Was Foucault a Paedophile?

I corresponded recently with a feminist friend with whom I agree on most political issues. I told her I am currently writing a book about child abuse and gender identity politics. In doing so I’m utilising many concepts provided by the late French philosopher Michele Foucault. “What I can’t understand,” my friend replied, “is why you can keep writing about this guy who was a vile paedophile … even if he may have had some good ideas.” 

I’m constantly challenged about using an alleged paedophile’s ideas to reflect on, well, paedophilia. Recently the feminist journalist Julie Bindel has added her voice, not to me personally, but to the chorus of accusations against Foucault currently circulating on social media. She wrote an article in December 2021 entitled Call a Child Rapist a “Child Rapist” where she accuses Foucault of being a child rapist, an age of consent abolitionist, and an apologist for child sexual abuse.

My questions in response to this article are the following: Was Foucault a vile paedophile, a child rapist, and a child sexual abuse apologist? Will children be protected by the current rush to cry “paedophile”? Are Foucault’s ideas about power, sex, and identity antithetical to a feminist analysis of child sexual abuse?

Foucault: A Child Rapist and Sexual Abuse Apologist?

Bindel relies on the widely-discredited accusations made by the French essayist Guy Sorman for her charge that Foucault is a child rapist. Sormon reports that during a weekend visit to Foucault in Tunisia in the late 1960s where the latter lived from 1966 to 1968, he observed that Foucault would have sex at night in the local cemetery with pre-pubescent boys. Bindel quotes Sorman: “They were eight, nine, ten years old, he was throwing money at them and would say ‘Let’s meet at 10 pm at the usual place’… He would make love there on the gravestones with young boys. The question of consent wasn’t even raised.”

The media sensationalised Sorman’s allegations which have consequently taken on the mantle of Truth. Foucault’s colleagues, friends, and his long-term partner the sociologist Daniel Defert immediately complied a select bibliography to dispel the myth and make accurate information widely available. Sorman’s accusations have been effectively debunked as phantasmagorical. 

Secondly, Bindel asserts that in 1977 Foucault was a signatory to a petition demanding a change to the law which she describes as “obliterating the legal concept of an age of consent.” Foucault did indeed sign an Open Letter to the Commission for a Revision of the Penal Code Governing Relations between Adults and Minors. Along with 80 other notable signatories, including Simone De Beauvoir, he did not campaign against an age of consent but was concerned there should be an equalisation of the consent laws between homosexuals and heterosexuals, a demand that by 1982 was successful in changing the law in France as it was here in the UK.

Thirdly, Bindel describes Foucault as belonging to a group of “male sexual libertarians” for whom, since the 1960s, “child abuse apologism is rife.” She refers to a brief passage written by Foucault to support her allegation:  “There is a disturbing scene where a little girl gets dragged into a ditch and sexually assaulted, which he describes as a ‘timeless bucolic pleasure’.” 

If your blood is boiling at this point about Foucault condoning child sexual assault, let me first describe the passage to which Bindel refers in his words elaborating the purpose of this passage in the context of Foucault’s larger thesis. I will then go on to address Bindel’s allegation.

The Lapcourt Incident

In The History of Sexuality: Volume 1 (1979) Foucault describes an incident in the village of Lapcourt, France in 1867 where “at the borders of a field” the “village half-wit” paid a girl “a few pennies” to play “a familiar game” of “curdled milk,” (in other words, to masturbate him) which “the older girls refused him.” 

