There’s another undercurrent here. In warning about a new “puritanism,” the Deneuve letter also revealed a classic cartoonish vision of America, land of puritans and prudes—even though the conversation on harassment would never have begun in France, or maybe anywhere, if it weren’t for the investigative journalists at The New York Times and The New Yorker who broke the Weinstein stories. The grotesqueries of the Trump administration may be the backdrop to the Weinstein scandal, but here in France, the fallout comes in a strange moment of generational shift, in which President Emmanuel Macron, who just turned 40, has been shaking things up. The letter in Le Monde was written by women of a certain age who seem eager to preserve the same establishment that let the shenanigans of one-time presidential hopeful Dominique Strauss Kahn be an open secret for years.

In the United States, the #MeToo moment may be changing Hollywood and changing workplaces, but very little has actually changed in France. The Deneuve letter is the product of a more fatalistic culture that seems to believe human nature is what it is, men are what they are, so women are expected to find a strategy, to figure out how to exploit the system to their advantage—often using their sex appeal—then to protect their place in that system. And if that system were to change? In another open letter, on the site of France Info, several dozen feminists who were identified as “militants”—you barely see the word “feminist” in the French press without that adjective added—posed that that question, criticizing the Deneuve letter. “As if it were a problem that our society tolerates sexist ideas just a tiny bit less than before, and the same for racist or homophobic ideas,” they wrote. “Wow, it was so much better when we could treat women like well-behaved sluts,” they added, mocking the tone of the Deneuve letter. “Are the pigs and their male and female allies worried?” they continued, referring to the calls to #BalanceTonPorc, or “rat out your pig,” to speak out about abuse. “That’s normal. Their world is changing. Very slowly. Too slowly. But inexorably. A few dusty remembrances won’t change anything, even if they’re published in Le Monde.”

When they wrote “male and female allies,” they used what’s called “inclusive language,” changing the genders and spelling of words to accommodate the feminine plural in compound nouns, where the default is normally masculine plural. A debate over inclusive language in France (and Spain) has been one of the odder, but most visible, offshoots of the current feminist moment. And it will not be tolerated! Last fall, the Académie Française, the ultimate authority on the French language, said inclusive language posed a “grave danger” to French, and would make a muddle of the written language. I personally side with the Académie on this one. I think you can be a good feminist without bogging down sentences. But I concede that language is culture, and language is power.