The aftermath of DG's resignation - what next for the FFSG?

PRlady said:
Oh believe me I know. Our tolerated pedophiles are in savagely religious communities, from the Amish to some evangelical sects to ultra-observant Jews and Muslims. It’s a different breed than claiming the right of the elite to do what they want sexually, but either way the victims are victims.
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I think you have an overly rosy view of the situation in the United States. Consider the writings of Camille Paglia and the accusations against Roman Polanski and Woody Allen. Consider the cases of Jerry Sandusky and Larry Nassar, members of another kind of secular elite. Or read the Mexican bordello scene in On the Road.

That said, I also think that your suggestion that the French view of Americans as overly puritanical should be considered in a new light was right on point.
 
Vagabond said:
I think you have an overly rosy view of the situation in the United States. Consider the writings of Camille Paglia and the accusations against Roman Polanski and Woody Allen. Consider the cases of Jerry Sandusky and Larry Nassar, members of another kind of secular elite. Or read the Mexican bordello scene in On the Road.

That said, I also think that your suggestion that the French view of Americans as overly puritanical should be considered in a new light was right on point.
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What I was trying to say is that there is no claim here that the artistic elite gets to sleep with children, and Allen and Polanski have paid some price even if they never go to trial.

But the French reaction to DSK in some quarters - after all, she was just a maid! and those puritanical Americans blah blah. Same thing as someone (Didier?) claiming that Cipres was being victimized by those same silly Americans.
 
Vanessa Springora, who wrote her experience as a victim of Matzneff, certainly opened the way for others French victims, along with the actress Adèle Haenel a few months before her. The age of consent in France is not fixed, so not everyone would consider a sexual act with a 15 year old as pedophilia (certainly not the French President and First Lady).

Vanessa Springora (and Adèle Haenel) clearly showed that the consent of a teenager with a man twice her age as dubious as best, but I believe than many people consider Matzneff a pedophile not because of what happened with Springora, but from his (published) memoirs where he wrote about sex with 8 to 10 years old boys in Thailand. Springora certainly helped move the French general public to understand that situations like Abitbol's were rape.

Matzneff wasn't famous as a writer to the general public though, it was pretty niche. I had never heard of him outside of a scandal almost a year before when he received a French Literature Prize (the Prix Renaudot). Like the NYT article said, he had not a big readership. He wasn't studied at universities as a contemporary author or anything, unlike other authors of his generation. He somewhat was more of a socialite.

I find it hard to pin it as a complete French vs American culture. The US has its fair share of dubious famous writers. I think a lot of Beat generations writers, including Ginsberg and Kerouac (On the Road was already mentioned in this thread), should be examined. Burroughs, outside being almost certainly a pedophile, also killed his wife. It doesn't prevent him from being seen as a literary genius by some American elite.

De Beauvoir falls into a more general trend of LGBTQ+ and feminists movement of the 60-70 supporting "alternative sexualities", including pedophilia, in both the US and France. Some historians have documented the official "pedophilia support" stance of some LGBT political groups. Pedophiles were seen to a minority akin to homosexuals, because their sexual orientation was the cause of discriminations. Sulamith Firestone (an important American feminist whose book The Dialectic of Sex I read with a lot of interest) was also pro-predophilia, which surprised me. She has very modern passages about feminism, radical even for today. But she ends her book with a call for sexual freedom of children, that she considers a class exploited like women.

(Another problem with De Beauvoir is that she has been accused of having sex with her high school students. So depending of their ages she might have been an active pedophile. Her books, so far I have read, do not talk about pedophilia, or desire to have sex with boys and girls)

So weird stuff going on there and a lot of stuff changed between the 70 and today. Framing it as a "France vs US" culture difference is misleading.

Edit : But yeah, the "puritanity" of the US (vs "Latin flirt") has been used by some reactionary people against feminist movements in France. This was definitively the case with DSK. I think indeed the FFSG tried to use that to defend Ciprès. Minus the xenophobia, the "American puritanity" accusation might be similar to the "Triggered" or "snowflakes from a liberal art college" reactionary arguments that are used everywhere.
 
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Article with video interviews with Brian Joubert and Véronique Guyon (who used to coach Joubert)
france3-regions.francetvinfo.fr

À Poitiers, Brian Joubert et Véronique Guyon réagissent à la démission de Didier Gailhaguet

Samedi dernier, le président de la Fédération française des sports de glace, Didier Gailhaguet démissionnait à la suite de plusieurs accusations de harcèlement sexuel dans le milieu du patinage français. Brian Joubert et...
france3-regions.francetvinfo.fr france3-regions.francetvinfo.fr

I don't speak French but based on quotes and autotranslate, Joubert "is struggling to digest the attacks on the man who has always supported him" and still thinks that because DG himself wasn't in the habit of sexually assaulting skaters, it's unfair that the discussion has centered around him; whereas "Véronique Guyon is more clear-cut on the issue" and says DG "put the wolf in the sheepfold" and is therefore responsible.
 
