Wokeness & Child Sexualization

Here’s a sicko story about French high culture:

The French writer Gabriel Matzneff never hid the fact that he engaged in sex with girls and boys in their early teens or even younger. He wrote countless books detailing his insatiable pursuits and appeared on television boasting about them. “Under 16 Years Old,” was the title of an early book that left no ambiguity.

Still, he never spent a day in jail for his actions or suffered any repercussion. Instead, he won acclaim again and again. Much of France’s literary and journalism elite celebrated him and his work for decades. Now 83, Mr. Matzneff was awarded a major literary prize in 2013 and, just two months ago, one of France’s most prestigious publishing houses published his latest work.

But the publication, on Thursday, of an account by one of his victims, Vanessa Springora, has suddenly fueled an intense debate in France over its historically lax attitude toward sex with people who are underage. It has also shone a particularly harsh light on a period during which some of France’s leading literary figures and newspapers — names as big as Foucault, Sartre, Libération and Le Monde — aggressively promoted the practice as a form of human liberation, or at least defended it.

It surprises no one that the French are not the world’s most morally upright people on the matter of sex. But this is way, way beyond the stereotype. More:

Caught now in the crosscurrents of France’s changing attitudes toward sex, Mr. Matzneff is the product and longtime beneficiary of France’s May 68 movement, the social revolution started in 1968 by students and unions against France’s old order.

With the slogan, “It’s forbidden to forbid,” the movement rebelled against authority and fought against imperialism, capitalism, racism, sexism and homophobia. Some also argued for abolishing age-of-consent laws, saying that doing so would liberate children from the domination of their parents and allow them to be full, sexual beings.

Mr. Matzneff was one of the leading writers to advocate the legalization of sex with children. In “Les Moins de Seize Ans,’’ or “Under 16 Years Old,” he writes, “To sleep with a child, it’s a holy experience, a baptismal event, a sacred adventure.” First published in 1974, it was republished in 2005.

Thinkers on the left, like Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, spoke in defense of the practice, or came to the defense of men accused of engaging in sex with people below the age of consent in France — which was and remains 15.

Read it all. It’s pretty horrifying. The leading left-wing daily Libération even ran classified ads from pedophiles seeking partners.

An American writer who lives in France, and is married to a French woman, tweeted about this story:

what my wife tried to explain to me about the crazy era in france producing the idea that children should be “liberated” to have sex with adults, was that the people arguing for this were the *wokest of the woke*. sartre, foucault, et al believed they were being *progressive*.

— Thomas Chatterton Williams