Guillaume Dulude is this adventurer with a very interesting life who speaks nine languages in addition to having a doctorate in neuropsychology and psychology. I quote my colleague Alexandre Pratt, who portrayed it in May 20201 “He shoots with a bow, fishes with his hands, hunts with an eagle. He can extract honey from a tree, build a yurt and play polo with a goat…”
Mr. Dulude could add another line to his resume: Colossal talent for talking bullshit with a very serious air.
He was therefore recently on Marie-Claude Barrette’s TVA program, live from South Africa, for his column, “L’homme dans tous ses Etats”. A chronicle on men? Why not ! It’s true that men are bad.
But it was when Mr. Dulude opened his mouth that things went wrong, when the host asked him what he thought of the word “feminicide”.
I quote it fully:
“Words are very important to understand the whole notion of activism and lobbying. Femicide is a lot like genocide. OK, a genocide, just to remind everyone, what it is: it is a group that organizes itself to annihilate and exterminate another group. This is extermination planning. So we use “feminicide”, as if the men are banding together and doing a similar plan, that is to say the extermination of the women. To suggest that, that is to say the use of that word, is extremely serious, and it is now seen as something banal and normal. It is a term that should not be used because it is false: there is no organization of men which aims to exterminate women, it is very serious, to make this claim…”
Wow, where to start?
I start by opening a dictionary, say the Larousse, to look up the definition of feminicide: “Murder of a woman or a young girl, because she belongs to the female sex. A sexist crime, feminicide is not recognized as such by the French Penal Code. »
Le Petit Robert: “Murder of a woman, of a girl because of her sex. »
The Grand Dictionnaire terminologique of the Office québécois de la langue française: “Act for a person to cause the death of a woman or a girl because of her condition. »
Let’s now look in the Merriam-Webster, a large English dictionary: “The gender-based murder of a woman or girl by a man”, with this quote from the NGO Africa Check: “There have been calls for a national strike to protest against feminicides in South Africa…”
I would point out that in South Africa, a country that Mr. Dulude seems to particularly appreciate, feminicide is a glaring problem: a woman is killed there every four hours.2.
Unfortunately, I did not do Latin in classical college, but fortunately, Google is there to dissect the origin of the word “feminicide”: the Latin root female of course designates “woman”, and the suffix -cide means “hit, kill ».
So, yes, I agree with Mr. Dulude: words are very important. This is why it is necessary to name things precisely, when such a thing is possible.
The murder of a woman because she is a woman: a feminicide. A woman who is killed by a stray bullet in a robbery that goes wrong: not a feminicide.
A woman who is killed by her ex-husband whom she has decided to leave: feminicide. If she hadn’t been a woman: she wouldn’t have died.
Femicide would have been used for the first time in the XIXe century, taken up in 1976 by a sociologist (South African!) and it was in 1992 that the term was, so to speak, consecrated, in the title of a book: Femicide: The Politics of Killing Women3.
Words are important. What happened in the United States from 1861 to 1865 was a civil warnot one genocide. And what happened in Rwanda in 1994, the extermination of one group (the Tutsis) by another (the Hutus), was a genocide. Either way, full-scale horror, of course. But to say that what happened in Rwanda was a civil war would be incomplete, it would disregard a capital fact: the Tutsis were massacred because of their belonging to a particular ethnic group.
Genocide was first used in 1944, by a Polish lawyer4. A bit of Latin and Greek, here: genosfrom the Greek “race” or “tribe”, and – again – the Latin suffix -cide. The lawyer then referred to the industrialization of the massacre of the Jews by the Nazis, which called for a term in its own right.
So, just on the etymology, Guillaume Dulude is in the field. On lobbies and activism, he is half right (or wrong): yes, lobbies and people sometimes insist on imposing words or expressions…
But “feminicide” is etymologically and contextually correct.
So far, we could say to ourselves: bah, Guillaume Dulude speaks through his hat, error of fact, it is not the first…
Except that he is downright crazy when he invents the words “genocide” and “feminicide” a cousinship that goes beyond the suffix -cide. I quote Mr. Dulude again: “We use ‘feminicide’ as if men are grouping together and doing a similar plan, that is to say the extermination of women…”
Well no, well no…
Nobody in their right mind thinks that, that “the” men organize “the” feminicide of women, like the Nazis with the Jews; like the Hutus with the Tutsis. The proverbial “we” mentioned by Mr. Dulude has a broad back here…
I also note that Guillaume Dulude also said this, about the seriousness of the term “feminicide” on the mood of men: “It sets the tone of the constant pressure, of how we point fingers at men at the moment, and we are surprised how the men are not doing very well, and that the relations between men and women are not going very well either…”
Well, I don’t hold a doctorate, but I humbly submit that feminicides are the symptom male discomfort. And not one cause of this discomfort.
I don’t want to attribute any intention to Guillaume Dulude. But I don’t understand this quibbling over a word which, etymologically and in context, is perfectly adequate. He explained himself in a video on YouTube by targeting “the media”, without further details. You can watch it here5. I thought of another verb, looking at it: to sink.
I also note that Mr. Dulude knows the weight of words: he says, for example, that he is incumbent of a doctorate in neuropsychology and clinical psychology, it is even the first line of his website6, in bold letters. Which is strictly correct, because he is not a psychologist or neuropsychologist. If he called himself a psychologist or a neuropsychologist, he would be in trouble with the Order of Psychologists.
So he cites his diploma…
This proves that Guillaume Dulude can weigh and weigh the words he chooses.
He should do the same when he speaks publicly about the meaning of other words.