The Revenge of the Middle-Aged Frenchwoman

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/19/opinion/sunday/france-women-yann-moix.html

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PARIS — I was at dinner with a group of Parisian women this week when someone mentioned the French writer Yann Moix. The table quickly erupted into arguments and denunciations. One woman claimed that Mr. Moix was entitled to express his views, however odious, while others insisted that he should just shut up.

Mr. Moix (it rhymes with “box”) isn’t a neo-Nazi or a racist. He merely admitted this month in the French magazine Marie Claire that he isn’t attracted to 50-year-old women, and that he prefers to sleep with Asian women in their 20s. “The body of a 25-year old woman is extraordinary,” he explained. “The body of a 50-year-old woman isn’t extraordinary at all.” Falling in love with a 50-year-old would be out of the question: For him, women that age are “invisible.”

Mr. Moix’s blunt remarks — made in the context of promoting his new novel, “Rompre” (“Breaking Up”) — aren’t especially shocking. It’s no secret that some older men fancy younger women. When researchers at the University of Michigan tracked messages on an American dating website, they found that women were most sought after at age 18, while men peaked at 50 (exactly Mr. Moix’s age).

Nor is this an exclusively male view. Women themselves often believe that youthful bodies look better: Fashion spreads in the same issue of Marie Claire feature models who look barely out of their teens.

And yet, Mr. Moix has set off a media storm in France and elsewhere, with middle-aged women and others lashing out at him in articles and on podcasts and social media.

“You don’t look a day under 65,” one woman tweeted to him. “I hope you’re lonely until you’re 100,” another wrote. They insulted his literary talent and his under-eye bags, and speculated about his wounded psyche. Magazines reprinted the best zingers. (Few French critics focused on Mr. Moix’s preference for Asian women, except to say he probably buys into the pernicious stereotype that they’re submissive.)

They also submitted evidence to rebut Mr. Moix’s view of older women, including photos of gorgeous middle-aged actresses like Halle Berry. In case a former Bond girl didn’t redeem the whole age class, ordinary women offered themselves up for inspection. One 52-year-old French writer posted a photograph of her admirably toned derrière, and other 50-plus women followed suit — hundreds, according to Mr. Moix. (“I would like 50-year-old women to stop sending me photos of their bottoms and breasts,” he pleaded.)

What does “l’affaire Yann Moix” say about the state of Frenchwomen? Why have Mr. Moix’s comments provoked such anxiety and outrage?

A well-known novelist, filmmaker and commentator, Mr. Moix has made plenty of provocative statements before. But this time he committed the twin sins of inelegance and indiscretion. As a public intellectual he’s supposed to play the “seducteur” who engages in a chaste flirtation with his audience. Announcing that he wouldn’t sleep with some of them kills the mood.

And in a country that lives by the maxim “Not all truths should be told,” knowing what not to say — and what parts of your life to conceal — are key social graces.

“He can sleep with whoever he wants, Yann Moix, who cares?” the 20-something humorist Agnès Hurstel said on France Inter radio. “Desire, erotic thoughts, are never politically correct.” What’s unacceptable, she said, is that Mr. Moix spoke to the magazine “as if he was on the couch of his shrink.”

Mr. Moix tried to explain that he’s a prisoner of his preferences and of his own fear of aging. His relationships with younger women often end painfully after a few months, dooming him to a perpetual adolescence. “It’s not something enviable, it’s something sad,” he said on a French talk show. His new book is based on his misery after a breakup.

But his remarks caught Frenchwomen in a take-no-prisoners mood, and feeling a new solidarity. #MeToo has made them more alert to the discrimination they face. They sense that they are still having to tolerate treatment their American counterparts have squashed, especially at work, and that this isn’t changing quickly enough.

The bedroom was one place where Frenchwomen were winning. Surveys report that they are far more likely to remain sexually active after age 50 than their American counterparts. The way the French see it, everyone is entitled to sex and love, and “there’s beauty in every age.”

Still, aging while female isn’t simple. Even in France it takes delicate internal calibrations to keep counternarratives at bay and stay “bien dans votre âge” — comfortable in your own age.

So there’s a collective satisfaction that Mr. Moix has been put in his place. He and Michel Houellebecq, the French novelist whose protagonists are sometimes revolted by the aging female form, are “the last salvos of an erotic masculine power that’s less and less socially acceptable,” the journalist Cécile Daumas wrote in the newspaper Libération this week.

But while women don't want to be reduced to their sexual allure, they also want to prove that they've still got it. Parisian newspapers and magazines — many of them edited by women Mr. Moix finds invisible — look like a jubilant counterattack: Julia Roberts, 51, is on the cover of Gala magazine (“To Be 50, and So What!” a headline exclaims), and the TV host Karine Le Marchand, 50, is on the cover of French Elle (“She’s as beautiful as a supermodel and as natural as a peasant”).

An ad for the Musée de l’Homme, a museum of anthropology in Paris, features the bones of Lucy, who’s estimated to be 3.2 million years old. “An extraordinary woman over 50,” the caption says.

Mr. Moix insists that there’s hope for him. By the time he’s 60, 50-year-old women will seem young. Alas, I’m not sure any of them will be waiting.

Pamela Druckerman is a contributing opinion writer and the author of “There Are No Grown-Ups: A Midlife Coming-of-Age Story.”

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