PARIS (LifeSiteNews) — No longer will the students of “Science Po Paris” – the Institute of Political Studies which counts among the prestigious university-level “grandes écoles” where the French intellectual élites are educated – learn ballroom dancing under the expert guidance of Valérie Plazenet, 53. A former student at Science Po, Madame Plazenet has regretfully decided to end her 8-year collaboration with that institution because she is unwilling to submit to “political correctness” and gender ideology, as she told several French media.
Ballroom dancing – rock ’n roll, rumba, tango, and the like – are the dances Plazenet enjoys teaching pupils at her own school of dance in southwestern Paris. Their peculiarity is that they involve couples composed of a man and a woman. And it was this that proved to be too much for a member of the snowflake generation at Science Po Paris, where “inclusiveness,” positive discrimination, and “openness” have become shibboleths in the school’s policies and communication.
Students at Science Po choose optional physical activity courses that include ballroom dancing. One of Plazenet’s concerns at the beginning of each academic year is to have an equivalent number of boys and girls to set up her course. Until recently, as she explained in an interview with Cnews, where conservative opinions are expressed more often than on most other French TV stations, candidates would fill in the enrollment form indicating if they were “male” or “female.” Often more young women would sign up for her course than young men, but the girls would go on to “recruit” enough reluctant boyfriends to make up a proper balance between men and women.
But it is precisely those words that have become unacceptable to the “woke” generation.
Last September, unbeknownst to Madame Plazenet, the terms “man” (homme) and “woman” (femme) were replaced on the enrollment form for her course by the English words “leader” and “follower.” (This is, of course, openly discriminatory, creating a hierarchy between the two dancers, but the anti-discrimination officer at Science Po failed to realize that.) Thus, the course ended up with a larger proportion of girls than usual because many female students who signed up for the classes thought the words meant “advanced” and “beginner” and happily checked the “leader” box.
The new enrollment process had, in fact, been set up in order to avoid the “gendered” words “man” and “woman.” As a result, the dance instructor was obliged to have girls dance male parts, but she did underscore on those occasions that dances look better when women are accompanied by men, and that women never lift men when dancing rock ’n roll or the tango, for example. She recalled that an element of “seduction” within the male-female couples is part of the aesthetics of ballroom dancing.
Things came to a head when the teacher asked the men in her class to move to one side, and the women to the other, adding that if a few girls were willing to dance male roles that would be okay because there were not enough men. A female member of the dance class later objected on Twitter that she did not want to be called a woman because it’s a “sexual term” and did not want to be “forced into a female role.” Last year, however, the same girl was happy to perform at a dance gala wearing a pretty black and white skirt, and she had repeatedly danced male parts during classes this year without anyone remarking on the fact, Plazenet remarked, stressing the irony of the situation.
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Parisenkova, a devout Christian who worked for the company for four years, requested to not read the books because they violated her deeply held religious beliefs.
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MORE INFORMATION:
Daycare center fired employee for refusing to read LGBT propaganda to toddlers: lawsuit
Christian woman fired for resisting LGBT agenda takes on Corporate America: Monday, October 24
But it was a male student who went on to lodge a complaint with the authorities at Science Po, saying he had been “made uncomfortable” by the professor’s language. An official of the school in charge of hiring teaching personnel then called Plazenet by telephone informing her that a student had “felt discriminated” by her words and way of teaching.
When she asked whether she had insulted anyone, the official replied that it wasn’t that at all, adding: “You know, nowadays, you have to be very careful with our students: they’re very sensitive; there are topics you can’t raise.” Plazenet immediately said that she had used the words “man” and “woman” and that she herself is a woman, and that men and woman actually exist.
At this point the Science Po official said that if Plazenet was willing to apologize and not to do such a thing again, she could go on teaching at the school. Emails followed, telling her that if she would only undertake to follow the school’s “ethical charter,” she could continue to teach there. “If I had committed a serious fault or had in fact insulted anyone, I hope they wouldn’t have kept me as a teacher,” she told Cnews’ Sonia Mabrouk.
But they were in fact asking her not to use the terms “man” and “woman” anymore, which prompted Mabrouk to remark that Plazenet was in fact being subjected to “blackmail” and “censorship.” The dance instructor said that would prefer to lose her contract than to cave in.
“And I won’t back down,” Plazenet added, invoking several reasons. The first was that she does not want to use English terms in one of France’s top higher education establishments. She also said that dancing has never been discriminatory because a man and a woman dance together for pleasure: it’s when you introduce the concepts “follower” and “leader” that you create discrimination.
“I’m a woman; am I a followeuse because of that?” she asked.
Plazenet also acknowledged that after years of successful teaching at Science Po, she was now facing an institution where “woke” and “gender” ideology had taken the upper hand. She added that the enrollment form for her dancing class has now been further altered to signify that couples will hence be formed “following the concept of leader and follower and no longer that of the gender or sex of the participants.”
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Not all students agree with the school’s policy. Plazenet has received a large number of messages of support, and some of these have been published on social media. In fact, the story attracted nationwide attention because a group of students who were horrified by what had happened to their professor contacted the national daily Le Parisien with all the details.
Valérie Plazenet has decided to remain firm and not to accept Science Po’s flawed offer, saying she owed it to the millions of men and women at risk because of this “moral dictatorship.” “Homme et femme (Man and woman) are not insults, they’re words that are in the French dictionary,” she insisted. Besides, administrative rules force her to provide her students with separate dressing rooms for men and for women.
She also stressed: “I’m a woman, I’m proud to be a woman, and with gender theory, wokeism and the like, they’re destroying womanhood. Women won’t exist anymore because our body will be considered like just any body. No, we have a body that is different.”
Valérie Plazenet has called on all artists to react when under attack, claiming that a pianist friend told her that the same type of ‘anti-discrimination” logic is appearing in that art, with people complaining that “there are more white keys than black keys.”
“This has to stop,” she concluded.