Vulgar though the Sunday Times report may have been, it did have a point. The tendency to forgive French intellectuals their sexual crimes and misdemeanours is both deep rooted and wrong.
None the less, there is some chronological snobbery involved in our present attitudes: I can remember fairly well the period in the late 60s early 70s when to be relaxed about paedophilia was a mark of enlightenment on both Left and Right. In British society at least this was also a class marker, since there was so much of it at boarding schools. As far back as 1929, one of the running gags in Evelyn Waugh's "Decline and Fall" was the paedophile schoolmaster Captain Grimes, who kept getting sacked for "the usual thing" and then hired somewhere else because he was, after all, a public school man.
(Ume and I watched a contemporary television adaptation but in this he was a straightforwardly gay man interested only in adults)
Certainly, the rock stars of the 70s were not unduly troubled by notions of an age of consent. Prepubescent children were, I think, mostly considered off limits but even that was flexible. The great backlash did not really get under way until this century. AIMHMHB, a colleague at the graun once told me how she had interviewed a noted pianist (and contributor to the NYRB) who had talked to her quite openly about what he considered his love affair with a 12-year-old boy. I was not, then, nearly as shocked as I would be now.
We talked about this sort of thing at least once before, in the context of Marion Zimmer Bradley and her husband? I think? Boyfriend maybe? Named Breen. Breen was notorious for molesting children in the Bay Area science fiction fan community in the same period, and there is a truly bizarre contemporary newsletter kind of thing raising his child molestation as a problem but being unsure if anything should be done about it given the new mores of sexual liberation.
I guess I have maintained traditional prejudices against French intellectuals so I'm not really torn by this.
The 70s rock thing is a bigger conflict because they were mostly great, musically.
I remember feeling crushed when I found out what a bunch of my culture heroes like William S. Burroughs, Brion Gysin, Allen Ginsberg, and others were getting up to with young Moroccan boys during their sojourn in Tangier.
1: I was recently reading a review of this book, which is horrifying, precisely because there was so little social discomfort with a deeply age-inapporpriate relationship: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/on-the-limits-of-sexual-freedom-on-vanessa-springora-consent-a-memoir/
I guess we'll always have Meat Loaf.
He'll do anything for love, but he won't do that.
I think there's a whole lot to unpick, as it were, with this issue - a mixture of colonialism, changing narratives of childhood, actual childhood sexuality, changes in ideas about who can consent and how, homophobia-generated sexual practices, etc. It's not just "Foucault cruelly did horrible things because he himself was a cruel and horrible person"; it's a whole complex of ideas that made doing these things seem normal and okay.
I've been reading Lawrence Durrell's Alexandria quartet, and it really highlights the power of the orientalist view of North Africa/North African sexuality. Durrell recognizes, for instance, that rape of Alexandrian children occurs but it's really just sort of...normal? It becomes bad - although not as bad as you'd think - when the victim turns out to be a non-Muslim, non-poor, non-anonymous person and therefore the rapist is sort of bad, but not that bad, but we wouldn't really be bothering about this if he, like many other characters, were just exploiting anonymous Alexandrians. There's an occasionally articulated "well Alexandrians are just like that, sort of lazy, sort of sensuous, not really masculine and therefore sexual assault against them is sort of sordid but sort of laughable" bit, too. (Also lots of "lol pedophilia in England" stuff, of course.)
In short, lots and lots of men and some women treated North African children/teens really abusively and this was a recognized thing that was not in fact widely condemned by anyone. If anything there was a whole narrative (Burroughs, Durrell, etc) about "oooh look how decadent and shady North Africa is, it's not like our behavior is what makes things decadent and shady or anything".
When I think about this, I also recollect David Wojnarowicz's autobiographical writing in which he talks about enjoying his childhood/tween sexual contact with older men, some of which was paid and some of which was not. (To the best of my knowledge Wojnarowicz had adult partners as an adult.) I've read a number of memoirs by gay men in which they write positively about childhood/tweenhood sexual experiences with adults. Some of it seems like neglected/abused/shy/weird kids continuing to feel positive about positive attention from adults even when they grow up, some of it seems like a product of homophobia (you can't be sexual with or out to your peers, so older gay men are the only people you can explore that stuff with and the only people who say anything positive about your sexuality, and in turn those older men probably had child/tween experiences like yours so they feel like it's normal).
Wojnarowicz's childhood was horribly traumatic in almost every way, so just because the least traumatic aspect of it may have been sexual contact with adults that doesn't mean it's a good idea.
