Posing for Playboy an act of female empowerment, says French minister

A French minister has said women should be featured in Playboy “if they enjoy it” after she posed for the front cover of the magazine and gave an exclusive 12-page interview.

Marlene Schiappa, one of Emmanuel Macron’s highest-profile ministers, has defended her photoshoot, saying that like Pamela Anderson, she found it an “act of emancipation”.

“If some [women] want to pose in a men’s magazine and enjoy it, I think that we shouldn’t blame them,” Ms Schiappa, the outspoken secretary of state for social economy, told the men’s magazine in a lengthy interview released on Thursday.

The release of the interview, which ranges from women’s rights to wokeism and whether politics is an aphrodisiac, coincided with the 11th day of mass strike protests against Mr Macron’s pension reform. Critics have claimed it is a smokescreen to cover the president’s political woes.

She finds intelligence attractive

Ms Schiappa, 40, a former erotica novelist, whose books include Dare to Have a Female Orgasm and Good Girls Don’t Swallow, has previously defined herself as a “sapiosexual”, a person who finds intelligence sexually attractive.

Under the headline “Marlene Schiappa, a liberated minister”, the front shows her covering her body with a white dress that reveals part of a bare thigh. Similar insider shots show her with a tricolour ribbon and another in which she covers her modesty with her bare hands. In others, she poses in a skin-tight, cream-coloured sleeveless garment with red boa. In another, she wears a Lycra blue dress. None are explicit.

Even before Playboy’s release, Ms Schiappa was reprimanded by her boss Elisabeth Borne – France’s longest-serving female prime minister – who complained the interview was “inappropriate”. The slap-down turned her into “Playboy’s best press attache”, according to editor Jean-Christophe Florentin.

This week, gender equality minister Isabelle Rome waded in, telling Le Figaro: “I wonder why would you choose Playboy to try to advance the cause of women when this magazine is a concentration of sexist stereotypes? It’s all about the culture of women as objects.”

In the interview, Ms Schiappa argued that her frankness was “an advantage”.

“Because people say that politics has become colourless, that everyone resembles one another... I don’t resemble anyone else.”

She cited Ms Anderson as an inspiration after the US former glamour model spoke of how posing for Playboy had been “an act of emancipation that allowed her to re-appropriate her own decisions”.

“The question of sexual freedom is for me a political issue,” she insisted.

“Women should be able to do exactly as they please, whatever the backsliders think. If they want to dress up like nuns and never meet a man, we should support them. It’s the same thing if they want to pose nude in a magazine – even if in my case I’m clothed!”

‘Is politics an aphrodisiac?’

The lengthy interview covers much ground, including the question: “Is politics an aphrodisiac?”

Skirting the issue, she replies: “In political combat, there is adrenaline because one is transcended by what one believes in.

“I like to convince people and when one likes to convince it can go via seduction but not necessarily. It’s quite tricky when you are a female political to find the right dosage,” she added.

The interview also delves into the prolific activist-turned-politician’s past as an erotic novelist, literature which she said she was “proud of”.

“I think it’s important that the erotic collective imagination is not written only by men,” she said, claiming that she felt “safer” in the presence of erotic authors than “with certain male politicians”.

“For those who don’t know erotic literature, it is a universe in which one is very respectful of consent,” she says.

For the most part, the interview focuses on her work as a women's rights defender within Mr Macron's government, tackling topics that include domestic violence, street harassment and sexual abuse.

Politics, she said, can be a source of frustration and the ends justify the means. “I spent several days at the UN defending women’s conditions in the world and very few people talk about it so thank you Playboy for talking about it!”

Ms Schiappa had short shrift for wokeism, saying: “It is absolutely fundamental to defend the universal rights [of women] and not to descend into relativism” which she defined as a school of thought whereby a certain abhorrent practice “becomes acceptable because it is customary”, such as excision or child marriage.

In response to sarcastic comments from opponents such as Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the Leftist leader, who said her interview was a sign France was going “off the rails”, she said politicians should stop being such a bunch of killjoys.

“I often say that you don’t have to be sinister to be a minister,” she said.

Quoting Oscar Wilde, she added: “Be yourself, everyone else is already taken.”