Violences Sexistes = Riposte Féministe
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The Riposte graffiti series
It was as soon as my second day in Paris that I noticed them. Words, graffitied on the city walls in nearly every arrondissement. Just words, no images, with each of their thick black letters painted on a white block of paper, like homemade Scrabble tiles.
Always, they were words about women. Words like this:
At top, "A stolen childhood / A broken future". At bottom left, "To be born a woman is deadly" (partially torn off). Rue de Saintonge, 75003 Paris. Lexia Snowe 2020
This is the piece I noticed first, in the Marais, before I realized there were others like it, different words rendered in the same style. For a sense of scale: "une enfance volée" stretched the full length of the car parked below it, and this is high up on the wall, at about twice the height of a man.
The size and the starkness of the letters was what caught my eye, but its message is what stopped me walking: "A stolen childhood / A broken future", and, "To be born a woman is deadly". I processed that slowly, sensing this wasn't in the "Okay, boomer" or "Take the red pill" line of pop sass more typical of graffiti. The phantom 'i' conjured by the position of the ridge meant I first read "une enfance violée", a childhood raped.
As it turns out, my misread was prophetic. Rape is among the recurring concerns of this city-wide graffiti series focussing on the domestic abuse of women. There is never any signature, tag, or identifier of any kind by the piece; there is only the stark visual style recognizable from ten strides away. In a city second-skinned by illicit scrawlings and pastings, these block-lettered graffiti pieces stand out. I'm going to call them the Riposte series because of their in-the-wild rawness and anonymity, with "riposte" (meaning 'retaliate' or 'respond' in French) being the word that recurred most often in the pieces I spotted.
Here is another Riposte piece:
"She isn't dressed like a slut, you think like a rapist". Rue des Blancs Manteaux, 75004 Paris. Lexia Snowe, 2020
We don't have to call in Mulder and Scully to figure a different person painted this one -- letter 'i' is uppercased, and the brush strokes are thinner. But equally clear is that this is a companion piece to Une enfance volée. There may be multiple hands at work here, but they are of one mind.
I have come to imagine a female collective behind this series of graffiti. I picture them in a creaking Belleville loft, with today's brush worker painting on the letters while her fellow activists cut paper blocks, chalk ideas for future messages onto the wall, and argue about the pleasure versus morality conflict of objectifying Shawn Mendes. (It's a tough one.) On the other hand, I have no idea. Paris isn't my city; I don't have the lived experience under its sky that would enable me to expand on these wisps of a story. Part of why the Riposte series has become so intriguing to me, in fact, is entirely that gap between what I see and sense, and what I understand and know.
I'll tell you something, though. As soon as I became aware of the Riposte pieces, I started seeing them everywhere. (Okay, maybe not in the tony 16th Arrondissement, where I get the impression they bury evidence of discontent under a fountain.) Here is a selection:
Click on image to launch slideshow in a new page.
Another observation: many of the Riposte pieces, perhaps even a majority, had been ripped down by passers-by.
To some extent, being torn down is the fate of all graffiti in Paris, except in visually gobby neighborhoods like Belleville, Jaurés or the Marais, where it isn't ripped away so much as subsumed into subsequent layers, smothered for a while before being obscured entirely in the brusque and fast-paced circle of life. At the same time, the tearing down of the Riposte pieces seemed rather more targetted. For a start, it was rarely the entire piece ripped off but a few strategically chosen letters whose removal made nonsense or guesswork of the overall message. What's more, this was invariably on walls that you wouldn't exactly call prime real estate, in scabbed and haggard connecting corridors between hotspots. So it wasn't that graffiti itself offended the tearers. It was what this particular graffiti said.
Look at Une enfance volée again. The letters torn down at bottom left are those that essentially censor the words "woman" and "kill". The tearer stopped there as though that was enough to appease his or her wounded sensitivities. It appears that Paris, or a forceful faction of it, doesn't want to be reminded about the injustices and inequities faced by women.
Here are three more examples:
Click on image to launch slideshow in a new page.
