However, though Agacinski is an important contemporary thinker, I don’t think she has been any more influential on this commission and its thinking than anyone else. I’m fairly sure that the Dutch and Belgian thinkers who made a similar argument weren’t doing so under her influence. Perhaps the French commission was, but they could also have been influenced by any number of other thinkers who take Freud seriously.

However, if all of those gendarmes with machine guns everywhere I looked weren’t evidence of a demand for law and order, I don’t know what would be. But I agree about women in politics: I would be more surprised if a woman became president of France than if one became president of the U.S.–and I would be surprised in either case.

France has traditions, and they don’t like to see another way. There is that woman is the Socialist Party who wants to run for the Presidential Elections. This is impossible for French people to accept a woman as President. Politicians from her own party (the Left who are suposed to be open-minded) said on the news: “Who’s going to look after the kids?” My people are a sexist nation of machos stuck in their traditions and scared of change.

This is a bit off topic, but aside from murder rates, I don’t think the evidence supports your statement. According to data from a 1999 international victimization survey, robbery and assault rates were higher in France than in the U.S. The difference might even be greater today, since crime rates have been trending down in the USA, and my impression is that they have been rising elsewhere. International comparisonsn are always tricky, but I haven’t seen any solid evidence that USA crime rates other than murder are much higher than other developed countries…in fact, they often appear to be lower. (Of course we also have a much more punitive justice system in the US.)

I presume that you mean by this that Americans showed a greater sense of “traditional values” by being scandalized by his behavior and turning the event into a major political battle, while Europeans didn’t seem to care about infidelity. Moral Americans versus immoral Europeans. From the European perspective (as a European, not as a Mormon): “Hey, even a president is still a human being who can be tempted into plain stupid private behavior and tries to talk himself out of it – shame shame shame – and let’s now continue with our full attention to social security, health care, international relations and the needs of the Third World.”

Of course women are used to sell everything here, too, it’s just that in Europe they use women’s bare breasts to sell mayonaise. (No joke. In Spain I saw a television commercial that showed a man in the kitchen grooving his hips to match the movement of his hand spreading mayonnaise on a piece of toast. Into the kitchen walks his bare breasted girlfriend and they both groove while he holds the mayo-spread bread for her to take a sumptuous bite with a sultry eye. It made quite an impact on a young missionary used to seeing mayo marketed by moms saying “My kids like BestFoods best!”)

Well, thank goodness that never happens here!!