The waltzers represented what was until very recently called a cult film. This ode to adolescent carelessness which explored the sexual fantasies of sixty-eighters was to celebrate its 50th anniversary this year. At least that’s what we thought until the M6 channel removed it from the poster.
There is no doubt that the (dazzling) presence of Gérard Depardieu – implicated in a rape case – paved the way for this censorship. It’s no longer really the season to exclaim as he did in the film: “Aren’t we comfortable here, peaceful, cool, relaxed?” » One might even think, like the film critic of Figarothat it is all the work of the bad boy of French cinema, Bertrand Blier, who is no longer in the odor of sanctity.
Other times, other manners. We learned this week that 50% of men under 35 who are in a relationship admit to having avoided sex to watch a TV series. After the United States, where the phenomenon is well known, what many have described as a “sexual recession” has indeed affected the country of Dangerous Liaisons and D’history of O.
After rap, SUVs and junk food, the French would no longer have anything to envy of the Americans in terms of sexual puritanism. A survey by the French Institute of Public Opinion (IFOP) tells us in particular that the number of those who declare having had at least one sexual intercourse in the last year has fallen by 15 points since 2006. This drop is particularly strong among 18-24 year olds, 28% of whom have not had any sexual intercourse in the last year. In 2006, they were only 5%!
Small consolation, this affects both men and women. If 7% of men and 11% of women were sexually inactive in 2007, they are now 22% and 26%. About half of women and men believe they could continue living with someone in a purely platonic relationship.
Pills, condoms, IUDs, erotic toys, porn, dating sites: for 40 years, has this great libidinous unpacking only had the effect of dispelling the mystery and extinguishing the libido?
We are far from Waltzes. And yet. This film symbolized the beginning of this era where individualism broke down all taboos. Aren’t Blier’s heroes, Jean-Claude and Pierrot, looking for a society that resists them? And they can’t find it. This gave rise to the sexual revolution, the least of whose paradoxes was not, while putting an end to an oppressive climate, “granting phallocracy all the privileges it had always demanded”? wrote the essayist Patrick Buisson.
If sex is everywhere — and even an obligation — there is a chance that it will no longer be anywhere. In love with his ego alone, Narcissus can no longer support the couple and even less the family. If a man can become a woman (and vice versa) by the simple magic of his will, how could man still be a mystery to woman and woman, an enigma to man, according to the formula of the writer Louis Dumur?
Not to mention that, in this ethereal world, touching has become risky. Recently, meetings between colleagues have been replaced by videoconferences; cashiers, through automatic teller machines; the restaurant, through Uber deliveries. Woody Allen’s hygienist prophecy where a man and a woman each make love in their cubicle thanks to technology is less and less science fiction. Today, some would even retort to the filmmaker: why bother about the other?
It is no coincidence that this is accompanied by the triumph of woke ideology – and its neofeminism -, which participates in a Protestant, and therefore puritan, religious revival. In some literature, romantic passion and seduction are nothing more than “sexual assault” and “rape culture”.
Next to the pornography that floods the web, type the word “sexuality” on the Internet and you will only see “sexual abuse”, “rape” and other apocalyptic expressions. Afterwards, we will be surprised that young French people recently interviewed by Release dream of an asexual world.
All this in an era which nevertheless continues to claim to be “open to others” when it has never been so full of itself and no longer even tolerates sexual otherness. As if the very first otherness, that which founds human duality and its centuries-old culture, was not first and foremost that of man and woman.
If the repression of sexual assault is progress, the democratic dream which consists in these matters of demanding absolute transparency is totalitarian. In France, hadn’t an environmentalist MP proposed making it an offense to not share household chores? When will the Penal Code be under the covers, the reading of the rights before the first kiss and a formal contract before coitus?
As a character would have said Waltzes : ” And love ? Mess ! »