By Evi Tsakali,
“I swear, any woman that votes for Zemmour, is an idiot”, exclaimed the cafeteria lady to her colleague. I was at the university, going to the cafeteria during a lecture break to grab a coffee, and witnessed the unfiltered conversation of the two lovely cafeteria ladies I have known since my first year here (and to whom I felt a bit more connected after this incident). She continued; “He hates women” and then her colleague and I (waiting for my coffee) chimed in the frenzy adding “…and migrants”, “…and the LGBTQIA+ community”. Almost unanimously we ended up saying: “Il est fasciste!”, united in our despise of the extreme-right candidate for the upcoming presidential elections, who is taking France many steps back…
However, the cafeteria conversations were never the highlight of political analysis; I just started with this incident not only to illustrate — quite vividly — the emotions and the attitude of French people towards Éric Zemmour, but also because it occurred to me during a period when, especially here, we were crammed with provocative statements from the presidential candidate that were seriously testing my limits. Focusing on women and the LGBTQIA+ community, here are some elements of Éric Zemmour’s stance;
The First Gender
One of Éric Zemmour’s first books, published in 2006 and written in response to Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Gender, is titled (ironically) The First Gender. It is frankly impressive how such a small book (of about 100 pages) contains so much hate. According to his own statements, Zemmour attempts to “resuscitate the virile psyche” (“ressusciter la psyché virile”) via this book, which is, in essence, “a manly etiquette manual for the use of young, feminized generations” (“un traité de Savoir Vivre viril à l’usage de jeunes générations féminisées”).
Quotes from this book include: “A boy, he takes initiative, he assaults, and he conquers, he has sex without love, for pleasure and not for life” (“Un garçon, ça entreprend, ça assaille, et ça conquiert, ça couche sans aimer, pour le plaisir et pas pour la vie”), as well as a nostalgia for the good old time when “it was the girls that treated us like machos and not our friends””(“c’étaient les filles qui nous traitaient de machos, pas nos copains”), and when sexual harassment was not so strictly punished by the law and thus there was no “judiciary surveillance of desire” (“surveillance judiciaire du désir”). The man against whom numerous sexual harassment allegations have been made during the past years does not omit to affirm that “manhood goes hand in hand with violence” (“la virilité va de pair avec la violence”).
The LGBTQIA+ community and the “objective alliance”
His discriminatory rhetoric would not exclude the LGBTQIA+ community; in The First Gender, he denounces an “alliance between gays and women to feminize society” and claims that “all the work of feminists and homosexual activists consists in denaturating the difference between the genders, in showing their exclusively cultural and therefore artificial character traditionally masculine et feminine attributes”.
To him, homosexuality is “a choice”, and the homosexual couples’ desire of having children is nothing but a caprice; it was no surprise that during his campaign he has implied that — if elected — he will reconsider the “mariage pour tous” (=marriage for all, the name of the legislation legalizing the marriage of homosexual couples) and the “PMA pour tous” (=assisted reproduction for all).
Mixed schools no more?
Zemmour, among all his other opinions, is a strong opponent of mixed spaces, especially mixed schools; “The generalization of mixed spaces, especially schools, anesthetize the manhood of little men, who need to detach themselves from their mother… We live in an era of totalitarianism, castrating mixed education”. That leaves me wondering: if elected, how will he react to the French — obviously mixed — National Assembly?
Abortion and other hilarious stories you can tell yourself if Zemmour is elected
Éric Zemmour is reportedly firmly against abortion (in French IVG) and has not hidden the fact that, if he wins the presidential elections, he will question the applicable laws. Among other statements objectifying women (unfortunately, the list is ridiculously long to dedicate only one article, and the present one does not even treat the issue of migrants and islamophobia), he has blurted out the following “gem”: “In the traditional society, dominated by masculine values, a woman suffers without understanding it, but she accepts her kind, her destiny”. At least, Zemmour has understood something from the patriarchy; it makes women suffer…
References
- Zemmour, misogyne et fier de l’être, charliehebdo.fr, Available here
- Zemmour candidat: on a relu son “Premier sexe” et on a des questions à lui poser, huffingtonpost.fr, Available here