I'm feeling extra cynical tonight and I just don't believe an election this early is a good thing, because it comes before the whole fed has been razed to the ground and cleared out. I would bet anything DG has a crony puppet who will run and be elected for him and then things will go on as they did before, and DG will worm his way back in somehow.

Hopefully the Sports Minister is ready with the wrecking ball.
 
misskarne said:
I'm feeling extra cynical tonight and I just don't believe an election this early is a good thing, because it comes before the whole fed has been razed to the ground and cleared out. I would bet anything DG has a crony puppet who will run and be elected for him and then things will go on as they did before, and DG will worm his way back in somehow.

Hopefully the Sports Minister is ready with the wrecking ball.
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From what I understand it's a procedural requirement - they had to set a date so they'd be functional in the event that the Minister doesn't withdraw the delegation for good. But yeah, one of DG's cronies slithering into the spot so that he can play eminence grise for a while before reemerging from the shadows would not surprise me. I really hope the Minster does withdraw the delegation so a whole new federation can be built from the ground up, with nobody who was involved in the management/running of the previous one allowed involvement until a) the new federation is fully established and b) they can prove their bona fides.

ETA: The timing just a few days before Worlds is pretty petty, too.
 
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misskarne said:
I'm feeling extra cynical tonight and I just don't believe an election this early is a good thing, because it comes before the whole fed has been razed to the ground and cleared out. I would bet anything DG has a crony puppet who will run and be elected for him and then things will go on as they did before, and DG will worm his way back in somehow.

Hopefully the Sports Minister is ready with the wrecking ball.
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I feel the same. That he took a little bit of time to resign so he could organise the next steps. I hope I’m proven wrong :(
 
Viscaro said:
Vanessa Springora, who wrote her experience as a victim of Matzneff, certainly opened the way for others French victims, along with the actress Adèle Haenel a few months before her. The age of consent in France is not fixed, so not everyone would consider a sexual act with a 15 year old as pedophilia (certainly not the French President and First Lady).

Vanessa Springora (and Adèle Haenel) clearly showed that the consent of a teenager with a man twice her age as dubious as best, but I believe than many people consider Matzneff a pedophile not because of what happened with Springora, but from his (published) memoirs where he wrote about sex with 8 to 10 years old boys in Thailand. Springora certainly helped move the French general public to understand that situations like Abitbol's were rape.

Matzneff wasn't famous as a writer to the general public though, it was pretty niche. I had never heard of him outside of a scandal almost a year before when he received a French Literature Prize (the Prix Renaudot). Like the NYT article said, he had not a big readership. He wasn't studied at universities as a contemporary author or anything, unlike other authors of his generation. He somewhat was more of a socialite.

I find it hard to pin it as a complete French vs American culture. The US has its fair share of dubious famous writers. I think a lot of Beat generations writers, including Ginsberg and Kerouac (On the Road was already mentioned in this thread), should be examined. Burroughs, outside being almost certainly a pedophile, also killed his wife. It doesn't prevent him from being seen as a literary genius by some American elite.

De Beauvoir falls into a more general trend of LGBTQ+ and feminists movement of the 60-70 supporting "alternative sexualities", including pedophilia, in both the US and France. Some historians have documented the official "pedophilia support" stance of some LGBT political groups. Pedophiles were seen to a minority akin to homosexuals, because their sexual orientation was the cause of discriminations. Sulamith Firestone (an important American feminist whose book The Dialectic of Sex I read with a lot of interest) was also pro-predophilia, which surprised me. She has very modern passages about feminism, radical even for today. But she ends her book with a call for sexual freedom of children, that she considers a class exploited like women.

(Another problem with De Beauvoir is that she has been accused of having sex with her high school students. So depending of their ages she might have been an active pedophile. Her books, so far I have read, do not talk about pedophilia, or desire to have sex with boys and girls)

So weird stuff going on there and a lot of stuff changed between the 70 and today. Framing it as a "France vs US" culture difference is misleading.

