A government that respects parity and, for the second time in France, a woman Prime Minister, Elisabeth Borne, who also wanted to dedicate her appointment to little girls.
franceinfo: Do you think that such an appointment could help little girls to move forward on the path to equality?
Claude Halmos: A child, boy or girl, builds the image he has – consciously and unconsciously – of himself, from several elements: the place – rewarding, or not – given to him by his family, that – valued or not – that society gives to this family. But also the image that this society, depending on the status it grants to men and women, sends back to him of his gender.
In the Afghanistan of the Taliban, what image of herself can a little girl build who understands that she does not have the right to go to school like boys, and that once an adult, she will have to hide her body like a shameful object in a cloth prison, and won’t be able to get out on her own? Even if it is helped by the resistance of the adults around it, this imposed and generalized devaluation is very destructive.
In the same way, being a girl in a country that prohibits abortion means knowing that, unlike boys, you will never be completely the owner of your body and your life. So learning that nothing is forbidden to women professionally is important for little girls, but many things still prevent them from feeling equal to boys.
Which ones?
To feel valued and have the ability to succeed, girls must, like boys, overcome barriers due to the social and cultural status of their family, which school unfortunately too rarely compensates for. But they must also fight not to internalize the image that is sent back to them of themselves.
We still often explain, for example, the difference between the sexes to children by telling them: “Boys have penises, girls don’t” ; which places girls as beings who are missing something. This is a false explanation: girls lack the penis that boys have, but they lack organs.”to make babies”, which they have in their belly; and each having what the other does not have, so they are equal. But it is fraught with consequences.
What are these consequences?
An explanation of this type transforms the difference between the sexes into an inferiority that little girls can internalize all the more easily since society, by paying women less than men, for example, seems to confirm it.
But it is also destructive for the education of boys. To pose women as inferior is to favor the behavior of men who, like the aggressors in the subway, for example, use them as objects. And even to reinforce in their fantasies those whose pathologies lead them to think of themselves as owners of their companions, and authorized to murder them if they want to leave them. So a Prime Minister…bravo! But the fight continues.