Sex and Deviance

by Guillaume Faye

  [15] Each year several young police officers who are the mothers of small children are killed by criminal gunfire.

  [16] Armed forces charged with police duties among the civilian population. –Tr.

  [17] Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, as translated by H M Parshley (New York: Vintage Books, 1979). –Ed.

  [18] But if the number of veiled women continues to increase, this is destined to change.... This rejoices thinkers on the Islamophilic fringe of the extreme-Right who, moreover, are at the command of the totalitarian Iranian regime which, as the unspeakable and pathetic Arnaud Guyot-Jeannin declared in a lecture: ‘prefer the modest, veiled young women to the vulgar and provocative Western girls in tight-fitting jeans or bare-bottomed under their miniskirts.’ Such words imply not only submissiveness to invasive Islam, but also a prudery which is of suspicious origin.

  [19] Capillary action is the tendency for a liquid to flow into narrow spaces, even against the pull of gravity. For example, if you dip the tip of a paintbrush into paint, paint will begin to flow upward into the part of the brush not submerged in the paint. –Tr.

  [20] Wilhelm Reich (1897–1957) was an Austrian psychoanalyst whose school of psychoanalysis was heavily influenced by Sigmund Freud. He is perhaps most noteworthy for his influential book, The Mass Psychology of Fascism, published in 1933. –Ed.

  [21] Herbert Marcuse (1898–1979) was a member of the Frankfurt School and highly influential sociologist and political theorist. One of his most notable ideas was set forth in One-Dimensional Man (published in 1964), whereby he offered a distinction between true and false needs. The preoccupation with satisfying the latter is said to result in the repression and self-alienation of man, who no longer knows his true needs. Marcuse was one of the teachers of the American paleoconservative political philosopher, Paul Gottfried. –Ed.

  [22] Despite the fact that many young girls and women get pregnant because they failed to use their contraceptives properly, and usually end up getting abortions.

  [23] All citizens are equal, proclaimed the Convention, but those who did not share the ideas of the Convention were much less so than others, e.g., the Vendéans.

  [24] We should note that feminism really took off on American college campuses at the beginning of the 1960s (as did what the French call ’68-ism). Wilhelm Reich was a major inspiration for both American and European feminism. Reich (1897–1957) doctor, psychiatrist, and psychoanalyst of Ukrainian origin was a heretical disciple of Freud, a Marxist, and member of several communist parties, who eventually died in an American prison. Of his large oeuvre, the three books which influenced radical feminism and ‘sexual liberation’ were: Die Sexualität im Kulturkampf, 1936 (The Sexual Revolution, 1945. –Tr.); Der Sexuelle Kampf der Jugend, 1932 (The Sexual Struggle of Youth, 1972. –Tr.); Die Funktion des Orgasmus, 1927 (The Function of the Orgasm, 1968. –Tr.). The arrival of radical feminism and the sexual revolution in France began with the interpretation of Reich’s works by the Left-wing American intelligentsia.

  Going farther back in time, we should not forget that the ideas of the French Revolution were also largely of American inspiration. But it was in France in both cases that these ideas were taken to authoritarian and egalitarian extremes, namely Maoism and Trotskyism for the 68ers. And the invention of the premises of Marxist communism in the Terror and the Commune of 1870 (cited by Marx) furnished the political tools of communist totalitarianism.

  [25] In colloquial French, the interjection La barbe! (literally, ‘the beard’) means that’s enough, cut it out! –Tr.

  [26] Charles Maurras (1868–1952) was a French nationalist counter-revolutionary ideologue who was the founder of the Right-wing Action Française. –Ed.

  [27] Joseph de Maistre (1753–1821) was a French Counter-Enlightenment philosopher who fled the Revolution and lived the remainder of his life in Italy. He always remained a staunch opponent of democracy and supported monarchical rule. –Ed.

  [28] Union pour un mouvement polulaire, or Union for a Popular Movement, is the leading centre-Right political party in France. –Ed.