The Lapcourt incident, Foucault argues, is politically and historically significant as the first documented case in French history of the construction of the medical identity “the paedophile.” Before the 19th century, the relationship between power and sex was the power of authorities (the Church, the Law, and the Patriarchal Family) to say “No!” to any sex which did not take place between the “legitimate” married couple. By the end of the 19th century, and for the first time in history, sovereign power was combined with the bio-power of medicine and psychology. These latter constructed the human being as having a sexed identity connected to who they “really are” by nature, in doing replacing the religious “soul” with the psychological “soul.” Paedophilia joined other constructed medicalised identities such as “the pathological homosexual” or in the case of women “the nymphomaniac” and “the hysteric” whose sexed souls were psychologically unhealthy. “Paedophilia” separates mentally “unhealthy men” who have sex with children from allegedly healthy “normal men” who only have sex with women, preferably their wives. So far, so good.  Foucault has provided a materialist analysis of how our dichotomous sexed bodies–we are either male or female–are invested with gendered meaning by the culture and operated on by bio-power. 

This passage is anomalous however in that Foucault, the arch-theorist of power, sex, and the social construction of “the sexed subject,” evacuates this incident of any power. Before the construction of the medical identity “the paedophile,” Foucault tells us that sex “between simple-minded adults and alert children” was about “inconsequential bucolic pleasures.” Foucault says of the sex: “… this everyday occurrence in the life of village sexuality, these inconsequential bucolic pleasures became from a certain time not only the object of a collective intolerance but of a judicial action, a medical intervention, a careful clinical examination, and an entire theoretical elaboration” (31). He asks: “What is the significant thing about this story”? He answers: “The pettiness of it all” (1979, 31-32).

Feminists Give the Lapcourt Girl a Voice

Although childhood is demonstrably a social construct (throughout history different cultures have defined childhood differently), it is also a materially real stage of human development and dependence. Bindel says Foucault “seems to not appreciate the vast amount of power an adult has over a child.” I agree with her. But Foucault also neglects consideration of another fundamental power relation, patriarchy or the power relation between men and women, of which he also wrote.

Thankfully, the Lapcourt girl and the countless girls throughout history have been given a voice by feminists. Feminists have a long and honourable history of insisting that men’s use of girls for sexual gratification is indeed an everyday occurrence, but not one that is petty and inconsequential. Since the second wave of feminism in the 1970s, feminists have raised public awareness of the ubiquity of child sexual abuse and that it is typically not perpetrated by deranged or pathological paedophiles but by “normal” men–fathers, stepfathers uncles, family friends, the man next-door. 

The writer and journalist Susan Dalgety has recently written about how she was sexually abused as a child by a familiar man. Referring to herself in the third person, she says: “He would press a damp sixpence into her shaking hand and grunt, thank you. As if it was a consensual act, one that she, a small child whose breasts had not yet started to bud, had agreed to share with him.” Dalgety says, “the shame of those sixpences still haunts her.” “As soon as she was free of her abuser, she would rush to the village sweet shop and spend his money on sugary treats. Even now, she wonders why she didn’t throw those coins in the dirt, where they belonged.”

Bindel is correct, Foucault is a child sexual abuse apologist in this passage about the Lapcourt incident. Shame on him to attribute sexual agency–“alertness”–to the little girl. Since she was bribed to masturbate the man, this might have given him a clue that she wasn’t motivated by desire! This brings me to note a particularly overlooked sociological phenomenon whereby men think—Foucault apparently included—that an erect penis is axiomatically an object of desire for girls and women (as demonstrated by the current unsolicited ubiquity of “dick pics” circulating on social media and dating sites). I wonder whether it occurs to some men that their penis might even be an object of revulsion, in particular for a child!

In righty castigating Foucault, Bindel nevertheless misunderstands his thesis. She asserts that in his view “sexual attraction to pre-pubescent children is a sexual identity and somehow hardwired, as opposed to chosen or socially constructed.” She is wrong. For Foucault “true identity” is a fiction, a fabrication, a chimaera, but one nevertheless that modern social justice liberationists hold onto as if “…therein lies a truth every bit as precious” as the truths human beings in previous ages have “demanded from the earth, the stars” (158). 

