h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

THOUGHT FOR THE DAY 3
President Hollande’s affair is highlighting the difference between British and French attitudes to sex, with many in France sticking with the kind of ‘Scientific Rationalism’ that became so important in the build up to the Sexual Revolution of the 1960s.

Of course the “Scientific” and “Rational” exploration of sex made a “great leap forward” in the experiments of the Marquis de Sade in his contribution to the build up towards the Age of Revolution. “All men are born free, and yet everywhere they are in chains” wrote Jean Jacques Rousseau: and those chains included those social ties like marriage by which women secured their futures and those of their children, and therefore the future of Society, through the chains of legitimacy and legitimate rights- arguably an extension of the careful ‘nest-building’ instinct that is shown by females in many other species.

Hence revolutionaries like Karl Marx and Frederick Engels in “The Communist Manifesto” could refer to “bourgeois marriage” as a form of “prostitution” by means of which women exploited their sexual and procreative power in order to bind men to them through spiritual and temporal laws, though, perhaps in France especially, that applied to the ability to produce legal heirs, because the mistress, the courtesan and the ‘kept woman’ was very much a feature of the ‘Ancien Regime’.

Marx and Engels proposed that there should be ‘common ownership’ of women, whatever they envisaged by that: and, in spite of Mary Wolstencraft’s “Vindication of the Rights of Women” the “Age of Revolution” became very much an of “The Rights of Man”, as the ‘male principle’ of power, domination and “Heroic Materialism” became the ‘Spirit of the Age’- and still remains so. And in spite of those women who have followed Bonnie Tyler in “holding on for a Hero’, over the last hundred years the ‘Emancipation of Women’ has increasingly meant women seeking the chance to ‘invade’ and ‘conquer’ those same fields of power, domination and ‘Heroic Materialism’ in order to prove themselves just as capable of operating within the systems that still shape the modern world, while trying to turning the whole thrust away from the Malthusian Catastrophe’s that haunted the male imagination in the nineteenth century.

So it seems that there are still women who feel that “Heros” are men in need of their ‘other half’- the ‘heroine’ and ‘help-mate’ who complements them and helps to make them whole. Mary Wolstonecraft’s daughter, Mary Shelley saw that there would be a danger that Dr. Frankenstein’s male ‘demon’ would demand a help-mate and partner, who could match his disproportionate powers and form one monstrous whole. And perhaps it was because she elevated the ‘fishwife’ and the ‘housewife’ to the corridors of power and beat the men at their own game that Margaret Thatcher got up so many peoples noses.

It seems to have been a lesson learned by the two women who are arguably the two most powerful women on the planet. Chancellor Merkel of Germany seems to have made a virtue of offering to a German people still recovering from the obscenity of Nazism with its excessively “masculine” brutal worship of power, a milder, more gentle and less strident vision of the German character.

Christine Lagarde, on the other hand, is very much both a very modern woman and at the same time classically French, even if an important part of her ‘rise’ was spent in the USA. In fact the time she spent in the USA was probably crucial because she was in competition with both men and women who wanted to be the ones ‘who wore the trousers’; and, like many, perhaps most, French women Mme. Lagarde very evidently has never believed in neglecting her feminine attributes. There cannot be very many people, of either sex, who have risen to her kind of power and prominence in national and global affairs, who spent their earlier physical ‘prime’ as part of their country’s national Synchronized Swimming squad!

As soon as you register that fact, you can see that it makes sense. She still surfaces from some demanding session or manoeuvre with that charming and disarming smile: and she still carries herself with the self-confidence of having spent hours practicing and perfecting the art of making her bathing costume clad body look beautiful and ‘fit’. At a more mundane level the same knowledge can be found in the French ‘madame’ of ‘a certain age’ who enjoys it when men follow her around in the local supermarket with open admiration. All of this is just part of the natural order of things, natural beauty given that particular ‘French touch: and every creative ‘master’ or ‘mistress’ enjoys being appreciated by the ‘connoisseur’, which in some ways takes French people in some ways into their own version of ‘Enchantment’.

It seems significant that, though the French Revolution of 1789 took great inspiration from the American Revolution of 1776-83 and onwards to the drafting of the US Constitution, those learned and ‘rational’ members of the National Assembly who drew up the French Rights of Man saw that Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness were just the kind of unrealistic fantasies that seemed to energise ‘the English’ in their “Wonderland”. The new French Society would be built on Liberty, Equality and Fraternity, with the kind of liberty that would make it possible to really try to pursue happiness curtailed and cut back by the limiting impact of Equality and Fraternity. Rousseau of course was from Geneva and was more Swiss than French, and the French Revolutionaries were less interested in getting rid of all ‘the chain’ than sharing the chains around more equitably.

Thus, though the Hollande affair has not really scandalised French opinion, last year people were outraged and reduced to tears over the ‘affair Cahusac’ when it was revealed that one of the Hollande Cabinet had been forced to admit that, in his professional life before entering politics, when he was a successful dentist, he had made use of a Swiss Bank account in order to keep his money safe. It is not clear that he broke any laws, but, in the full knowledge of what a terrible ‘sin’ this would be thought to be by all French Socialists he had lied to his political colleagues. Some of the party faithful were reduced to floods of tears live on TV at the thought that M. Cahusac had ‘cheated’ on the PS, but cheating on your wife, husband or partner is another matter, as is cheating the law and law enforcement officers for most people. The French Police have finally had to fine French motorists who flash their lights to forewarn all motorists coming in the other direction that they are heading towards a Police trap. The ‘citizens’ are the natural enemies of the State apparatus.

To some extent this is still the legacy of the ‘realist’ school of novels associated with Emile Zola most obviously with “Les Miserables”. Zola investigated ‘the pits’ and sewers of French Society, took episodes that could happen to individuals and then made them all happen to one ill-fated character, whose life goes from bad to worse. It is dark and depressing tradition that was taken up by the “Pieces Noire” plays of Jean Anouilh in the 1930s to 1950s, in which the true worldly wise connoisseur tries to persuade the young idealist that life really is mostly ‘la merde’- nastiness that everyone has to just put up with, and the trick of succeeding is knowing how to enjoy those little compensatory moments which actually make life bearable. And the events of 1939-45 did nothing to lighten the mood with ‘chanteuse’ in black like Edif Piaf expressing the agony of everything that had to be endured and yet regretting nothing.

You only need to regret if you have not made the most of those compensatory moments that tend to be connected with natural appetites and senses. These are often connected with those orifices which can connect the individual with the wider world, and that includes the use of the anal passage as a very useful way to ingest medications and treatments.

Of course in more social situations the mouth is very important, with no country on Earth being prouder of its taste, discernment and mastery of all matters of food and drink. But France too is the land of perfume and smell, including its famous ‘petomane’- the farting entertainer: while music, painting and other serious arts find a ready audience and appreciation. So when President Hollande is up to his neck in political problems, as the most unpopular President France has had in the Fifth Republic, few in France will really blame him for finding some compensatory moments in the company of a beautiful young actress. In France this is not ‘cheating’ because in France no-one should really expect any different.