Anyway, my point being that I think a lot of gay men prior to the relatively recent past had first/tween sexual experiences with older gay men and for a variety of reasons viewed those as positive, and that this probably shaped a lot of the seventies/eighties "it's normal if I have sex with boys, childhood sexuality makes it okay, it was okay for ME" narrative that is now so totally discredited.
Also I tend to find that writers who sexually abused others are sort of auto-cancelled in my mind - I just can't enjoy their work anymore. Franco Moretti used to be my favorite literary theorist and I just can't bring myself to pick up his books anymore. I know it's more complicated than that, Moretti has useful and important ideas and yet it's just repulsive to me to read his work now.
2: The MZB thing was it, yes. Everyone knew and no one said anything.
There is an interesting echo with the Catholic Church in the US and Archbishop McCarrick, where you can trace in the official correspondence (later released by the Vatican) all the people not quite saying what everyone is aware is not exactly being said out loud. Admittedly, those stories almost all involved young men over the age of consent. But -- whatever the stage of physical development, there is an element of paedophilia, I think, whenever your "father in God" wants to fuck you.
2, 11.1 MZB was a horrific abuser herself.
I remember having one of those "the past is another country" moments when reading some of the personal writings (journals, letters & etc.) of some of the famous French intellectuals of that era. Not Foucault, I think it was Barthes, where I was amazed at how casually they talked about treating North Africa as a destination for sex tourism. Like it never crossed their minds that there was anything wrong with it.
10 I have this weird reaction where I still love their work from before the time I found out but have absolutely no interest in anything they've done since the revelations came out. Mostly I find this applies to Polanski and Woody Allen.
Is that part of why the Algerians got so violently anti-French?
It's sort of hard to square our modern notions of trauma and generational transmission of dysfunction with all of history ever. The implication is "the vast majority of people who have ever lived were traumatized" but that seems to seem too modern a take on the dawn of time and the veldt.
Frowner's 9: last chimes with some of my own conversations with gay men.
Is that part of why the Algerians got so violently anti-French?
Mostly I find this applies to Polanski and Woody Allen.
I think on occasion of the Claire Dederer article, "What should we do with the art of monstrous men?" that I think we discussed here.
Since then, she's come up in a couple different contexts, and each time I feel like she starts of trite and dull for a while, and then at the 2/3 mark, she says things that are deeply insightful and profound, and I wonder if she'd let me massively edit down the first 1/3 of the thing.
16: I think what's traumatic is highly culturally contingent. Respectable, out in the open, heterosexual marital norms until not a lot more than fifty years ago look seriously abusive by today's standards, but that doesn't mean that most people living under them felt abused or were traumatized in the way you or I would be if they were suddenly imposed on us.
15/16: I was recently reading this article about trauma from the Algerian War, which is horrifying and which I'm not quite sure how to process (like the French, apparently): https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v43/n04/adam-shatz/dynamo-current-feet-fists-salt
Yet France still refused to call les événements a war. Instead, this was 'an operation to maintain order'. The French state did not formally recognise that it had fought a war in Algeria until 1999. It was another two decades before it admitted to the systematic use of torture. In 2018, Emmanuel Macron acknowledged France's responsibility in the murder of the pro-independence militant Maurice Audin, a communist mathematician who was 'disappeared' in 1957 - but passed over in silence in the extrajudicial murders of FLN leaders such as Ali Boumendjel and Larbi Ben M'hidi, who were 'suicided' in French custody during the Battle of Algiers. Even today, access to the war archives means overcoming significant bureaucratic obstacles. Denial, secrecy and subterfuge around Algeria coincided with the increasing commemoration of the deportations of Jews under Vichy, as if remembering the Holocaust and forgetting Algeria went hand in hand.
...
Correspondence was subject to military censorship, but self-censorship was even more effective in concealing the realities of war. The appelés were keen to reassure their parents of their safety, or to flirt with their girlfriends. Writing letters was a means of escape. Michel Berthelémy wrote to his family every two weeks, but never mentioned the day his 'world crumbled', when he fired a shot in fear from a balcony only to realise he'd killed a teenage boy. ... [trigger warnings]
This is also connected to standard misogyny and classism and discomfort with sexuality in general, especially the separation between the women you fuck (working class, uneducated, do sex work) and the women you marry (middle/upper middle class, educated, maybe have an affair in a bohemian sort of way).
A lot of those Frankfurt School guys back before the war were all "well, off to the brothel for a stimulating evening about which I can intellectualize", for instance, and this was viewed positively as a sign that they were leftists and not uptight and so on. Sex workers are fun and authentic and proletarian, which is fun for the philosophers, but of course there's no room for the possibility that the sex workers might have liked, eg, an education, a job where you don't risk getting syphilis, etc and that they might have been happier being a little less "authentic".