Edit : But yeah, the "puritanity" of the US (vs "Latin flirt") has been used by some reactionary people against feminist movements in France. This was definitively the case with DSK. I think indeed the FFSG tried to use that to defend Ciprès. Minus the xenophobia, the "American puritanity" accusation might be similar to the "Triggered" or "snowflakes from a liberal art college" reactionary arguments that are used everywhere.
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What an interesting post, and we should include Camille Paglia in the group of people who seem to make excuses for pedophilia. (Her motto should be, if it's sex, it's good.) This is an area where older feminists might say but times are different, but that excuse holds NO water in this situation, it's not a practice of a particular time like bra-burning. I also read Firestone and De Beauvoir and for whatever reason, this excusing of theirs didn't make an impression at the time.

The Beats were famous (I think primarily) for being transgressive. But what do you do with Nabokov and Lolita? A literary masterpiece with the most distasteful protagonist this side of Doesteyevsky.
 
I had to read Lolita in college, and I HATED it; I remember racing through as fast as I could, just to get done. It's hard to read it without feeling the desperate need for a shower, or maybe two or three. However, it's pretty generally agreed upon that Humbert is meant to be distasteful and that what he does is wrong. There are probably people who get the ideas and the themes wrong -- there always are -- but bottom line, it isn't Nabokov's endorsement of pedophilia. (That's me bending over backwards to be fair, because as I said, reading it was a pretty icky experience.)
 
French skaters who have talked about sexual abuses so far :

- Martine Olivier-Moulinot, an french ice dancer of the 70s, whom her coach tried to lock with him in hotel bedroom during a camp in Germany. She threatened him to tell everybody and he let her go. At the time, she was french silver medalist behind Muriel Boucher (not yet Zazoui). She entered 4 world championships and 3 Euros.

- Hélène Godard, raped in the 80s by coach Beyer at 13-14 yo and by coach Jean Roland Racle at 15 yo (Racle said she was more than 18yo and consenting) at the club des Français Volants, in Bercy or at the summer camp in La Roche Sur Yon

- Nancy Sohie, a belgian skater who trained in France with coach Jacques Mrozek at the begining of the 80s, who had her leave Bruges and her parents at 13yo and had her move in with him as his "secret girlfriend" between 14yo and 18 yo. Mrozek coached in France but also abroad, in Belgium, Switzerland, Netherlands or in the US. She says she was under his influence and going toward self destruction until her parents got her out of there.

- Babeth Cavaillé who was skating with the Français Volants club in the 80s. She was raped several times at the La Roche sur Yon Summer Camp when she was 12yo. She doesn't say a name but the modus operandi is the same than what has been described by the other girls. At 15yo, she was raped by an ice dance coach during a summer camp in Toulon.

- Agnès Gosselin, six times french champion, signaled to Annick Gailhaguet inappropriate touching by Beyer and also that she was being sexually abused by the father of the family who was hosting her. She was told to shut up for the sake of her career.

- Anne Bruneteaux was sexually abused during the same period. She was 13 yo-15yo by coach Michel Lotz in Asnières. He had her sleeping at his house and was taking baths with her for masturbation purpose.

- Béatrice Dumur had the same thing happening to her with Lotz in the second part of the 80s. She talks about rapes.

- Sarah Abitbol in the 90s raped by Beyer at 15 yo within the Français Volants club in Bercy and at the summer camp of La Roche sur Yon

- Laetitia Hubert in the 90s who is cited as not willing to go public again about her own case (she was 15 too) with Beyer but supports Sarah

- Anne-Line Rolland was raped at 12 yo by her coach Pascal Delorme in Nancy in the 2000s. Thanks to 7 girls testimonies without any support from the federation., he was convicted in 2003 for multiple rapes. Anne-Line is the sister of the pair skater Vivien Rolland.

- Vanessa Gusmeroli talked about Beyer's behaviour during a summer camp in La Roche sur Yon and informed Lucine, her former coach. She said she wasn't a target.

- Catherine Huc, Vivien Rolland's partner, was abused at 16 yo by a french skater during the evening after the end of the pair competiton at the 2000 Nice World Championships, then by another one the day after while she was avoiding the first in the second's room. She blocked the memory for 20 years. This is more blurry for her as the thing she knows is that many people were totally drunk but not her and that both took her by surprise, without violence. She never had the occasion to give her consent or not, she reminds it as body and mind split. It was her first sexual experience. She stopped competing at the end of the season.

- 2010 Nadjma Mahamoud and her mother talk about Beyer's sexual harassment. Nadjma left within weeks after her arrival in Bercy.



