Restrained in his sexism, Philippe Candeloro considers himself the victim of “invisible discrimination” and denounces “wokism”

He particularly stood out at the Sochi Olympics in 2014. Former skating champion Philippe Candeloro, now a sports commentator, made a series of sexist comments with his co-presenter Nelson Monfort, regarding the physique of skaters, whose performances sports should have analyzed for France Télévision. As Germany’s Aliona Savchenko entered the ice, Candeloro waved “her cute little rear…”sparking a lively controversy for his uninhibited sexism, hypothesized a few weeks later in the columns of Le Monde.

Ten years later, and as the Olympic and Paralympic Games take place in Paris this summer, the skater has looked back on his career to “Figaro at night”, on the April 30 show. True to his previous statements, Philippe Candeloro gave a masterclass on ouin ouin and criticized the Me Too movement, with the same endless arguments made by many of his detractors.

We can’t say anything anymore, it was better before

Proof that certain mentalities struggle to evolve with the times, Philippe Candeloro is nostalgic for a time before Me Too when everything was better (read: for privileged heterosexual white men like him). “Today with Me Too, with Wokism, we are no longer as natural as at the beginning”. For the skater, “we censor ourselves” excessively, for fear of this “every word spoken from our mouth” be received as “an insult”.

Attack without naming the principle of social deconstruction, that is, actively freeing himself from certain sexist mechanisms instilled from early childhood, Candeloro deplores this wokism which claims to distort men. In his words, he becomes one with sexism, as if it were part of his identity, and getting rid of it would mean signing the death of his person: “Today they’re trying to take away my DNA, the way I’ve lived my whole life, with my stupid schoolboy jokes […] We would like to convince ourselves that from everything we have learned we must disinhibit ourselves from all this. And this is difficult.

In the name of freedom to annoy

Candeloro also wields the well-known card of “freedom to annoy”supported by personalities such as Catherine Deneuve or Brigitte Lahaie, who had expressed fear Me too it does not impose a liberticidal pseudo-puritanism. However, how to miss he expressed it in a forum, “ the wrong thing is not, never has been, to try. The mistake is not listening to rejection, not respecting it, not even to give it the chance to exist “. And this is all “Which has been widely denounced by #MeToo, and not just the fact of feeling the desire, of taking risks.” Or, as Réjane Sénac wrote at the time: “This so-called freedom is still and always that of an asymmetric complementarity and a duty of consent of women. Making an equal right to choose unthinkable and unlivable.”

However Philippe Candeloro, like others before him, does not seem to understand the difference. “If today we can no longer say to a lady “Oh you are wonderful Lady”, under the pretext that we are harassing her, it is better to tell her “It’s okay, old bitch”” he jokes. And when the journalist asks him if he should comment on a skater’s butt, the latter suggests that it is a blessing in disguise: “I would say no, except that thanks to one of these comments I was able to make, at some point we got 3 million more people to watch skating.” In short, it’s a shame if women are the ones who celebrate or are denigrated once again, given that it’s for a good cause.

Positioning yourself as a victim, confusing humor and misogyny

Another well-known rhetoric is that which consists of reversing roles to place oneself as the victim of a castrating system. “I’m straight, yes. Is being straight a disease today? I feel that way. Here he is presented as a martyr in the face of a society that wishes him harm, adopting the lexicon of victimization.

When asked about his possible frustration at no longer being able to do his job as he wishes, he responded that he felt limited. “We are in a country of freedom and we are no longer so free.” He claims to have been recruited by France Télévisions in 2006 because his “schoolboy humor” glad. It is precisely this humor that could cost him his job today, he warns. And to conclude, not without indecency: “I call it invisible discrimination.”

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