First woman to have accused Patrick Poivre d’Arvor de rape, the journalist examines, in her latest book, the feeling that has embraced her to dismantle the system of muzzle. It gives us to understand the culture of rape and “the macho impregnation of our psyche”.
by Aude Dassonville
Book. Let’s take stock: what do we really know about Florence Porcel? We know that she accuses the one she nicknamed “the predator” of having raped her not one, but twice (Patrick Poivre d’Arvor denies all the accusations against him). That it was the first to file a complaint. That the media response of its alleged aggressor seemed so unbearable to other women than some have come out of the shadows to say: “I do not know Florence Porcel, but I believe it because it happened to me the same thing. “We know, finally, that an old friend with whom she corresponded to her lions for a long time by communicating their written, destabilizing and immodesty exchanges, to the defense of the accused.
What we were unaware until then, it was how Florence Porcel – who had started telling her story in a key novel, Pandorini (JC Lattès), published two years ago – received these successive shocks. When reading shame, we discover that under his skull partly made up of titanium (following a trepanation suffered in adolescence), there is a steel mind. Even though she is at the origin and at the heart of the maelstrom, the author strives to detach herself from the facts she denounces to list and analyze everything around them. Starting with this famous feeling of shame, of which she resuscitates the memory of the first stinging burns which were inflicted on her child to dismantle the mechanism of muzzle.
“Solid like a woman”
His almost educational reflection follows the path that made her understand that she was only one representative among others of a female universal petri of negation of rights and invisibilization – the part of a whole. By sharing her discovery, and without trying to intellectualize it, she gives to understand the culture of rape and the macho impregnation of our psyche. It is not trivial, moreover, that the journalist and novelist uses as much “I”, that of the victim of rape known as such, as of the “we” who includes him in a society still incapable of looking at the Victims of sexist and sexual violence for what they are. Florence Porcel was not born a feminist, she became, by the force of events and her need to overcome them. Without finding a qualifier that suits her, she invented her expression: her, she will now say that she is “solid like a woman”.
This demonstration to the false arguments of pleading allows him to pursue his other goal: to give his version of the facts, without intermediary, without the interruption of the comments, before the possible trial which will not fail to shred it again. With this book without pathos, Florence Porcel calls for reason rather than passion, arouses reflection rather than compassion. We do not know if the burden of his sentence is lightened. But here it is, and exposed to those who want to know before judging.
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