Anyway, the same idea that it's jauntily intellectual to have paid sexual contact with working class people and that this proves something splendid and open about your own character.
In re generational trauma: No, I think that people in the past were traumatized and that trauma was normalized. Consider all those girls who reported sexual abuse to Freud - if that was in fact so normal and non-traumatic, why were they seeing a shrink? And if it was so normal and non-traumatic, why did Freud famously support them at first and then decide that they were making it all up?
Or consider many of our parents! Like, my mother had a good life with people who loved her, and yet you could see in her character the traces of the various times when her dreams were crushed by her family because of her gender. She tried very hard not to do the same things to me (we talked about this) and yet there were things that still made our relationship tough at times. Or consider my dad, who is a sterling man and who I truly admire but who has never had the kind of friendships or emotional intimacy that he wanted (except with my mother), substantially because of expectation around gender.
There's another question about whether it is theoretically possible to lead a "non-traumatized" life and what that would look like, but I think that misogyny and racism and class violence, etc etc are transhistorically bad and harmful no matter how normal they seem.
I don't disagree with you about the transhistorical badness -- I think our norms are better rather than just different. I meant more that the negative impact is ameliorated where the bad thing happening to you is culturally normal; there are standard understandings and coping mechanisms that help. When what's happening is not just bad but also understood to be unacceptable, you're at sea in a different kind of way.
22.2
More humorously, I am reminded of this paragraph: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v42/n11/john-lanchester/maigret-s-room
There is plenty of sex in the books, but it all has to do with the other characters, usually the relevant criminal perpetrators: Maigret is passionately uxorious, but the passion is expressed through culinary rather than sexual appetite. In this respect, the inspector was very unlike the man who created him. Simenon famously claimed to have had sex with 10,000 women, and was equally famously corrected by his estranged second wife, who claimed the real figure was 1200. She had good data. When they lived in the US, Denise and Georges would go to brothels together; she liked chatting to the girls in the lobby while he was upstairs having sex with one of them. When he'd finished he would come down, and if she was having a good time she would say: 'Why not have another one, Jo?' Which must rank as one of the strangest sentences ever spoken in the history of marriage.
The implication is "the vast majority of people who have ever lived were traumatized" but that seems to seem too modern a take on the dawn of time and the veldt.
The vast majority of people who ever lived were malnourished. Natural systems aren't designed machines, running optimally by default, they're kludges meandering from one crisis to the next; human brains and societies are no different. Largely pwned on preview.
Also I tend to find that writers who sexually abused others are sort of auto-cancelled in my mind - I just can't enjoy their work anymore.
My understanding is this is the original (Black) meaning of "cancelled" - not any public or group reaction, just "this person might as well not exist for me personally anymore".
Maybe Sally Hemings really did love ol Tom. Maybe the Cree woman who had 8 children by that French trapper (who had another wife in Montreal) was pleased with the arrangement. Maybe every single 18th century coupling in each of our ancestries was coercive, and so we are just as much a product of sin, as we now understand it, as any Woody Allen movie.
I'm totally with the idea that sins of the past are a complete disqualification for idol worship. But an artistic or philosophical, or world historical, accomplishment can also stand on its own. We just have to separate the idol from the work.
On the point, I was not impressed when reading Foucault. Maybe it was the translation, but I doubt it
The vast majority of people who ever lived were malnourished.
I sort of don't know what this means. Is it just saying that most people died under age 5, in most of humanity, or is it saying that most adults had rickets? Is it saying that there was a severe shortage of calories, but what there was was fine nutritionally? Or is it saying there were enough calories but they were only potatoes? Or is it saying that most children were undernourished to the point of brain-development consequences?
Or is it saying that every possible situation accounts for 1% of the situations and there's absolutely no generalization to be made beyond "they were traumatized AND hungry OR died by age 5"?
Also, aren't most people alive right now?
Let's count. Everybody who is alive, raise your hand.
Everyone post your SAT scores, your net worth, and whether or not you're currently alive.
I cried because I wasn't alive, until I met a man who couldn't raise his hand because he had no hands AND he also wasn't alive.
33: I didn't realize you knew ol' Nohands Corpsey! Great guy.
32: I'm that cat Schrodinger put in that fucking box, so I can't answer that question.
32 and whether each of your great great grandparents enthusiastically consented to the intercourse that led to your respective great grandparent's births.
That's a good example of changing times because they were cousins.
