A Victim’s Account Fuels a Reckoning Over Abuse of Children in France

New York Times ^ | January 7, 2020 | Norimitsu Onishi

[karpov]

PARIS — 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, last 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 minors. 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.

A day after the publication of Ms. Springora’s book, “Le Consentement,” or “Consent,” which sold out quickly at many Paris bookstores, the fallout continued. Prosecutors in Paris announced that after “analyzing” its contents, they had opened an investigation into the case and would also look for other victims in and out of France.

In France, it is illegal for an adult to have sex with a minor under the age of 15. But it is not automatically considered rape, unlike in countries with statutory rape laws where people who are underage are considered incapable of giving consent.

[karpov]

Foucault, as discussed here, the most cited academic of all time, "was a homosexual sadomasochism fetishist who habituated the bathhouses of San Francisco and thus died of AIDS in 1984."

But let's remember, the real criminals are men who ask their female coworkers out on dates, compliment their looks, or tell dirty jokes /s.

[Biggirl]

A French version of Epstein?

[neverevergiveup]

“But let’s remember, the real criminals are men who ask their female coworkers out on dates, compliment their looks, or tell dirty jokes /s.”

That’s because those who write about culture, and those in the entertainment industry promote these ideas. When I see someone in the US trying to look ‘worldly’ reading Le Monde, I am ‘amused’.

[Perseverando]

In Godless France, it is only evil to call evil evil.

[Little Ray]

Epstein was a procurer.
He was also probably a foreign agent, providing blackmail material.
This guy was a relatively ordinary scumbag.

[lee martell]

I can imagine Jean Paul Sarte approving of such behavior, or finding arguments to justify it.
His common law wife, Simone de Beauvoir, herself a well known author, would have gone along with it.

They would have called more conservative standards,
“Shopworn vestiges of the bourgeois and the pedestrian classes.”

[NetAddicted]

Foreign agent?