Just when when Dominque Strauss-Kahn thought he finally got a lucky break, now a French writer by the name of Tristane Banon has filed a complaint that he raped her in 2003. DSK in turn has filed a counter-complaint accusing her of filing a false police report.
This is definitely a story where all those involved will have way more than fifteen minutes of fame once all the dust settles. Let the courts determine if the man is guilty or not. But the French reaction to date shows that the double standard there is way beyond anything in puritan America, notwithstanding women in France won equal rights way back in 1946 when the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man was re-incorporated into that country's constitution and it was made clear for the first time that it applied equally to men and women (a full eighteen years before the US guaranteed the same for its women by law -- at least in employment and housing -- in the 1964 Civil Rights Act). While the rest of the Fourth Republic's constitution bit the dust and was replaced just twelve years later by the present constitution of the "Fifth Republic," that preamble and the Declaration were re-incorporated so both are still very valid
To this day, nearly every one in France still knows the seventeen articles of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen by heart. (Ask any American if they know the ten amendments that comprise the Bill of Rights!) Isn't it time that the French walked the talk when it comes to women?
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