Crossing the line and widening political perspectives

All we could see were tense smiles, nervous laughs or widely open eyes in front of this quite surprising advertisement campaign for the project of a new Perpignan-Montpellier train line, launched by Robert Ménard. Only one poster, but it was enough to be followed by a 3-days-scandal and passionate armchair debates.
The French media weren’t long in coming with a reaction: “shocking”, “vile”, “revolting” were the only adjectives used to characterize it. And when Laurence Rossignol (the former minister in charge of Women’s Rights) drew a parallel with a story involving a woman who died last June, tied to a railway by her husband, passions suddenly became unleashed. “How dare he making fun of femicide?”, “This demonstrates a lack of respect towards the victim, and towards women in general”.

Let’s be clear on one point. Who concretely feels outraged or disrespected? The family of the victim? No, they haven’t said a word. All the French women, who should feel concerned by this vulgar advertisement just because of their gender? Neither. The truth is that this “offended culture” paradoxically maintains a conservative moral order. One the one side, it strongly condemns any word or act that goes against a set of unclear and not legally defined principles and dogmas – requiring, if needed, the instrumentalization of a death for a political purpose. But on the other, it only feeds the envy to provocate, to test the boundaries of social acceptance, sometimes going beyond the edges of reason.

« This “offended culture” paradoxically maintains a conservative moral order »

Now, shall we remind that the very purpose of communication is to impact people, to appeal to psychological factors, and awaken their most instinctive feelings? The denunciation of a phenomenon of “viral marketing” by the socialist official Carole Delga looks like a sign of extreme ignorance of how our capitalistic society works. Business is nothing without advertisement and scenarisation. People want to get a show.

Still, modern communication methods have to remain in a very strict ethical framework, avoiding making any racist, sexist, or in any kind offending allusions, yet facing the challenge to seduce more and more indifferent publics. With this risky campaign, Ménard’s strategy was to promote an unpopular project, to attract the attention of investors and of public services, seeking for funding and support. He has obviously succeeded in that.

Nonetheless, we have entered into an era when courage, creativity, anti-conformism, and vivid imagination have become socially unacceptable. When bad taste has become a crime. Nowadays, reigns a global climate of paranoia, when any attempt to practice black humour is immediately interpreted as a provocation, and as a grave breach of political correctness. And the punishment is implicit, yet even more painful than anything we could imagine: it’s social shaming. Your sentence is a sullied reputation until the end of your days.

« Courage, creativity, anti-conformism, and vivid imagination have become socially unacceptable ».

This capacity of detachment, of auto-derision is what we’re currently losing. Or what a system that does not give us enough space for imagination makes us lose. We are now afraid to think outside the box, to widen our political perspectives, by fear of crossing the line. The media determine where this line is, and what happens when you cross it.
It is a perfect illustration of the theory of “frame building”: today it’s the question of presentation, perception and interpretation, and also what the media choose to make an emphasis on. For instance, who has thought to remind that the author of the advertisement, Robert Ménard, apart from being unanimously known as a fascist-and-sexist-retrograde, also happens to be the founder of Reporters sans Frontières – an organization recognized as of public utility, and defending the freedom of press around the world?

Empirical studies on group dynamics, mostly conducted by Irving Janis (1918-1990), have shown that an individual will be likely to change his reactions or decisions when he is surrounded by peers, who will exert a pressure leading to a superficial homogeneity of viewpoints.  That is called groupthink. In our case with Ménard’s posters, we could all laugh together on the absurdity of the conveyed message, or simply not pay attention to this advertisement because we don’t see what’s so funny. However, for the sake of the group cohesiveness, we’re being dictated how to react. This should be unacceptable. You have to express your disappointment and have simply no right to find it amusing.

Now, evoking the question of the integrity of women’s rights being endangered by such a poster is as futile as hypocritical when you see how the several politicians, who raised their voice against Ménard, took advantage of the situation to do their own (political) advertisement. Besides, this whole story was a habile way to divert the public attention from the recent and meaningless reform voted by the Senate, to higher salaries for the mayors of big cities and local officials.
How does this story end? Well, it’s nothing but a rhetorical question. Under this pressure, and feeling socially humiliated and ashamed, Ménard obviously had to remove those posters.

An attempt to shift the Overton Window, and breaking self-censorship at the price of dignity. That what it’s truly about.