The panel nods understandingly
Hugh Schofield at the BBC wrote a piece last January on a tv confrontation in 1990 between a Paris literary dude who boasted of “seducing” young girls and a woman who pointed out it wasn’t something to boast of.
The footage can easily be found on the internet. In a jocular tone the programme’s respected presenter, Bernard Pivot, asks Matzneff (then aged 53) what it is like to be a serial “collector of young chicks”.
All bald-headed suaveness, Matzneff explains how he prefers school-age girls who have yet to be “hardened” by disillusionment over men. He says they come to him because he listens and takes them seriously.
The panel nods understandingly. A Catholic woman who is there to defend fidelity in marriage laughs, as if at a charmingly naughty child.
But then Pivot turns to a woman who has so far been silent, a Canadian writer called Denise Bombardier, and the atmosphere suddenly changes.
“I feel like I am living on a different planet,” says Bombardier coldly. And she launches into a devastating attack on her neighbour.
Does he not understand anything about the rights of children, she asks. Has it never occurred to him that these young girls may end up damaged?
But the intellectuals of Paris gave her a hard time, not him. Imagine my surprise.
She had been warned by her publisher that attacking Matzneff would not go down well – and so it proved.
In newspaper articles she was described as “frustrated” and a “bitch” (the French is even more obscene).
“So (Bombardier) has discovered that in the year 1990 girls of 15 make love to men who are 30 years older than they are! Well, big deal!” wrote one critic.
Ah yes, girls of 15 “make love” to men of 45 – aka men of 45 rape girls of 15. It’s all in your point of view, eh what?
But what interested me was the “how times have changed” bit.
It is a measure of the extraordinary rapidity of moral change in our times that none of this could conceivably happen today.
By no stretch of the imagination could a contemporary author write so blithely of his seduction of underage girls – and, in Matzneff’s case, of boys too.
And even if he did, there would certainly be no-one leaping to his defence, accusing his detractors – like they accused Bombardier 30 years ago – of reactionary neo-Puritanism and failing to understand the wellsprings of teenage sexuality.
Ohhhhhhh yes there would. There would be the “sex-positive” types who do in fact very much accuse critics of reactionary Puritanism, and there would be the likes of Peter Tatchell and NAMBLA.
There is moral change but there’s also a lot of two steps back.
Wow, who knew that someone named “Bombardier” could actually drop bombs?
The two sides are talking past each other. It’s much as South Park pointed out in their fucking genius episode “Miss Teacher Bangs a Boy“. There’s a disconnect between the reality of being a young person and how adults envision things through the hypothetical eye of a young person. (And let’s not even begin to talk about the changing boundary between adolescent and adult, never mind questions of what is acceptable behavior across that line.)
I think that such thinking was rather fashionable in those days among a certain breed of French intellectuals (e.g. Foucault). More recently there was Milo Yiannopolous, who ‘defended the idea of “13-year-olds” having sex with “older men,” arguing that child molestation provided a “sort of ‘coming of age’ relationship” for teenagers.’ One notices that it tends to be common among the kind of people who like to think of themselves as ‘daring’ or as ‘mavericks’, and who make their name by being ‘shocking’..
That South Park episode is brilliantly horrible and true. Thanks, Nullius.
A lot of effort has gone into the cultural experiment of abolishing shame in the Western world. Well, call me reactionary, prudish, sex negative etc., but I for one am actively pro shame. I think feeling shame is closely related to having a conscience, which is why it’s hardly surprising that psychopaths have neither. Emotions like shame, embarrassment and guilt are important internal “alarm systems” that tell us not to do certain things even if we’re relatively sure of getting away with it. I definitely think there are men* who ought to have more shame in their lives. The more the better, I say. If I had my way, being a sleazebag would be universally considered so shameful and embarrassing and humiliating that nobody would be able to behave that way and live with themselves.
* Women are off the hook in this regard, since they’re already shamed pretty much no matter what they do.
The uncritical embrace of Freud is involved here as well. Alice Miller’s books include shocking examples of the way the assumption that pre-adolescent children are ‘sexual beings’ worked out in the 60s-70s.
Yep, a bit of shame is a good thing. Shame and guilt are signs of growth. We need more of it, not less.
I remember reading Mes Amours Decomposees circa 92/93 while working in a secondary school in France and wondering how anybody could think that kind of behaviour was in any way justifiable.
When you are surrounded by kids of that age on a daily basis, their fragility, their lack of self regard, the extent of how easily manipulated they are become evident. Matzneff always acted like what he was doing was proof somehow of his superiority over other men, that he was more virile somehow for seducing schoolgirls, when in fact it was always an admission of his inability to relate to women or men his own age or even with a little (any really!) experience, who would have perceived him as a creep a mile away.