  [29] Large enterprises (able to afford to do so) and television networks have, amid making great effort in attempts at ‘public communication’ (propaganda), launched a policy of high-priority diversity recruitment — for positions requiring low or mid-level qualifications, of course. Concretely, this will end in a lowering of standards, especially at France-Télécom, in which most of the technical and commercial staff are North or Black African. In a questionnaire sent to all its Internet subscribers, France-Télécom asks whether they are satisfied with the customer service and installation personnel, providing a scale for evaluating them. If there had not been a lot of complaints, such a survey would have been pointless.

  [30] Lawsuits have been brought by White and Asian students against universities who granted preference to Blacks with lower grades in order to fulfill their quotas.

  [31] Alain Marie Juppé of the Union for a Popular Movement served as Prime Minister of France from 1995 to 1997 under President Jacques Chirac. –Ed.

  [32] We should note that in all vital professions (engineering, surgery, aircraft piloting, scientific research, nuclear maintenance, etc.) in which one cannot afford to fool around with amateurism, positive discrimination, quotas pertaining to sex and ethnic origin miraculously disappear; the rule of rigorous individual selection wins out. Practicality sweeps away ideology and sentiment. We are no longer in the playground. That a pretty young African woman, incompetent and ‘on the make’ should, through favouritism, become first Minister of Human Rights, then of Sports, then French Ambassador to UNESCO, is not a very serious matter considering the vapidity and uselessness of these positions — one might only regret the cost of her salary. That another woman of North African origin, just as incompetent and as much on the make should become Minister of Justice [Faye is referring to Rachida Dati, who held this office from 2007–9. –Tr.] is more serious, considering that the Elysée Palace [i.e., the President of France, resident at the Elysée Palace. –Tr.] will have to take the operation of this ministry into its own hands, quickly and discreetly. On the other hand, Mme Lagarde is much more in her proper place at the head of the International Monetary Fund than is Mr Strauss-Kahn, who was propelled into that post for political reasons, and was more concerned about his dick than about the responsibility his position demanded. [Christine Lagarde assumed the position of Managing Director of the IMF following the resignation of Dominique Strauss-Kahn in May, 2011. Strauss-Kahn was under investigation for the alleged rape of a hotel maid at that time; charges against him were later dropped, although he acknowledged having sexual relations with the woman in question. –Tr.]

  [33] In the audiovisual domain and in show-business, many women must have sexual relations with this or that director in order to succeed. It is a kind of institutionalised and forced prostitution. Obviously, pretty women are more often the victims of these practices and are thus the most disfavoured professionally. Graceless or ugly women are left relatively undisturbed; but, obviously, they will never advance professionally. In France, it is only a minority of starlets who are able to succeed without sleeping with anybody. In show business and the media, sex plays the market role and women are the means of exchange. I know a woman whose lucky break in this industry was to find a homosexual boss. In my own period of involvement in that professional domain, I never met a single pretty woman who did not admit to having been the victim of sexual harassment and blackmail; not a single one who reached an important place without having to give in to these kinds of attack. Other sectors of the economy, especially communications, are affected by this professional prostitution to a lesser degree.

  [34] The Strauss-Kahn affair revealed that the bosses of the Socia
list Party, although stuffed to the gills with feminist ideology, have never cared about the behaviour — macho, to say the least — of the man in question, whose escapades were well known to the political and journalistic classes. At the moment of his inglorious exit, 14 May 2011, many of them committed gaffe after gaffe trying to defend him, especially the pathetic Jack Lang. The affair, which even a Hollywood script writer would have been unable to render believable as fiction, is emblematic of Leftist ideology, of the disconnect between discourse and behaviour, between theory and practice. Do as I say, not as I do. One of the mammoths of the Socialist Party went so far as to say: ‘hitching up a maid’s skirts is not a crime.’ Left-wing feminist movements did not protest.

