Parity and Equality

Due to democratic advances the now common goal of sexual equality is no longer disputed, rather it is the ways through which to achieve it that are discussed. At this time, equality appears as the impossible, a utopian idea of a common measure between the two sexes. The debate on parity of recent years pertains to this discussion. Before even discussing the meaning of parity, we must note that the problem of sexual equality remains unelaborated. In two registers, an anachronistic naivety about equality hinders the thinking of the “politics of the sexes”. In the first instance, it is a matter of negating sexual inequality, or affirming the naturalness of progress towards equality. The belief in spontaneous and continued progress towards sexual equality within a democratic context challenges all realistic observations and results in a reticence in the demand for a law to create equality, as if the question of the sexes were escaping the well known rule: there is no equality without constraint, it is always produced. The debate on sexual equality is therefore built up on a surprisingly primitive base: a parity law would attack the natural movement of democracy! We refuse to see the tangible reality of inequality or that the relationship between the sexes implies a balance of power. To this naturalist register we can add the register of political authority: universalism is not discussed, the universal is neutral, and that is all. And if some people, detecting the gap between what is said and what is done, envisage a corrective law (parity), one objects that the effectiveness of universalism would diminish to the point of being sent back to the reality of its concrete expressions. Thus we conceal the collusion, however well known, between universal and masculine dominance. The anathema of “repli identitaire" prevents us from seeing that women are requesting to live in the universal rather than to divide it up, to work on identitarian development with the other.

The "parity debate", launched at the beginning of the 1990s, clearly determined its object: the absence of women in political representation. Then it crystallised the entirety of the feminist renaissance. I have two comments to make on the necessity of a new word to talk about the equality of the sexes. The first is to underline that it is a matter of sharing power, in European terms referred to as: the "decision making". After two centuries of fighting for civil and political rights, the time has come to participate in public affairs at the highest level. Parity is thus the expression of equality’s ultimate issue: that of power. The second comment is about the word itself and its political and semantic effectiveness: the word parity has allowed the word feminism to be avoided, a word which is still "impolite", or even damned.

Thus started a debate focussed on the word parity itself. Parity is not a potential substitute for or a complement of the equality principle - the latter being enough in itself. Parity is more a word than a concept, it is a tool for fabricating equality. If it is an instrument, it is easy to understand that it targets simultaneously access to the allocation of political power and all occurrence of masculine power within and outside of politics. It has proved to be a useful tool, and has revealed this ultimate inequality: that of power. And in criticising this masculine power it is obvious that every inequality is devoured by this breach. Parity was an aim as much as a tool, an end as much as a means. For as long as the philosophical issue remained intact.

Clearly, it seems impossible to found parity philosophically. But it is necessary to distinguish its worth as a tool from its conceptual difficulty. This would mean that parity is true in practice but false in theory. Neither a new principle nor a complement of equality, rather it reveals its meaning adjectivally: political parity, linguistic parity, domestic parity.

The noun equivalates to its adjectives: these indicate the places where masculine power is today called into question. Indeed, it is in placesof power that the use of the feminine is a problem for some. Parity's adjectives complete the map of issues of power, without for all that exhausting the question of inequality – principally and notably econo,ic- and the confrontation of the sexes, notably the trade, prostitution and enslavement of women.

Political parity is a democratic issue much larger than the mere correction of the republican representative system (numerical balance of elected representatives). ? In democracy, political power is identified as the popular sovereignty which . Therefore, instead of founding the division of power between men and women on biology (the "difference in sexes"), it is necessary to inverse the reflection leaving the definition of sovereign and to ask how sexuation is. Parity is not a new principle but could well be a deep shaking of modern sovereignty.

Parity, remarquable highbreed of the utopian affimation of equality between the sexes and the universalist demand for laws which cement a principle, allows the difficulty of the link between democracy and the differences between the sexes to be tackled. It is a utopia that calls on the law in order for it to be achieved.