Around that time a friend of mine, a man of little morals himself, went to see Matzneff give a talk. He was a bit of a fan – he lent me that book actually – but even for him the creepiness of seeing the man in the flesh was overwhelming. He didn’t speak of him to me again…
That undercurrent of latent paedophilia of which Tim Harris speaks was indeed quite strong then in France in the 70s and 80s, not only among ‘intellectuals’ but in a lot of popular culture, always just apparent under the mainstream. There was maybe the toxic influence of Freud at play there, but also this French idea that thinkers, writers and artists were somehow special beings and should be given a free rein. And the fear, obviously, of being seen as anti-intellectual, as ‘not getting it’ whatever ‘it’ was…
Matzneff, for one, boasted frequently of having very high protectors in the highest reaches of the government. I think I heard once that Mitterand was a fan. That talk he gave to which my friend went? It was at Sciences Po…
Sorry, I should precise that Sciences Po (l’Institut des sciences politiques de Paris, to give it its full name) is traditionally the first step in the academic ladder (usually the ENA -Ecole Nationale d’Administration- but also some other Grandes Ecoles) that provides most of France’s high-level civil servants, prefets, ambassadeurs, charges d’affaires etc… It is A Big Thing.
See also: Roman Polanski.
A lot of people didn’t realize that Nabokov didn’t create Humbert Humbert as a role model.
See also: Pretty much every male rock star from back when rock stars were indeed a thing.
As I have previously mentioned, I can no longer listen to some of the rock songs I used to enjoy because the lyrics could have been (and probably were) written by a serial rapist or at least a terrible misogynist sleazebag.
And then there’s Woody Allen’s Manhattan, in which Mariel Hemingway age 16 plays a girl of 17 who is “in a relationship” with 42-year-old Allen. And there is of course Woody Allen himself, who went off with his girlfriend’s underage daughter.
Not forgetting Bill Wyman, who was 47 when he began ‘dating’ the 13-year-old model Mandy Smith (who later insisted that there was no sex involved until she was 14!). They married when Smith was 18, Wyman 52, and divorced 2 years later.
As I recall, the press treated the whole thing as a salacious joke (Lucky Bill, eh? Nudge nudge, wink, wink), every newspaper story accompanied by photographs of the girl modeling underwear, and Wyman’s paedophilia was overlooked on account of Smith looking and acting a lot older than 13, and because her mother gave the ‘relationship’ her full approval.
Of course, being a Rolling Stone meant that Wyman was a National Treasure, and obviously being a rock star ‘this sort of thing’ was not only to be expected but tolerated to boot, so the police and welfare services were happy to look the other way, perhaps towards non-famous men who mistakenly assumed that Wyman’s actions and the reception he got meant they could do the same with a similar lack of repercussions.
And of course, Roy Moore, who had mothers of the young girls he dated defending him from every rooftop. ‘That’s just the way we do things down here’. We fail to understand the south; we need to understand and be sympathetic to everything from Paula Deen to pedophilia to Jim Crow. It’s their way of life, and horny men just hump little girls because we’re the south. I loathe that attitude.
I have had several awful experiences lately picking up novels by celebrated authors only to find that at least part of the plot revolved around some nubile young thing, usually under age (though in one she was of age, but looked underage; author covering ass there) who seems to exist only for the purpose of going to bed with middle-aged men. And, of course, she is delighted with the experience. She wants to, she practically begs for it.
I have taken to ending those books shortly after she shows up and it becomes obvious it is another of those books. I have read some novels by women who have late twenty, early thirty something women having affairs with men old enough to be their fathers; these usually aren’t so detailed about the sex act, there is usually angst about something to do with it, but it is still annoying. Just not as disgusting.
Arnaud and Bjarte wrote (paraphrasing):
Pedantic, Aristotelian quibble: Shame is a useful thing. We need the proper amount of shame.
Too little shame renders one emotionally crippled, the imbalance manifesting as under-regulation of behavior. Too much shame also renders one emotionally crippled, manifesting as over-regulation; e.g., self-punishment, analysis paralysis, and scrupulosity.
iknklast, your mention of under-age sex in novels by celebrated authors reminded me of Stephen King’s It. There is a scene set in a storm drain in which each of the boys took it in turn to have sex with the lone girl of the group in order to give them power to defeat Pennywise. It must be remembered that the children were all pre-teens. It wasn’t clearly explained how this was supposed to work or even how the girl (it was her idea, if memory serves) knew that this ritual was necessary. The entire scene made no sense to me then or now.
I read the book when it was released in 1986, and though I haven’t checked the scene may have been revised for later editions. It certainly didn’t feature in the 1990 television mini series, and I assume it had no part in the recent movie.
It is probably no surprise that the author who was so contemptuous of girls that he could write such a gratuitous kiddie-gang-bang scene is the same man who recently confirmed his contempt for women by joining in with the condemnation of JK Rowling.
And sends them into expensive therapy, which often doesn’t work. Even if it does, it often has to be done again later, because apparently it wears off. Or something.
Nullius in Verba @ #10.
Maybe yes but I think we are not there yet. Hence: we need more shame.
iknklast #13, Acolyte of Sagan #15
That was one of the things I seriously disliked about “1984” as well. I guess the Julia character isn’t portrayed as “underage”, but the same trope about attractive young female who exists only to inexplicably and out of nowhere fall in love and have sex with older male. I suppose Orwell must have been thinking something like “well this doesn’t really have anything to do with the larger theme of life under a totalitarian regime. Still, I have to work some dirty male jerk-off fantasies in there somehow, so let’s spin it as an act of rebellion against the party and pretend that’s the point”
“Steppenwolf” by Herman Hesse (another work that’s been hyped up as brilliant for reasons that will forever remain mysterious to this reader) was awful too. Never want to read it again.
^ Yes. It’s one hell of a pervasive trope.