Watching the podiums of the french championships of the 70s on Wikipedia is scary

1968LyonPatrick PéraPhilippe PélissierJacques Mrozek[1]
1969Boulogne-BillancourtPatrick PéraPhilippe PélissierJacques Mrozek[1]
1970Boulogne-BillancourtPatrick PéraJacques MrozekDidier Gailhaguet[1]
1971MegèvePatrick PéraJacques MrozekDidier Gailhaguet[1]
1972ChamonixPatrick PéraDidier GailhaguetWilly Bargauan[1]
1973StrasbourgJacques MrozekPascal DelormeChristophe Boyadjian[1]
1974Boulogne-BillancourtDidier GailhaguetPascal DelormeGilles Beyer[1]
1975ReimsDidier GailhaguetGilles BeyerJean-Christophe Simond[1]
1976AsnièresJean-Christophe SimondGilles BeyerChristophe Boyadjian[1]
1977AmiensJean-Christophe SimondPierre LamineGilles Beyer[1]
1978BelfortGilles BeyerMichel LotzChristophe Boyadjian[1]
1979ToursJean-Christophe SimondMichel LotzPatrice Macrez[1]

Jean-Roland Racle was 7 times french pair champion between 1968 and 1975




Girls from the 80s are talking, led by the girls of the 90s.
What is scary is all the girls from the 2000s and 2010s whom we KNOW had the same trajectories and had several bizarre things happening in their career. The potential of horror stories is intact.
 
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@PRlady I have not read Lolita (and I do not really want to...) so I hardly have an informed opinion. From what I know, Nabokov might have been attracted to young girls (why else would you write such a book ?) but in interview he always clarified that Lolita was a victim of a pedocriminal, just a child and not a temptress or anything else his readers might have projected on her, and certainly not in anyway guilty of what happened to her. I think however that that this book (or the idea of it, don't know if so many people read it) might have been used by pedophiles to romanticize their crimes in many countries.

If you're interested, here is a bit more referenced info on the French context in which Abitol made her revelations :
  • In September Mona Chollet publishes a book called "Witches, The Unbroken Power of Women" (Sorcières, La puissance invaincues des femmes). This goes straight to the top of the bestseller list in France. This is a book against sexism in general, not only rape culture, but it criticizes how DSK and Polanski are treated in France. This, along with other successful feminist books, really shows a trend of renewed interested in feminism in France.
  • In November 2019 Adèle Haenel, a very famous French actress, recalls her experience of sexual assault by a now forgotten French director. You can see the video here with English subtitles. Haenel is very interesting but it is quite long. Everyone condemns this not-famous director, but the double standard with Polanski (whose most recent film is a public and critic success) is apparent. The Adèle Haenel case was really heavily discussed in France, and the critics against Polanski are renewed.
  • In December 2019 Springora publishes her book. Once again the double standards between how Matzneff vs. more famous aggressors like Polanski, DSK, Besson are more and more questioned.

So by the time Abitbol comes in, you have more French journalists know how to report rape cases and more people willing to listen to it than 2, 3 or 5 years ago.
On French rape culture I read a book that I found very enlightening by Valérie Rey-Robert, called "Une culture du viol à la française" (A French Rape culture). She has written a very interesting article on the subject that you can Google Translate (like the rest of her blog if you're into French feminism) but the book is sadly not translated into English.

In other news Nathalie Péchalat is running for President of the FFSG : here is the L'Equipe article. Gwendal Peizerat is surprised, doesn't know yet if he will run against her (source).
 
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Wyliefan said:
I had to read Lolita in college, and I HATED it; [...] but bottom line, it isn't Nabokov's endorsement of pedophilia.
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No? I'm glad. (as far as I know, mystery writers are not murderers either)
Too bad you couldn't read Lolita with different eyes, really too bad ...
 
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Well, if you understand the writer's intention, you have the opportunity to see all these monsters in human form, for (another) example in the tradition of Georg Büchner's Woyzeck, who said: "Every human [or human soul] is an abyss, it makes you dizzy when you look down".
This helps immensely, especially when looking at oneself.
 
overedge said:
@Nmsis I hope we can share this chart if/when the ISU finally responds to what's happening in the FFSG. I for one am not really interested in "blah blah this is terrible blah blah we protect all athletes", if nothing meaningful is done.
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Well, a 16 yo figure skating athlete was sexually assaulted in a hôtel at a major ISU championship.
It was 20 years ago but I think the ISU should very much be looking into how it protects minor figure skaters during its championships as of now. :nopryde: :revenge: :shuffle:
 
