or that “women cause accidents on the road”?

It’s all ignorance. And these exact people are the ones who are dumb enough to think that feminism means letting women have a higher social status than men. If they don’t make the effort to educate themselves on such simple topics like this- how can we expect them to stop judging women for no reason?

We’ve all seen her in movies and video games: a terrifying creature with snakes for hair, turning men to stone. Modern media loves to portray Medusa as the ultimate female monster.

But if you actually go back to the classical texts—specifically Ovid’s Metamorphoses—the story is heartbreakingly different. Medusa wasn't born a monster. She was a beautiful maiden, a priestess of Athena, who was assaulted by Poseidon inside the goddess's own temple.

Instead of punishing Poseidon, Athena punished Medusa. She cursed her, turning her hair into vipers and condemning her to eternal isolation. The "monstrous" gaze that turns men to stone wasn't an weapon of terror; it was a tragic, permanent defense mechanism so no one could ever touch or hurt her again.

History and pop culture completely erased her survival story to sell us a generic villain. Why do you think Hollywood keeps ignoring the tragic depth of this myth? Is it just lazyness or do monsters sell better than complex victims?

Ps. I got so frustrated by how her story is always misrepresented that I spent weeks creating a short 8-minute cinematic documentary analyzing the original texts and her erased history. If you want to see the visual breakdown, I’ll leave the link in the comments below!

Hello everyone!

TL;DR: I’m a baby feminist and I need to be educated. Give me literature recs (non-fiction or fiction books, tv shows, etc) or teach me stuff!

I have been observing the minor misogynistic elements that have plagued the world and continue to exist, despite centuries-worth of women’s rights and equality movements. Of course, the major ones are obvious and spark much hatred from both males and females for various reasons, but I hope to know the origins of such a profound divide that has been persisting forever.

To me, some ideas and actions seem so obscure — like how the establishment of the stereotype that feminism is a cult of women purposely ruffling the patriarchy (no joke) — to the point it is quite laughable. The more I learn and observe, the more I understood the stereotypical feminist.

So please. Recommend me some good books or shows for beginners about feminism. Whether it be non-fiction about a political and/or social movement from ages ago, or an eye-opening fictional narrative. Literally anything.

If you have any comments or questions, feel free to ask (or even correct me or teach me). Thank you!