When anger is an act of disrespect
One Riposte piece in particular made a deep impression on me. This is not because of what it says, so much as what happened while I was taking its picture. Here it is:
At top, "We believe you". Below, "Sexist violence = feminist retaliation", a refrain I spotted in several other pieces in this series. The pencilled retort at bottom left urges, "Learn to write", although note that learn (apprenez) is—oh, the irony—spelled incorrectly. Address withheld, as a courtesy to the wall owner. Lexia Snowe, 2020
While I was seeking the best angle on the piece (difficult in that knobbly street), a man's voice interrupted, very insistently. Excusez moi, excusez moi. It was a pale-looking guy whose rumpled shirt summarized a bad day already and it was only noon. He sized me up (and down), then demanded to know: did I do this.
He meant the Riposte piece (pictured above). I snorted elaborately, having neither the French nor the time to convey all the reasons—loosely related to my education, profession, quality of life, and perfectionism—why I would never do graffiti. Or, for that matter, come back to the scene of my own crime by daylight for a nostalgic snap, like a regular dumbfuck.
Accepting I was some kind of far-out graffiti tourist, he was angry for a while, and then he was somber. This was the wall of his store, he said. The Riposte piece, to him, was not something to be commemorated in a photograph, it was an act of disrespect against his business. I told him I understood, and I did. I've been a business owner my entire adult life. Which means, for my entire adult life, the system has worked for me, at least that much. I suggested to him that the person who pasted these words to his wall did not enjoy the same systemic cooperation. If the law or its execution was not dysfunctional when it came to "violences sexistes", there would be no need for "riposte féministe" and no war cry on his wall. He nodded and was thoughtful when we parted. I don't believe I changed his mind, but maybe I tilted it a bit.
I thought about that store owner when I spotted this next Riposte piece:
"Every 48 hours we die because we are female". Lexia Snowe, 2020
This is one of the oldest and most storied bridges along the River Seine -- and now it's got this eyesore on it. I think we can all agree, without being on the Paris tourism board, that this bridge would be better without graffiti. It's fine to care about beauty and want to preserve it. It's more than fine, in fact; it's core to the human spirit.
But rather than condemn the graffiti -- because that's like complaining about the smoke without talking about the fire -- we should condemn the underlying cause of it. I've seen enough of the Riposte series now to sense something real behind the stunty aspects of its stark visual style, its confrontational language, and its high-footfall locations. Picture again that hypothetical Belleville loft of feminist street activists. I believe the anger and pain of those women is real, not performative. The appeasement of real human anger and pain is more important than masonry.
Ministry of Rape
Unfortunately, both in the Riposte series and in other graffiti I noted around Paris, it is clearly felt that the French government is listening to female anger with glazed eyes, if it is listening at all. On the Île de la Cité, for example, not far from the Toutes les 48h piece, is the last of the Riposte series that I'll contemplate here today. Ministère du viol, it says, backdropped by state buildings.
Here it is:
"Ministry of Rape". Île de la Cité, viewed from Quai des Grands Augustics. Lexia Snowe, 2020
"Ministry of rape". This is an astonishing accusation. Not merely that the government is indifferent to rape, but that it institutionally protects and perpetuates it. I saw these words written in multiple locations around the city, by a broad range of artists, so they can't be dismissed as one graffitist's taste for melodrama. This view is widely held.
As a guest in France, I can't tell you the full story behind this view, not truly, any more than a white person can truly feel the breadth of Black inequities. There are incidents and microaggressions and cultural nuances drummed into your skin, by virtue of living in that place at that time and with that skin, that an outsider will inevitably oversimplify by reducing to received narrative.
However, various of the "Ministry of Rape" pieces that I saw alluded to French politician Gérald Darmanin, and his rise to the heights of French government -- culminating in his appointment as Minister of the Interior in July of this year -- despite multiple allegations of sexual assault against him. The Paris streets appear to feel that, just as the French film academy is ready to regard a rape conviction as overlookable, as irrelevant to the measure of an artist as untied shoelaces or a shaving cut, so the French government weighs rape by a different metric to victims. Which is funny because the design of law is to protect victims, not perpetrators, and the design of government is to embody the law.