  Getting back to that comical figure, Jack Lang, whose pedantry and fatuity would have delighted Molière, we cannot help mentioning this anecdote, widely discussed in the summer of 2011: Luc Ferry, the former Minister of National Education and philosophy reporter for Le Figaro (incidentally a very intelligent essayist and less full-of-himself than Jack Lang), declared he knew of a former government minister whose pederastic adventures in Morocco nearly ended badly, that all Paris knew about it, and that the scandal had been hushed up from on high — obviously referring to the Elysée Palace. Amusing oneself with Arab boys is a classic tradition going back to the days of André Gide. At this, Jack Lang mounts the battlements, acts indignant, protests, makes threats, etc., despite not even being the person in question! The episode reminded me of a story told in my native Angoumois: The Story of the Chicken-Thief. It goes as follows: A peasant complains to the police that some unknown person has stolen some good, broody hens from his chicken coup. The inquiry gets nowhere. No fox could have been responsible; they had all been exterminated. So the guilty party must have been a man, a chicken-thief. The affair is widely discussed in town. One day, a gypsy shows up at the police station and says: ‘That bum is lying. His chickens were not stolen! And it wasn’t me who stole them — or who plucked them, either!’ The police arrested the gypsy and declared the case closed.

  [35] Anne Lauvergeon. –Ed.

  [36] No ‘parity’ is demanded in the judiciary and national education — ultra-feminised sectors.

  [37] It is implicitly accepted by the Zeitgeist that women must choose a career between the ages of 25–40 rather than have children. Women of the middle and working classes must take care of the home, the children, and her work at the same time. They are exhausted by the end of the day. What is more, the man has often left the family. One reason for the low birth rate of native Europeans is the combination of this imperative for women to have a career, the devaluation of the homemaker, and the weakening of couples.

  [38] ‘Maternal language’ (langue maternelle) is the French equivalent of the English ‘native language’ or ‘mother tongue’. –Tr.

  [39] French writer and political journalist who, until 2009, wrote for Le Figaro. He is notorious in France for his anti-liberal opinions. –Ed.

  [40] In his 2011 Maundy Thursday Homily at the Cathedral of St John in Lyon, Msgr Barbarin, a cardinal and Primate of the Gauls, declared: ‘He who wants to be great among us shall be your servant! This goes for the Church: authority is abasing oneself before others, washing their feet, helping them.’ Surreal. An inversion of meaning: authority is submission. The morality of sheep faced with a wolf.

  Chapter 5

  The Farce of Sexual Liberation

  Sexual liberation is one of the great ideological and political movements which has agitated the West from the beginning of the 1960s. Strongly linked to political feminism, dissident Marxism (or Leftism), and also to libertarian anarchism, the current of sexual liberation is a fine example of metapolitical success, since it attained its objectives — which in any case were part of the current of the time and may have occurred in any case.

  The sexual liberation movement mixed, pell-mell, as if utterly bewildered, all of their projects and goals: the end of the bourgeois family, of conjugal fidelity, of female virginity at marriage, of heterosexual predominance, total freedom for pornography, abolition of taboos against incest, paedophilia, and so on and so forth. A great potpourri in which Eros is noticeably absent; a potpourri lacking the refinement of the libertine.

  To value pleasure above all. ‘To enjoy without restraint’, said the anarchist slogan of May ‘68. The most unbridled, egotistical individualism was curiously mixed, in France especially, with affinities for the collectivist Left. But here there was no contradiction. In hindsight, we can see that the sexual revolution was a surge of vulgar hedonism of petty-bourgeois origin which wanted to emancipate itself brutally from the straitjacket of Christian sexual morality. With a bit of ideological sleight-of-hand, the theory of sexual liberation (which also frequently referred to itself as ‘the sexual revolution’) presented itself as the counterpart to an anti-capitalist revolt and to an infantile neo-Marxism, a pretention whose imbecility was demonstrated by Christopher Lasch[1] (of whom I speak elsewhere), since commerce used it as the basis for a new business.

