Can posing for Playboy be a feminist assertion? A French authorities minister thinks so and has defended her resolution to look — clothed — on the entrance cowl of the infamous journal.

Marlene Schiappa, a 40-year-old feminist writer who was plucked from obscurity by President Emmanuel Macron in 2017, is not any stranger to controversy and has repeatedly angered rightwingers.

But even the prime minister and leftwing critics really feel the minister for the social financial system and associations has made a mistake together with her newest stunt: posing for Playboy to accompany a 12-page interview on ladies’s and homosexual rights in addition to abortion.

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“Defending the right of women to do what they want with their bodies: everywhere and all the time,” Schiappa wrote on Twitter on Saturday. “In France, women are free. Whether it annoys the retrogrades and hypocrites or not.”

The resolution has irritated some colleagues within the authorities which has been battling strikes and more and more violent demonstrations in opposition to plans to lift the retirement age by two years.

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The sight of Schiappa carrying designer attire for a glamour journal was seen by some as sending the fallacious message, with one particular person quoted as saying they thought it was an April’s Fool joke after they first heard about it.

Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne, solely the second girl to occupy the place, referred to as Schiappa to inform her that it “was not at all appropriate, especially in the current period,” an aide advised AFP on Saturday.

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Greens MP and fellow ladies’s rights activist Sandrine Rousseau, an outspoken critic of the centrist authorities, mentioned: “the place is the respect for the French folks?

“People who are going to have to work for two years more, who are demonstrating, who are losing days of salary, who aren’t managing to eat because of inflation?” she advised the BFM channel on Saturday.

“Women’s bodies should be able to be exposed anywhere, I don’t have a problem with that, but there’s a social context.”

– ‘Not comfortable porn’ –

Playboy has defended the unfold which can seem in its French-language version.

Schiappa was the “most ‘Playboy compatible'” of presidency ministers “because she is attached to the rights of women and she has understood that it’s not a magazine for old machos but could be an instrument for the feminist cause,” editor Jean-Christophe Florentin advised AFP.

“Playboy is not a soft porn magazine but a 300-page quarterly ‘mook’ (a mix of a book and a magazine) that is intellectual and on trend,” Florentin added, whereas admitting there have been “still a few undressed women but they’re not the majority of the pages.”

Other criticism of Schiappa has centered on the broader subject of the centrist authorities’s communication technique.

Macron, who not often offers interviews to the French press, supplied his ideas on political energy and pensions in a protracted interview revealed in youngsters’s journal “Pif, le mag” final week.

Schiappa, a daily on French TV discuss reveals, introduced in laws outlawing catcalling and road harassment whereas serving as equalities minister in 2018.

The mother-of-two was a prolific writer and blogger earlier than her profession in politics, writing in regards to the challenges of motherhood, ladies’s well being and being pregnant.

She additionally penned a 2010 e book that supplied intercourse ideas for the obese which some critics noticed as propagating stereotypes.