Here is a selection of graffiti I spotted capturing this view of the French government:
Click on image to launch slideshow in a new page.
Have you nowhere else to write it?
A storekeeper in Charles Dickens's A Tale Of Two Cities (set, in part, in Paris) corners a kid graffiting the street and furiously asks, 'What are you doing? Have you nowhere else to write it?'
In light of the "Ministry of Rape" street meme in Paris, I wonder if the starkly lettered and brashly inked activism pressed into the august bone structure of the city is expression of the last resort. If the state will not listen, then these women (and men angered on their behalf) indeed have nowhere else to write it. Surely the French Revolution taught Paris that what you refuse to hear in drawing rooms and below chandeliers will inevitably wind up on the street, where it has passed beyond dialogue and will be satisfied only with action. (Yes, there's voting toxic men -- and women -- out of office, or hashtagging them to hell on social media, but let's be real for a moment: those are long and ambiguous pursuits with mixed results. Donald Trump is still the President of the United States. Roman Polanski, whom I intend to citizen-arrest should I ever cross paths with him, is still entirely unpunished.)
In just ten days of wandering the city, I've formed a strong sense of the actions the Paris streets would like to see when it comes to women's rights.
Above all, rape and physical violence against women must stop happening in a vacuum. If a man (or woman) glimpses an opportunity for sexual or physical abuse, his (or her) entire world must tremble in the foreknowledge that his entire world is exactly what's at risk should he act. We ensure that tremble through the law -- and not merely in the statutes, but in the approach paths we provide to seeking justice. The law books might guarantee a rapist will be severely punished, but what does that matter if there are ten glaringly bright interview rooms -- full of trauma bureaucrats who need me to say it again closer to the microphone or to produce a pubic hair from an encounter a decade ago -- before a charge is even filed (or an investigation even opened)? The presumption of innocence is not endangered by making it easier to file an accusation. Nor does making it harder for rapists to nonetheless rise to prestige and privilege harm good men. By my calculation, not one good man is harmed.
If French politicans want pointers on any of the above, they could do worse than walking their own streets for a day or two, and reading the words on them.
Female objectification in Paris architecture
I have a personal request to add to Paris's action list for women. It relates to the other way in which women are represented on its streets. I don't mean in its graffiti now. I mean in its architecture, its statues and its general adornments -- that enduring form of representation glimpsed in the backdrop of everyday city life that wordlessly conveys and elevates a value system.
Lately, we've had long-overdue conversations about how racial inequities are quietly perpetuated by statues honoring their perpetrators. In the same spirit, we need to talk about the depiction of women in classical architecture. Works of undoubted beauty, yes. Inspiring to me as a woman who wants to see the world un-anchor itself from demeaning ideas about my sex? No. A thousand times, no.
Here are a few images of offensively antiquated depictions of women in Parisian architecture:
Click on image to launch slideshow in a new page.
Of course, part of the problem is that Paris is a European city with ancient foundations, unlike, say, Los Angeles, which was established only in the last 250 years for freeways to play footsie. At the same time, I think Paris could be more pro-active in opening itself to the present and future. It could revisit the past and make room retrospectively for those women absent from its architecture only because history was written by the winners and their wieners. The Palais Garnier opera house, for example, might consider that none of the relentlessly male composers honored in the busts on its walls could have gotten anywhere without iconic opera singers like Emmy Destinn, Cesira Ferrani and Hariclea Darclée, all of whom are conspicuously absent in the bust honor roll.
The final word
I'll let the Marais have the final word:
I believe this is French for: "Nope". Rue de Bourg Tibourg, 75004 Paris. Lexia Snowe, 2020
France, the Paris streets are speaking loud and clear. Stop using women's bodies to sell stupid shit, and then ignoring those same bodies when they are battered or violated. Believe women when they say they have been wronged. And believe that every violence sexiste will have a riposte féministe. Letter by letter, our anger will come to the streets. It will come to the revered bridges. And it will be a bitch to scrub off. - L.S.