It is a strange springtime in 2024 Paris.
The events celebrating International Women’s Day, March 8, started the evening before with a strange demonstration of 4,000 people passing on Rue de Renard, which is the street behind the Pompidou Center, where I encountered them by chance.
“Feminist strike begins on March 7,” read flyers announcing the march. “Tonight we are a night demonstration to allow women who cannot strike tomorrow to mobilize,” explained Arya Meroni, the self-declared secretary of AG Feminist, who identifies herself as “an activist, anti-capitalist and for globalization.”
She also emphasizes in interviews that her Feminist Assembly is “neither a collective, nor an organization, nor an association.”
What is it, what does it mean to be “secretary” of a non-organization, and who finances her and the various names of groups she lists, I do not know, and none of the journalists interviewing her has raised these questions anywhere in the French press.
Neither does the local press raise questions as to how this March 8 International Women’s Day celebration came to be open not only to women – though they were the vast majority in this evening demonstration – but also transgender individuals (though how they were identified I do not know); gay men (how they were all identified, I have no idea either); and the “undocumented,” which is the term for those who have entered France illegally (guess they were easily identified – having no papers whatsoever to present).
The rights of “sex workers” appeared to have been another cause, although I did not see any slogan suggesting that they wanted to become like their Amsterdam Red Light District fellows in their famous windows, who are unionized – but who also pay taxes.
There were also messages such as “Believe your child, teach your son” – which is strange, since it is well known that children are very good liars. As Judge Judy, a popular US TV personality, often remarks: How do you know kids – and politicians, that’s my addition – are lying? “Their lips are moving.”
But it appeared that the above message was more about the “pronoun debate,” and that parents should now believe whatever their kids say about ideas about sexuality, be it that they are born in the wrong body, or – whatever.
Which is a peculiar opinion: Governments do not consider their kids mature enough to vote under the age of 18, – or to buy alcoholic beverages under the age of 21 in the US, 18 in most European countries. But they’re to be trusted about ideas crossing their minds when hormones are raging through their bodies. And they’re to be educated that, as far as sexual preferences go, anything goes.
All the above messages have little to do with the origins of the March 8 Woman’s Day. The earliest record of the event dedicated to advancing women’s rights indicates it was first held on February 28, 1909, in New York City.
From then on it was celebrated on various dates, but only after the revolution did Lenin proclaim March 8 to be the official holiday, with the Chinese Communist Party following in 1949.
It was Theresa Malkiel, daughter of persecuted Jewish immigrants from Russia, who suggested the event to the Socialist Party of America in New York. She was a suffragist who warned against the white supremacism in her own party, and also against the false consciousness of “bourgeois feminism.”
That’s more than a century ago – yet the above sounds like noises emanating now from both US campuses and the Democratic Party’s so-called “squad” in Washington. The more things change the more they stay the same, except there is no chance now that a Jewish woman – and with the name “Malkiel” (which in Hebrew means “God is my King”) – could head this Paris demonstration, or any similar ones around the world.
For there was only one non-women’s-rights focused group I could detect participating very vocally at the demonstration. They were Urgence Palestine, whose members were screaming, “Assassinate the Jews” – though the newspaper reports I read said that the group was just supporting Palestinian women. Why not support Israeli women? No journalist asked this question.
The screaming, though, was sharp and clear. It stopped after few minutes. Whether this happened due to police police presence, given that hate speech is a crime in Europe, I do not know. I could no longer see, as the demonstration was advancing toward Place de la Republique, a popular square for big crowds – but not before hooded demonstrators broke some bank windows and threw paint on supermarkets’ windows.
In the square, the demonstrators chanted, “Solidarity with the struggles of the world,” and called out their opposiiton to President Emanuel Macron’s “demographic rearmament.” The latter is the new term in France feminist groups use when opposing policies to increase fertility.
It appears that some of these believe that there is no harm if the French or other European countries’ citizens decide to have fewer kids, as they believe in open borders. Since there are plenty of Third World countries with birth rates far above the fertility rate replacement level of 2.1 (all European countries are below, some far below) around the world, free movement of people would take care of the potential European demographic void.
How will such a Utopian Europe or France look?
If you do not have kids, why should you care? “Apres moi le deluge” – After me, the flood.
Reuven Brenner’s books include The Force of Finance and History – the Human Gamble. He’s also the author of recent articles about demography, anti-semitism and the Middle East.