Can posing for Playboy be a feminist statement? French Foreign Minister Marlene Schiappa believes so and defended her decision to pose dressed on the cover of French Playboy.
Marlene Schiappa, a 40-year-old feminist author whom President Emmanuel Macron sought for his administration in 2017, is no stranger to controversy and has repeatedly angered right-wing parties.
But even the Prime Minister and left-wing critics think the Secretary of State for Social Economy crossed the line and made a mistake when she decided to pose for Playboy for a 12-page interview about women’s and gay rights and abortion.
“Defending the right of women to do what they want with their bodies: anywhere, anytime,” Marlene Schiappa wrote on Twitter on Saturday. “In France, women are free. Whether that bothers the retrogrades and hypocrites or not.”
Defend the women’s right to remove the leurs corps, this is the part and all temps.
In France, les femmes sont libres.
N’en déplaise aux retrogrades et aux hypocrites.#Playboy—MarleneSchiappa (@MarleneSchiappa) April 1, 2023
The decision angered some government colleagues who staged strikes and increasingly violent demonstrations against plans to raise the retirement age by two years. Many understood that Marlene Schiappa’s cover sends the wrong message, and some even thought the news was an April Fool’s joke.
Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne, the second woman to hold the post in the country, called Schiappa to say that “it is not appropriate at all, especially in the current period,” an aide told AFP on Saturday.
“Where is the respect for the French people? People who have to work for two more years, who demonstrate, who lose days of salary, who cannot eat because of inflation?” Greens and women’s rights activist Sandrine Rosseau told BFM on Saturday. “Female bodies should be able to be exhibited everywhere, I have no problem with that, but there is a social context.”
Playboy defended the cover. Schiappa was the “most Playboy compatible” of the ministers “because she is connected to women’s rights and understood that it is not an old man’s magazine, but that it could be a tool for the feminist cause,” said editor Jean-Christophe Florentijn to AFP.
“Playboy is not a porn magazine, but a 300-page publication that is intellectual and fashionable,” Florentin added, admitting that “there are still some nude women, but not on most of the pages.”
Other criticisms of Schiappa focus on the broader issue of government communications strategy. Macron, who rarely gives interviews to the French press, spoke last week about his views on political power and pensions in an interview published in the children’s magazine “Pif, le mag”.
Schiappa, a regular on French television, introduced legislation banning street pranks and harassment when she was secretary of state for equality in 2018.
Mother of two, she was an author and blogger before starting her career in politics. She wrote about the challenges of motherhood, women’s health and pregnancy. In 2010, he wrote a book of sex tips for overweight people, something that critics say propagated stereotypes.
Source: DN
