The title does not go there by four paths. The “bitch” is all of us. We are all, as women, potential victims of online misogyny. The directors Léa Clermont-Dion and Guylaine Maroist, for their documentary, met four of them. Politicians, youtuber, simply anonymous, their profiles have the only common point of having served as an outlet for hatred of women. We thus discover the former Democratic representative of Vermont Kiah Morris, the most cyberharassed woman in Italy Laura Boldrini, former president of the Italian Parliament, the Quebec teacher Laurence Gratton and, as she called herself, the “French cyberbullying champion” Marion Séclin. You could hardly find more relevant speakers.
These are extremely strong testimonies delivered in front of the camera by the victims who accepted, not without some easily understandable reluctance, to speak openly for this documentary. The two directors do not hesitate to show the threats and the messages received by the victims, without hiding or watering down anything. From one story to another, one can only remain dismayed by the avalanche of violence suffered by these women. The call for the rape of Laura Boldrini, from a politician whose only merit is to assume his criminal words, is already enough to make your jaw drop. With the intervention of Laurence Gratton with her schoolchildren, we begin to want to believe in a hallucination. His students, barely young girls, confide in him that they are already receiving messages on social networks from strangers calling them “bitches”.
But to stop there would be to touch the subject. Léa Clermont-Dion and Guylaine Maroist intend to lead the viewer into the infernal spiral that cyberbullying represents for those who are victims of it, and to make them feel this fear that they experience on a daily basis. To do this, they borrow some of the tricks of horror cinema, staging their speakers as if they were being spied on by one of their attackers, with a lot of music from the same cinematographic vintage. The intention is good, but only half works, because under-exploited.
‘Worse than rape’
The material provided by the various testimonies is much more powerful than all the stylistic effects attempted by the duo of documentarians. “The cyberbullying was worse than the rape I suffered,” says Frenchwoman Marion Séclin. This sentence alone expresses the devastating impact of this misogyny 2.0 that we had just glimpsed. The more the minutes and confidences go by, the more the discomfort oppresses. The documentary should have reached its climax with the testimony of one of the only two men interviewed: Glen Canning, whose daughter Rehtaeh Parsons committed suicide because of the cyberbullying she suffered. You can’t find a worse result. Unfortunately, the intervention of the father is shorter than it deserves. We will retain from his too brief speech only one conclusion that he draws himself: “His life was worth less than the life of a boy. »
Faced with these direct and indirect victims, the contribution of the experts questioned is less. These briefly touch on the history, the context, their own concerns, but remain too superficial. We also regret that an element, however extremely recurrent in the documentary, is not more in-depth, namely the threat of rape. Confined to what the victims who have received this threat think, it is nevertheless a keystone in this system of online misogyny.
This is the weak point of this documentary, which could have scratched more on the analysis side. It’s rare to write this about a film, but, for once, it would have deserved to be longer to delve deeper into the subject. I salute you bitch is all the same a vitriolic plea that puts the finger on the key that hurts and gives an irrepressible desire to stand up against a new injustice suffered by women. Let’s hope that this new chargeable document will help raise awareness.
If you are a victim of cyberviolence, the various possible remedies are explained to you on the site. stopcyberviolence.ca/recours.