At summer camp someone told a version of an Andrew Dice Clay joke, "All I need is a hole and a heartbeat. Heartbeat optional." and I don't know if the optional part was in the original or was their own creative addition.
Why was Galvani running electricity into a dead frog anyway?
29: I misspoke. "Malnourished" is probably wrong; I should have said suboptimally nourished. I was pointing to osteoarchaeology, the Flynn effect, athletic records; whether inadequate calories or nutrients or both doesn't matter. I wasn't referring to early childhood deaths at all, but they reinforce the point: deeply suboptimal results are the historical norm, and not explicable as historical cultural preferences.
I remember being disturbed and weirded out by Foucault's snide and superior dismissal of the authorities' concerns with "these inconsequential bucolic pleasures" (The History of Sexuality). Creepy old guy taking advantage of an innocent young girl....er, that sort of sounds like the sexual abuse of a minor to me.
Because I'm a member of the anglosphere's bourgeoisie, I guess, and not a French intellectual ...
43-No, that's glib and self-satisfied; Foucault may be wrong, but we really don't need to believe "sexual abuse of a minor" is some transhistorically valid description of everything the Canadian petit-bourgeoise objects to.
Foucault depicts young, well, proto-hustlers as having agency: maybe that's a sentimental lie on his part. What makes certain kinds of experience permanently damaging? Because the culture tells us that they are permanently damaging? Were they permanently damaging before we decided that? I don't think this is a straightforward question.
A conservative trots out explosive eye witness accounts of child rape in graveyards, and we all should immediately believe it? Jeune Afrique suggests there's a lot more nuance to the story. Having sex with 18 year olds is problematic, but it's not the same thing as raping 10 year olds.
https://www.jeuneafrique.com/1147268/politique/tunisie-michel-foucault-netait-pas-pedophile-mais-il-etait-seduit-par-les-jeunes-ephebes/
@22
Tangent: that's part of the reason I'm a little bit chary of the 'sex work is work' line of thinking, because there doesn't seem to be an 'ethical model of consumption' on the other side.
I didn't know who Guy Sorman was so I read his wiki page. They say he's a classical liberal so I suppose he is a right-winger. At the end of the article they say "Faced with some inaccuracies in his claim [about Foucault], Sorman later adapted his statement, admitting having only a 'convergence of troubling evidence'". And then link to an article in French which I cannot read.
That article is here: https://www.lexpress.fr/actualite/idees-et-debats/michel-foucault-et-la-pedophilie-enquete-sur-un-emballement-mediatique_2148517.html
There must be some commenter who can read French and tell us what all these articles say?
48: Very, very brief summary of 44: Folks interviewed think it's unlikely Foucault was molesting children. Rather, he was fucking teenagers in the cemetery. Pedophilia would not at all have been acceptable in this village, and the cemetery wouldn't have been private enough for him to be secretive. Here's kind of the key sentiment, run through Google Translate because I am lazy. The tone is nicely preserved.
Moncef Ben Abbes, true memory of the village, is categorical: "Foucault was not a pedophile but was seduced by young ephebes. Guys of 17 or 18 whom he would meet briefly in the thickets under the lighthouse next to the cemetery. The civil majority is then fixed at 20 years. A precision close to that of Jean Daniel who reported in a portrait of Michel Foucault to Sidi Bou Saïd that "he was, most discreetly in the world, homosexual. Without the rumors of the little village thugs, no one would have suspected it."
Moncef Ben Abbes, véritable mémoire du village, est catégorique : « Foucault n'était pas pédophile mais était séduit par les jeunes éphèbes. Des gars de 17 ou 18 ans qu'il retrouvait brièvement dans les bosquets sous le phare voisin du cimetière. » La majorité civile est alors fixée à 20 ans. Une précision proche de celle de Jean Daniel qui rapportait dans un portrait de Michel Foucault à Sidi Bou Saïd qu'« il était, le plus discrètement du monde, homosexuel. Sans les rumeurs des petits voyous du village, personne ne s'en serait douté ».
47 is paywalled, but it starts by rehashing who said what in a way that suggests Sorman is dropping this juicy tidbit at such a late date to promote his book.
By "the tone is nicely preserved," I am referring to the fidelity of the translation. The tone is really gross. Just in case that wasn't clear.
You come at Foucault, you best not mis(cancel).
Anyway, the same idea that it's jauntily intellectual to have paid sexual contact with working class people and that this proves something splendid and open about your own character.
I always get a whiff of intellectuals-are-aristocrats-really off this. The rich, the vagabonds, and the X-class do what the mere bourgeois are afraid to.