France's most revered actress Catherine Deneuve hit out Tuesday at a new "puritanism" sparked by sexual harassment scandals, declaring that men should be "free to hit on" women.
She was one of around 100 French women writers, performers and academics who wrote an open letter deploring the wave of "denunciations" that has followed claims that Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein sexually assaulted and harassed women over decades.
They called it a "witch-hunt" that they feel threatens sexual freedom.
"Rape is a crime, but trying to seduce someone, even persistently or cack-handedly, is not -- nor is being gentlemanly a macho attack," said the letter published in the daily Le Monde.
"Men have been punished summarily, forced out of their jobs when all they did was touch someone's knee or try to steal a kiss," said the letter, which was also signed by Catherine Millet, author of the hugely explicit 2002 memoir, "The Sexual Life of Catherine M.".
Men had been dragged through the mud, they argued, for "talking about intimate subjects during professional dinners or for sending sexually-charged messages to women who did not return their attentions."
- '#METOO WITCH-HUNT' -
The letter attacked feminist social media campaigns like #MeToo and its French equivalent #Balancetonporc (Call out your pig) for unleashing this "puritanical... wave of purification".
It claimed that "legitimate and necessary protest against the sexual violence that women are subject to, particularly in their professional lives", had turned into a witch-hunt.
"What began as freeing women up to speak has today turned into the opposite -- we intimidate people into speaking 'correctly', shout down those who don't fall into line, and those women who refused to bend" to the new realities "are regarded as complicit and traitors."
It also helped foster "this Victorian idea that women were mere children who had to be protected," the letter argued.
Some women who were strong enough to demand equal pay, it claimed, would "not be traumatised forever by a fondler on the metro", even if it is a crime, preferring to see it as a "non-event".
The signatories -- which included a porn star-turned-agony aunt -- claimed they were defending sexual freedom, for which "the liberty to seduce and importune was essential."
Oscar-nominated Deneuve, 74, is best known internationally for playing a bored housewife who spends her afternoons as a prostitute in Luis Bunuel classic 1967 film "Belle du Jour".
