“People make history, but they don’t know the history they are making. Patrick Buisson may well be classified on the right and often qualified as a conservative, he likes to quote this sentence from Karl Marx. Rarely has it been better illustrated, he believes, than by those crazy years which, in the last century, were both those of the sexual revolution and those of the feminist revolution.
In a work abounding in a culture that is both scholarly and popular, the former adviser to Nicolas Sarkozy and director of the Histoire channel attempts to paint a portrait of this individualist revolt which, mixing hedonism and consumerism, has resulted in the world which is ours at the start of the 21ste century.
With a title inspired by a song by Serge Gainsbourg, Decadance (Albin Michel) presents a thesis that is bold to say the least. What does Buisson tell us if not that the sexual revolution, presented as part of the emancipation of women, has led to the commodification of bodies, to pornography and to a gigantic sex industry? That the explosion of families and divorces has led to an impoverishment of women never before seen in history? That the generalization of contraception and the arrival of the pill – reforms on which the author obviously does not wish to go back – have subjected women to a veritable pharmaceutical diktat?
According to the essayist, one cannot understand the #MeToo movement without taking into account the bitter failure that women feel despite half a century of feminism. “Today, the #MeToo movement is a neo-puritan feminist reaction to the failure of the sexual revolution of the 1970s. Because, somewhere, there is the idea, to use Simone de Beauvoir’s famous phrase in the force of things, that ‘we’ve been cheated,'” he said.
Men, the big winners
This sexual revolution, says Buisson, would have been carried out essentially for the benefit of male interests. “Moreover, the first American feminists of the Women’s Lib wondered if the sexual revolution caused by the pill was not in the process of granting phallocracy all the privileges it had always demanded: no marriage, no children, mating without forming a couple, the consumption of women without having to support them emotionally or financially…”
“Before, there had always been illegitimate love and adultery. But, in all walks of life, when you got a girl pregnant, you had to marry her. With the sexual revolution, there were no more constraints of this type. What had always traditionally been women’s currency—their bodies—was totally devalued. Basically, it is the masculine conception of sexuality that prevailed. »
In 1982, two Quebec sociologists caused a scandal at a symposium of the French Movement for Family Planning by denouncing through the pill “a greater domination of male sexual imperatives” and “a mimicry of male sexuality”.
Because it must be said that the sexual revolution goes hand in hand with that of consumerism which, in a few decades, has invaded the smallest corners of private life. “It is a Christian Marxist who says it, the filmmaker Pier Paolo Passolini. He is one of the first to have warned against this new mode of production, which not only manufactures merchandise but a new humanity based on what is most impersonal in man. However, this consumerist revolution no longer extends only to commodities, but also to bodies. »
This, the first feminists had also sensed. “They clearly saw that alongside the undeniable progress represented by the control of fertility, there was a dark side, a price to pay through the desacralization and commodification of the female body. In the libertarian-liberal couple, it is the liberal who always wins. Despite the promise of unimpeded enjoyment, sexuality has become part of the market through the sex market, but also sexology or sex therapies. On arrival, sex always pays off. You will tell me that this was already the case with prostitution; but from now on, it’s the whole world of interpersonal relations that finds itself in the sphere of the market. »
Men like the others
Likewise, Patrick Buisson deplores the fact that the massive entry of women into the labor market has never taken into account the specificity of female work. “Female work is not specific to modernity. It has always existed. Women have always worked, whether on the farm, with craftsmen or in trade. What was new was wage earning. »
“For the graduates from the bourgeoisie, work was a completely legitimate form of fulfillment. But for 90% of women, these were underpaid and underskilled jobs. This is where feminism failed. Instead of adapting work to women, motherhood was seen as an obstacle. It had to be removed or made so that it did not disturb. While pretending to despise it, the feminists of that time had masculinity as a model – Simone de Beauvoir always had Jean-Paul Sartre as an unsurpassable model. So we decided that women would be men like the others. »
Basically, it is the masculine conception of sexuality that prevailed.
Does this mean that today we should go back? “In a dechristianized society, it is quite obvious that Catholicism cannot claim to impose its ethical criteria on the majority. But was it therefore necessary to abandon any policy of aid to women who wanted to raise children? With the female wage earner, not for a single moment did this society which proclaims itself to be humanist and feminist concern itself with what was becoming of the condition of women at work. We simply wanted them to bend to the laws of the market without taking their uniqueness into account for a single moment. »
Similarly, no one had foreseen the impoverishment of women that would result from the multiplication of divorces. In France, 80% of over-indebtedness commission files concern women. “In bourgeois circles, divorce is not a problem,” says Buisson. But in popular circles, no one wanted to see the consequences for children, delinquency and drug consumption. All this has been perfectly studied in the black American ghettos. That does not mean that we had to stay in the previous regime, but that we had to try to estimate the social and human consequences. »
After 50 years of sexual revolution, Patrick Buisson is not surprised by the return of puritanism. He quotes the philosopher Denis de Rougemont who, in Love and the Westfinds that all periods of great sexual freedom are followed by a cycle of puritanism.
“Christianity, a religion that initially spread mainly through women in the eastern Mediterranean, was in a way a reaction to the debauchery of the Roman Empire. What has been called courtly love was a reaction against the excessive sexual freedom of the Middle Ages. In the society of Rabelais, people feasted in the churches. To the debauchery of the court of François Ier succeeds what has been called the movement of Precious, ridiculed by Molière. In France, the Revolution was very anti-feminine and directed against the political power of salons run by women. This is why it is also wrong to attribute to monotheistic religions the taboos that weighed on sex. These prohibitions are also found among the philosophers of Antiquity. »
A new moral order?
If the reaction of a movement like #MeToo to the sexual libertarianism of previous years does not surprise him, Patrick Buisson does not absolve current feminism from all criticism. Quite the contrary.
“At least early feminism was coherent,” he says. He was in revolt against the state’s hold on bodies and said: “My body belongs to me.” From the 1970s, we witnessed a reversal of the law. Originally designed to defend the interests of society against the encroachments of individuals, it becomes the weapon of individuals against society. It is no longer a question of men paying the “blood tax” by becoming a soldier; women do the same with the duty of motherhood. It is considered that the interest of the individual is superior. »
Strangely, the “neo-feminists” today have a radically different discourse, he says. “They claim a cop and a magistrate at the four corners of the bed. A control over sexuality and the private sphere that the first feminists challenged. We have rightly criticized the moral order imposed by the Church in France or in Quebec. Today, it is neo-feminism that claims to impose a new moral order on us with its police, its coercion and its controls. When it comes to fighting domestic violence, who would oppose it? But most of the time it is a criminalization of the male who does not say his name. It would be the height if, after Simone de Beauvoir’s trial of feminine essentialism, we allowed ourselves to essentialize men by declaring them violent by nature or by identifying them with a so-called “culture of rape”. »
So, is Patrick Buisson really this “reactionary” that some describe? “I don’t dream of yesterday’s world,” he says. The old world was obviously full of frustrations and flaws. But his successor is not ideal either. We have replaced priests with shrinks, but the existential, metaphysical void makes us champions of the consumption of psychotropic drugs. I do not see what superiority we could claim. This should lead us to more modesty when we revisit the past. We are very good at shooting the dead who, obviously, cannot defend themselves…”