El País — Houellebecq wants to be a “woman who has been raped”

The writer’s literary licence conceals a dangerous prejudice: once again insisting that it is characteristic of women to say yes and later think no. Or to say no while actually wanting yes.

Nuria Labari · El País · 8 April 2023

Michel Houellebecq’s latest provocation is that very soon we will all be able to watch him having sex in the experimental Dutch film Kirac 27, directed by Stefan Ruitenbeek. Yet Houellebecq does not want to make his debut in the world of artistic pornography. Although he signed a document agreeing to participate in the film, he now regrets doing so. So much so that he has tried to block its release in the courts, in Amsterdam and Paris. But with a contract and consenting adults involved, nobody rules in his favour. The film will be shown, and he feels like “a woman who has been raped”, as he confided to EL PAÍS. It is striking that the writer is incapable of simply feeling violated as the man he is, and feels he must change gender in order to experience humiliation or shame. Could Houellebecq now be a victim of patriarchy? Or would he like to be? Personally, I cannot resist a close reading of an interview in which every line is worth examining.

“I feel, though much less intensely, more or less what women who have been raped feel. I have the impression that my body doesn’t belong to me. I also have the impression that I feel shame. And the third thing is a distrust and a lack of interest in sexual relations,” he explains. It is astonishing that the French literary star’s rich imagination cannot conceive of men who have been raped, and that he describes what women who are victims of rape feel as though they were all the same and the same thing happened to all of them, as though they were concepts rather than people. I also find it suspicious that he invokes the image of a woman who has been raped to describe a situation — his own — in which someone signs a contract to engage in sexual relations that he later regrets. In other words, Houellebecq is a woman who has been raped but who previously consented, even enjoyed the sex, and then later self-identifies as a woman who has been raped. A literary licence that conceals a dangerous prejudice: once again insisting that it is characteristic of women to say yes and later think no. Or to say no while actually wanting yes. Sex and consent, as we all know, are terribly confusing, full of nuance and darkness. And, that being so, anyone can be a woman who has been raped, including Michel Houellebecq. A dangerous assertion. Because although sex is ambiguous and desire can be playful, even monstrous, victims of rape are not a literary product or a philosophical misunderstanding. Being a woman who has been raped has nothing to do with changing one’s mind, but with an abuse knowingly committed by the aggressor.

Yet it is incredible how, throughout the interview, the writer pursues the legitimacy of the victim he is not by trying to identify with the image of a woman who has been raped. And it is embarrassing how, to do so, he deploys his sexist imagination, in which women are political subjects destined to suffer sexual abuse by men. He, who has used and abused male privilege, now also wants to enjoy the recognition accorded to victims of sexist sexual abuse. Thus his appetite for privilege, including the privilege of not honouring the contracts he signs, turns him into the worst version of himself. It is clear that he is going to write about it, and clear that this is why he is constructing the status of victim, so that afterwards, as a woman who has been raped, he can denounce the inconsistency of sexual consent.

The matter is particularly mean-spirited when we consider one of the trailer’s promotional images. In bed are Michel Houellebecq, aged 67 and wearing sober silk pyjamas à la Hugh Hefner, owner of the Playboy mansion, and young Jini van Rooijen, thirty or forty years his junior, in a floral negligee and with a smile from ear to ear, happily seduced by the writer’s sexual and intellectual vigour. This image — of a very young woman, ideally underage, irresistibly drawn to the intelligence of a man of letters — has been indulged, celebrated and encouraged by a supposed French sexual freedom that Vanessa Springora already denounced in her book Consent. There, she recounts the relationship she had at fourteen with the writer Gabriel Matzneff, 36 years her senior, with her consent and that of her entire family and cultural milieu. Springora denounces how, for decades, the French cultural imagination has relentlessly insisted on idealised cinematic and literary depictions of unequal relationships shaped by the power of one party — the cultivated man — and the innocence and vulnerability of the other: the naïve girl, whose body is at the service of the former’s pleasure. It is therefore unsurprising that porn actor Houellebecq remains faithful to the stalest French macho eroticism. Indeed, although the recipient of France’s national literature prize says he feels like a woman who has been raped, he never asks how young Jini van Rooijen, who will appear in the film having sex with him, might feel. Or how his wife, Qianyum Lysis Li, with whom he has also had sex for the film, might feel. Why does the writer not mention his female partners’ right to privacy? Even when feeling like a woman who has been raped, he cannot put himself in a woman’s shoes.

Nevertheless, in the interview he looks crushed and distressed. But as a disoriented literary star, not as a woman who has been raped. Houellebecq senses that, on his current path, they will not give him the Nobel. Literary recognition is at a low ebb for sexist discourse, and the little Hugh Hefner scene is conspicuously damaging to his social prestige. He is very aware that the French Nobel was awarded to a woman, Annie Ernaux, his ideological polar opposite. Does Houellebecq think she was awarded the Nobel because women are fashionable, or can he imagine — I am not even speaking of accepting — that she is a great writer? We will never know, because his arrogance is such that Houellebecq boasts of not having read Ernaux. “To be honest, I haven’t really read her. I won’t say anything bad about her because I don’t know her work well.” In other words, saying something good does not even occur to him. Ernaux? What Ernaux? What Houellebecq wants now is to be the new woman of French letters, to be both the victim and the privileged man. And that is why, in the same interview, he announces that he is going to write his story as a woman who has been raped. “I’ll change people’s names, except mine. I’ll write it in the first person. I think it’s more or less the only thing I know how to do, and it might do me good by helping me destroy the memory,” he explains.