Wyliefan said:
I had to read Lolita in college, and I HATED it; I remember racing through as fast as I could, just to get done. It's hard to read it without feeling the desperate need for a shower, or maybe two or three. However, it's pretty generally agreed upon that Humbert is meant to be distasteful and that what he does is wrong. There are probably people who get the ideas and the themes wrong -- there always are -- but bottom line, it isn't Nabokov's endorsement of pedophilia. (That's me bending over backwards to be fair, because as I said, reading it was a pretty icky experience.)
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I recently heard a French interview of Nabokov himself which was absolutely fascinating to hear where he himself sets the record straight about the creation of the "Lolita" or nymphet persona. It was a broadcast about the Gabriel Matzneff scandal and the book Consent mentioned in another post (highly advise the whole broadcast actually if you can understand French, Nabokov starts at the 19m30s)
The expression lolita standing for a sexually precocious young girl who is the one enticing older men through her manners is a total misreading of his book. One, he never intended. He says the sick male protagonist sees a provocative girl but that is in no way what the girl is in reality. She is just a 12 year old girl and can't be pervers that way. So people who, at the time used, this novel to justify the fact little girls good actively derail the life a grown men were just trying to find an excuse for their own mental distortions.

He literally says "Lolita is not a pervers young girl. It is a poor child who has been debauched and whose senses will never awaken under the touch of the disgusting Mr. Humbert."

Sorry for the off-topic but that Matzneff case has been very present on the French media, with good reasons. Those guys should be forced to take responsibility for what they've done. The wider public should also better understand what it is to be trapped in an unequal power relationship.
 
Viscaro said:
In other news Nathalie Péchalat is running for President of the FFSG : here is the L'Equipe article. Gwendal Peizerat is surprised, doesn't know yet if he will run against her (source).
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How likely is she to be elected? I know she ran for the ISU athletes' comission a few years back and didn't get elected. This is a much bigger deal - is she in a better position in terms of potential support?

cs.berlin said:
No? I'm glad. (as far as I know, mystery writers are not murderers either)
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There's Anne Perry. But otherwise what authors write as fiction isn't necessarily a reflection of who they are.
 
cocotaffy said:
I recently heard a French interview of Nabokov himself which was absolutely fascinating to hear where he himself sets the record straight about the creation of the "Lolita" or nymphet persona. It was a broadcast about the Gabriel Matzneff scandal and the book Consent mentioned in another post (highly advise the whole broadcast actually if you can understand French, Nabokov starts at the 19m30s)
The expression lolita standing for a sexually precocious young girl who is the one enticing older men through her manners is a total misreading of his book. One, he never intended. He says the sick male protagonist sees a provocative girl but that is in no way what the girl is in reality. She is just a 12 year old girl and can't be pervers that way. So people who, at the time used, this novel to justify the fact little girls good actively derail the life a grown men were just trying to find an excuse for their own mental distortions.

He literally says "Lolita is not a pervers young girl. It is a poor child who has been debauched and whose senses will never awaken under the touch of the disgusting Mr. Humbert."
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I haven't read Lolita but I've read Rebecca Solnit's essay Men Explain Lolita to Me which quotes Nabokov's wife Vera expressing a similar sentiment: “I wish, though, somebody would notice the tender description of the child, her pathetic dependence on monstrous HH, and her heartrending courage all along…”

It's a good essay IMO and sort of not very off-topic in this discussion?
I sort of kicked the hornets’ nest the other day, by expressing feminist opinions about books. It all came down to Lolita. “Some of my favorite novels are disparaged in a fairly shallow way. To read Lolita and ‘identify’ with one of the characters is to entirely misunderstand Nabokov,” one commenter asserted, which made me wonder if there’s a book called Reading Lolita in Patriarchy. The popular argument that novels are good because they inculcate empathy assumes that we identify with characters, and no one gets told they’re wrong for identifying with Gilgamesh or even Elizabeth Bennett. It’s just when you identify with Lolita you’re clarifying that this is a book about a white man serially raping a child over a period of years. Should you read Lolita and strenuously avoid noticing that this is the plot and these are the characters? Should the narrative have no relationship to your own experience? This reader thinks so.

All I had actually said was that, just as I had identified with a character who’s dismissively treated in On the Road, so I’d identified with Lolita. I read many Nabokov novels back in the day, but a novel centered around the serial rape of a kidnapped child, back when I was near that child’s age was a little reminder how hostile the world, or rather the men in it, could be.
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re: Pechalat
Zemgirl said:
How likely is she to be elected? I know she ran for the ISU athletes' comission a few years back and didn't get elected. This is a much bigger deal - is she in a better position in terms of potential support?
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Was that the election she lost to Coughlin? :slinkaway

I remember she did get elected to ISU ice dance committee but then resigned because of a "potential conflict of interest situation" due her role as a skating commentator or something.

 
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