Month: May 2009

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Five Foot, Six Inches

I’ve been asked to clarify the notion of the sex dwarf.

As I said when I first began to write about the current French president, the term is not meant to be disparaging. It may seem a little disingenuous to say that it is meant as a compliment, but it’s true. I see Nicolas Sarkozy as one of a long and illustrious line of men who choose to make up in libido* what they lack in stature.

I’m not going to share here my reasons for believing that Nicolas Sarkozy is a sex dwarf. I will simply say two things: he is short (5ft6 is short, especially if your wife is 5ft9) and – as has been both widely observed and repeatedly suppressed – he is sexually predatory.

From Ancient Egypt to Aubrey Beardsley, sex dwarves have peopled mythology and haunted the human imagination. Dynamos of erotic energy, powering both the ego and the id, they are life’s doers (and shaggers). My reason for dwelling on this aspect of his person? I do not think that politics alone are sufficient to explain his baffling conquest, first of the French people and then of Carla Bruni. I suspect that the French nation was seduced, as was Carla, by the sheer force of the man’s will to power and, while I cannot speak for the latter, the former seems to have woken up the morning after the election either shaken or appalled by the dark forces that drove them to choose this nietzschean superman over his distinctly chaste adversary, the rather goody goody daddy’s girl – Segolene Royal. (I also think we can agree that whatever one may feel about the man’s policies, life in France would have been considerably less interesting if they had not.)

*li.bi.do |ləˈbēdō|noun ( pl. -dos): the energy of the sexual drive as a component of the life instinct (Psychoanalysis)

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Reconstructed Female seeks Unreconstructed male

Two female friends wrote to me recently, deploring the mutual bafflement that was coming between themselves and their boyfriends. One of them was French with an Englishman and the other, English with a Frenchman.

“It’s good to notice that even a British women has come across the problem of repressed English boys!” wrote La Francaise. For I had guessed at what she was going through, having experienced it myself: she was fed up with not feeling sufficiently desired and was appalled by the fact that he seemed to prefer a night out drinking with his friends than a night in bed with her.

The Englishwoman, of course, was suffering from the opposite. What would she not give for a night out with the girls? Her problem was not her man’s sexual repression, but his persistent tendency to sexualise everything. Beyond the first flush, his refusal to let her develop beyond the sex slave and their relationship beyond a parody of 9½ Weeks, was suffocating her. She felt, she said, like a character in a film he was directing: “It was as if he had the script in his head and I kept wandering from it and disappointing him.” In his keenness to fan the flames by acting out his idea of the love affair, he was actually snuffing out her desire for him.

For this is a reconstructed woman, he’s dealing with, who will resist submission and infantalisation, both by-products of what he sees as vital components of the sexy woman. She is used to contractual relations between men and women and the hard, brittle, intellectual tussle that they bring. And so she will call it a day, choosing the need for autonomy over the ‘ecstasy of submission’ (as Finkielkraut calls it).

My French friend, on the other hand, knows that she is not sacrificing her intrinsic autonomy by submitting to the rules of the Game of Love. As long as she is with Englishmen she will continue to miss the playful, erotically charged, wilfully mindless games-playing of L’amour a la francaise. Keep contractual relations out of the bedroom, says she, for therein lies the secret of erotic longevity. Play the game and preserve the mystere that Catholic societies have ever sworn by to keep the faith.

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The Work Life Divide

A bizarre poll, claiming to take the temperature of the nation after two years of Super-Sarko, reveals that a large majority (75%) admire the man for his ‘courage’ and ‘dynamism’ and at the same time, condemn the president (73%) for his inability to ‘listen’ and ‘to solve the problems of the French people.’

TF1 posted the results on its site. I think the readers’ comments reveal more than anything the nature of the divide that defines this nation.

At 23h35 on 6/5/09 Axel in London wrote:

“Those who affirm that ‘all of France is in the street to protest against (Sarkozy’s) policies’ have a weird view of things: even if the March demonstrations were supposed to have been an ‘enormous’ success, they only gathered 3 million French people. It’s true that the opinions of the 61 million others, who were at work or at home, don’t count for anything. Only the views of those who complain count…”

At 11h55 on 7/05/2009 Luc in Paris wrote:

“The reactions of Axel in London don’t interest anyone! He should get out of London and take a look at the extreme poverty of the country he’s living in.”

At 13h41 on 7/05/2009 Axel in London wrote:

“…That is very definitely one of the main reasons why I stopped voting left and started voting right: today in France, we are graced with a magnificent leftist intellectual dictatorship: ‘you think of France as we do or you don’t exist.’ Thank God I left France, a country being eaten away from the inside…”

At 16h40 on 7/05/2009 Xavier in Houston, Texas wrote:

“Bravo Axel in London (…)! The French don’t ever stop complaining, not working much and earning a lot!!!! Wake up, Sarkozy is doing a good job. If people stopped striking every month and finally got down to work, you wouldn’t be in this mess !!!!! Every time I come home for a few days, I see it. It’s a complete mess!!!!

The last word…

At 19h30 on 7/05/2009, Max in Boulogne wrote:

@ all expats or foreigners : of course you criticize France and yet you come to a French site…Hilarious! @ Xavier : I’d rather live in France under Sarkozy than in a country where only material and financial success is valued!

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730 Days on…

Yesterday was the second anniversary of Sarko, the sex dwarf’s presidency. I didn’t write anything on the day because I really couldn’t work out what to say about him. Nothing at least that I haven’t said already: which is that two years ago, when faced with a choice between the passive, matriarchal figure of Ségolène Royal and her ‘gentle revolution’ and the strutting and libidinous Sarkozy and his promise of ‘rupture’, this ancient patriarchy, in thrall to the libido, inevitably chose the latter.

Today I still don’t know what to make of Sarko’s record so far. Of course the majority of France (65%) thinks his presidency has been rubbish. (It is useful to note that exactly the same majority condemned Chirac after the same period in office.) My suspicion is that Sarko knows that he’s actually doing ok. Despite the trumpeting tone of the unions, last week’s grand Mayday rally saw half as many people on the streets as there had been for the general strike of March 19th.

In fact, I fear that the French democratic model, which dictates reform (or lack of it) from the streets, is in serious jeopardy. The eight unions may well have plastered over their differences in order to get their supporters marching together on Mayday in a big show of unity, but they are, in reality, at each other’s throats. Why? Because Sarkozy, through a very clever political sleight of hand, and without new legislation, managed to change the rules by simply rolling back the arbitrating power of the State and inviting management and employees to negotiate with each other directly. This was a disaster for France’s main trade union movements who have dominated labour relations and politics since the war, not because of their “representativity” (number of members) but because of their so-called political “legitimacy”.

By encouraging direct negotiations, Sarkozy subtly but radically changed the landscape. Henceforth, only “representative” unions, i.e. those whose members make up at least 30 per cent of a company (and in the years to come that will increase to at least 50 per cent) are allowed to negotiate labour reforms – a move towards democratisation against which nobody could decently object.

This move not only brought to the fore an array of far more radical unions (like Sud) that had hitherto not had a look-in, thereby fragmenting the base, but it has severely reduced the political clout of union dinosaurs like the CGT and the CFDT.

As Charles Bremner pointed out yesterday (as ever, quicker off the mark than me) there is no one remotely credible to stand against Sarkozy. From memory, these elements – a nation in moral and economic crisis, in search of a new identity and leadership that is at least perceived to be strong, with an opposition in disarray – generally lead to a second term.