Maso and Miso Go Boating

Witch hunts taught women that, if they joined the war against witchcraft, they would enjoy men’s protection. Once it was agreed that any woman might harbour the devil, suspicion would attach itself to every moment of a woman’s life. The institutional terrorising of women’s bodies—accusations, exorcisms, torture, public executions—also terrorised an entire society, isolating the victims and deterring resistance. The only choice remaining was a narrow one: be a witch or be an accuser.

Five hundred years later, the same logic persists in a different form. It’s 30 December 1975. France marks the end of International Women’s Year with a television broadcast on Antenne 2. The guest of honour, Françoise Giroud, then the Secretary of State for Women’s Rights, receives and lets pass without comment a series of misogynistic statements offered by a range of public figures. The title of the show says it all: Encore un jour et l’année de la femme, ouf! c’est fini. The institutional exorcism is final, and bears the name of a woman. It always has. The broadcast plays out without incident.

Three months after the broadcast, the Les Insoumuses collective gets its hands on the programme and returns it transformed. Video, at that time, was a medium that men had yet to colonise. Between ironic intertitles, loops, cuts, incidental music and direct interventions, the plateau speaks until it reveals itself. The choir of male voices repeats itself until it sounds like what it is. A rite.

Simone de Beauvoir described this figure with precision, the woman who joins the system while—and because—she refuses to identify with the others. But the witch and her accuser are daughters of the same mechanism. The title of the film by Les Insoumuses, made in response, names the trap, the two possible pathways in a world built by men for men: be Maso, that is, accept the humiliation and internalise the subordination; or be Miso, laugh at their jokes, play the game, become complicit in language that erases. Giroud chose both the former and the latter. The film shows that there is no other option.

The system needs a woman who speaks for women so that it does not have to listen to them.

Five decades later, the archive continues to burn. Protection is still bought through complicity. Exorcism still seeks a body. The choice still presents itself as if it were free.