Josée is only 15 years old when she is admitted to CEGEP. Rebellious, strong-willed and a punk at heart, dressed as an altar boy, with a crucifix around her neck, she enters her first anti-philosophy class and meets this teacher, R., a defrocked, cultured priest, who will easily charm and harpoon the sapiosexual that she already was. He is then 45 years old. Forty years later, Josée Blanchette delves back into this troubled past and lifts the veil on the toxicity of this relationship.
It was actually in 2018, when she learned that R. was in prison, accused of pedophilia, that the journalist, a real archivist, armed with a box full of her memories from CEGEP, her diaries, and work annotated with sulphurous comments from her teacher, decided to write this story. “I hadn’t reread that! I probably would have put it in the fire at some point or in the trash… That box survived two fires! It’s still resistant! Maybe a flood would have fixed everything, I don’t know, but I wouldn’t have been as strong to write the book if I hadn’t had all that material,” she confided on the phone.
Strong and solid, she is, but her gesture has nothing to do with courage, as many believe. She had no choice but to get to work, to bring this relationship to light, to speak out, to silence the silence and to tell not her story, but “the story of all women,” she explains. “It’s not my word, it’s our word, […] I wear it because most women are silent. And it’s scary to realize that, what they carry in silence. I have a lot of friends who will never, ever, ever speak. Do you think my family was happy that I released this book? And R.’s family? Neither.
Harpooned, manipulated, flattered
While writing was fairly easy—although it was an operation that forced her to delve into some not-so-savory areas of our society—it was difficult for the journalist to rehash this past, to find these words, those that made her the victim, she would later understand, of a sexual predator. “When I got back into it, I was the mother of a 15-year-old boy. And Hugo would bring me home little 15-year-old girls. […] So, to fall back into it, to reread all that with my eyes as a 55-year-old woman, it was a shock. It was… phew. […] Read him, read his pen [à R.]what he wrote to me, was difficult. I have had lovers in my life, and I have never received anything, NOTHING so raw. And I was then 15-16-17 years old!
She says that her CEGEP work sometimes includes two pages of commentary, with turns of phrase that are as hot as they are lewd, where R. underlines, for example, the sensuality of her text which East ” [si] full to bursting with fluids that[il en] is flooded. Gurgling until I lose my breath.” “He harpooned me with words,” Blanchette exclaims. “Imagine how I couldn’t take it anymore. The guy has a master’s degree in literature, a doctorate in philosophy, a master’s degree in religious studies… How do you want it? I’m no match, right now, he manipulates me as he pleases.” He talks to her about orgasm when she doesn’t yet know what it is. “Hello? That’s my work at 15. All the seduction happened in the first session. In the second session, he invites me to the movies, to see Lolita, and that’s it. I’m not even 16 when I sleep with him. This whole process of predation is happening when I’m 15.”
Raising awareness
And it is also to lift the veil on the preconceived ideas surrounding the predator and his victim that Josée Blanchette tells her story. “Catherine Fournier — currently mayor of the City of Longueuil who, in 2019-2020, was, as a member of the National Assembly, a member of the Special Commission on the Sexual Exploitation of Minors — said that what shocked her the most was to see that there is no typical portrait of these men.” No typical portrait, except that they are all men. “We see it with the Mazan affair, they are men, we must not hide it.” And the victims do not confine themselves to stereotypical roles either. “I wanted to show in my book that I come from a privileged socio-economic background, from a literate background, and I think that my story can be reproduced identically or almost in 2024.”
And the only way out of this impasse, according to Blanchette, is to stop burying one’s head in the sand. “I see it, people don’t want to talk about it or they tell themselves that it won’t happen to their children. […] A journalist was telling me that this wouldn’t happen to her daughters because they are so much smarter today, that back then, we were looking for mentors… No, no, no. We are still looking for mentors, because we are still told that we need a man in our life to see clearly. We are still flattered, at 15-16-17 years old, that a teacher is interested in us. It still happens, stories like that,” the author says indignantly.
The mother, the virgin and the whore
And, although things are changing a little, and awareness is tending to be raised, Josée Blanchette emphasizes that there is still a lot of education to be done around consent, abuse and in the face of the predatory society in which we live which is, she assures us, “100 times worse than the one I described in 1978, because of the Web. […] And it’s not me who says it, it’s the investigators specialized in sexual predation. There is an investigator who said that leaving your child with his iPad in his room at night is the equivalent of leaving him in a sandbox at 3 years old with 15 strange adults around him.
Parents need to be educated, that of boys, but also that of girls, around the behaviors that condition us, those that notably led little Josée, then so proud and unconscious, to play at the time the roles of mother, virgin and whore.