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A new French law criminalizes “repeated acts that could be constituted by words that degrade one’s quality of life and cause a change to one’s mental or physical state.”  Unfortunately, the law only applies to spousal relationships, and so it wouldn’t actually stop professors from playing hide the ball with first years.

There are two really screwed up things about the ban on what France calls “psychological violence.”

First, yelling and insulting someone is not violence.  If you’re yelling so loud that you physically hurt someone, such as by damaging their ear drums, or hit a painfully high pitch, then you have violence.  It might be abuse, but it’s not violence.

Second, the act is extremely over broad.  If your wife constantly turns down your sexual advances, that definitely degrades your mental state and quality of life.  Nagging may also fall under the law.  So might consistently beating your spouse…at Scrabble.

Beyond those two problems, there’s one other issue.  The law is extremely sexist.  It is aimed at punishing men who make their wives feel bad (and the French government campaign in favor of the law backs this up).  While the law is billed as being equally applicable to women who yell at their husbands, it is sexist because it targets male behavior while not being equally applicable to female behavior.

Consider laws against crack cocaine and powder cocaine.  Crack, because it’s cut with so many things, weighs more than its powdered brother, and the level of offense and sentencing are based largely on the weight.  Same amount of cocaine in different forms are punished differently.  (Likewise, don’t drop your acid tabled in your orange juice, because under the law you have 16 oz of acid).  While I imagine this anomaly occurred simply because the laws are just written poorly, it does have a racial effect.  The coke black people do comes with a harsher penalty than the coke white people do.

France has banned relationship coke; the yelling and insulting of your spouse.  They haven’t touched the good stuff, powdered relationship cocaine, nagging, being cold and withdrawn, or passive aggressive snipes.  Luckily, the French law is written to over broad that it may actually punish the way women abuse their husbands.  Of course, I’d really rather just have no fault divorce, but so long as we’re going to have stupid laws, I prefer a bit of equity in them.

Finally, a bit of practical advice to French men.  Berate the hell out of your girlfriends.  Not just because the fun’s over when you’re married, but because if you take her down low enough before marriage, your continued abuse won’t constitute a loss in quality of life.