  An Ideology of Puritans

  This ideology has a principally Anglo-Saxon (above all, American) and Germano-Scandinavian origin, that is to say, it comes from a cultural domain marked by puritanism of Protestant origin.[2]

  People threw themselves headlong into what might be called sexualism with the eagerness of beginners, of philistines. Sexual liberation thus has nothing to do with the refined libertine spirit which is erotic and free, [3] and in its freedom managed to maintain order without sacrificing pleasure, and it does so discreetly. . A certain Germanic coarseness, a certain dullness of spirit (well perceived by Nietzsche) which the United States has partly inherited runs through all the movements for sexual liberation. Does not manifesting a desire for liberation in any case amount to an admission that at bottom one is frustrated?

  Frustrated puritans discovered sex and were fascinated, passing from one excess to the other, from the narrowest prudery to the grossest shamelessness, like children who find the forbidden pot of jam and gorge themselves on it by the handful.

  Paradoxically, the ideology of sexual liberation has gotten further in Europe than in America. That is because the ideological or cultural viruses which originate among the American elite affect only a rather small part of the general population; this holds in all domains. Small-town America is not that of the college campus, nor that of New York or California. It has remained puritanical, even though America invented Gay Pride Marches and the pornography industry.[4]

  More than sixty years later, the principal aims of sexual liberation have entered into our mores. But it can hardly be said that the results have lived up to the hopes. The universal happiness and joyful liberation that were supposed to result from sexual liberation have not been realised. The great slogan of abolishing taboos went to work and brought back a mouse — not to mention bringing back taboos far worse than those which preceded.

  The False Promises of Sexual Liberation

  Has this sexual liberation produced the anticipated effects, those of fulfillment and a mythical path to physical and psychological pleasure? Have we, as promised, passed from the repressive and frustrating straitjacket of bourgeois society to the permissive paradise of bodily freedom, as predicted by Wilhelm Reich and Herbert Marcuse? Certainly not. In fact, we observe the opposite — among women as well as men. Dreams of emancipation have resulted in alienation.

  The universal sexualisation of society has triumphed at the expense of personal well-being and well-balanced sexuality. The media plugs society into a gigantic virtual sexual universe, a simulacrum made of images and words. This dream world consisting of all forms of eroticism — from the sweetness of well-balanced and beneficent sexual love to the orgiastic fantasies of pornography — has become a mass ideal, but it has become a hell on the individual level: the categorical imperatives of se
xual happiness have become impossible to achieve. One dreams of a chocolate cake, but there is no chocolate cake.

  In this respect, the traditional pornography industry of images (films, magazines), legalised in the 1960s, and the industry of erotic encounters (by telephone or via Internet messaging) becomes ever more frustrating for millions of naïve, exploited customers — because, obviously, it practically never leads to a real romantic or erotic encounter.

  As always, in attempting to substitute the virtual for the real, the chimera for the reality, the shadow for the form, the credulous masses are being manipulated and driven mad. The collapse of family norms, the retreat of the culture of modesty, sexual confusion, adult sex placed in the hands of unprepared adolescents, pornographic display made into a mass spectacle — all these have not lead to greater but to lesser pleasure, not to more well-balanced but instead quite unbalanced individuals.

  Here we must bear in mind the intellectually brilliant but sociologically aberrant discourse of psychiatrists and ‘philosophers’ and dissident Freudians who reproached Freud because his Oedipal resolution aimed at reinforcing social morality and regulating sex according to social norms. In the 1930s, the Marxist psychiatrist Wilhelm Reich denounced the repressive character of the patriarchal family. Twenty years later, Herbert Marcuse criticised the mortifying character of ‘renouncing impulse’ and spoke in favour of a sort of sexual anarchy which would set one on the path to happiness and fulfillment. In the 1970s, the French current of anti-psychiatry carried the torch down the trail blazed in May ‘68. In their celebrated Anti-Oedipus, the ‘philosopher’ Gilles Deleuze and the psychiatrist Félix Guattari defended (in terms that sounded almost like political demands) the demise of the family as an oppressive straitjacket and now obsolete (much in the same vein as the decadent novelist André Gide). They preached the ‘legitimacy of every desire’, even pederasty, and championed ‘an elective, polymorphic sexuality without regard for the distinction between the sexes.’ Obviously, they were preaching in favour of their personal inclinations, but forgot that they themselves had been raised in stable families.