I suspect Bindel is unaware that she agrees with Foucault in that she too rejects the idea that “paedophilia” is “a medical condition.” Unlike Foucault in this passage, she focuses on a feminist analysis of power and sexed identity: “The feminist fix for the sanitisation of child sexual abuse is to get rid of all the euphemisms and medicalised terms and to call these individuals child rapists and child abuse apologists”

Moral outrage at “paedophiles” would not have helped all the other peasant girls across France in the 19th century when “paedophile” was first coined as a medical term. And its denomination has not helped the generations of girls since. For example, the working-class girls in our own communities in the 21st century such as those in Rotherham were sexually abused with impunity before the very eyes of the police and social workers. Just as Foucault called the Lapcourt girl “alert,” the Rotherham girls were given sexual responsibility for their abuse.  

Although it might feel like safeguarding, crying “paedophile!” does not get to the root of men’s sexual predation. It places the locus of responsibility onto routing out the “perverts” and the “sick” from our society and it deflects us from recognising the sex of those carrying out the abuse. It throws a veil over the truth, namely that the men who sexually abuse children are often in all other respects “normal blokes.” 

“Woke” Push-back Against Feminism

In the last 50 years, ideas that normalise men’s sexual use of children have been mobilised according to whichever version of social justice is currently fashionable. In the post-war 1960s and early 1970s the idea that throwing off prudish Victorian, sexual “repression” can be a route to personal liberation was part of the cultural zeitgeist. It was in this context that libertarians argued that “intergenerational sex” should become destigmatised. For example, the Paedophile Information Exchange (PIE) in the UK promoted the idea that adults, should be able to “share mutual sexual pleasure” with “consenting” children without legal sanction. PIE was accepted as a legitimate voice by well-established civil society organisations such as the National Council for Civil Liberties (NCCL, now known as Liberty). In libertarian circles of the 1970s women who refused to accept that children could “consent” to sex with an adult, or that “intergenerational sex” is about sexual liberation, were derided as man-haters, biological essentialists, extremists, bigots, right-wing traditionalists, and sexually repressed prudes. I know, I was there!

Although it became socially unacceptable to express such views during the 1980s, largely due to the indefatigable work originally undertaken by feminists, by the end of the 20th century there was a return to the issue of “intergenerational” sex, in particular by so-called Queer Theorists and the espousal of alleged “sex positivity.” Bindel claims Peter Tatchell, a prominent LGBT campaigner in the UK, is one such child sexual abuse apologist. In 1997, Tatchell defended a book that returned to the issue of “intergenerational sex” as a harmless activity. He claims the author was “courageous.” Tatchell says he has been reliably informed by friends who, when they were children aged 9 to 13 had had sex with adults, had not felt abused but that it “gave them great joy.” Tatchell argued that “it is time society acknowledged the truth that not all sex involving children is unwanted, abusive and harmful.”  

The proposal that it is “natural” to sexually desire children is resurfacing, although this time as something which shouldn’t be acted upon. The idea is taking shape that there is an inherent, sexed identity, where some individuals, colloquially known as Minor Attracted Persons (MAPs), are born with a proclivity to sexually desire children. MAP as a “true identity” is taking place within a cultural context of social justice which requires the unequivocal affirmation of a gendered/sexed “soul.” 

Empirical evidence of the predation of girls by men is ignored by the Left. Yet any poll of women demonstrates that, at the very least, many of us (perhaps even the majority of us) as girls were exposed to an erect penis flashed in a public space. I, for example, was five years old, walking my little dog with a friend in the local park. Perhaps the reason why male violence cannot be recognised as prevalent–much easier to target a few aberrant “paedophiles”!–is that, if it were, it would have to be acknowledged that sex self-identification laws and policies have serious consequences for the protection of girls, for example in changing rooms, in organisations such as the Girl Guides in the UK, and so on.

Foucault as a Resource

On one memorable occasion, two to three years ago, I was invited to talk at a radical feminist conference about a theorist of my choice who had significantly influenced me. I began my talk about how, when I started my PhD, I had specifically intended to expose Foucault’s ideas as irrevocably male-centred with no relevance for a materialist analysis of sexist oppression. I went on to change my mind. I had hardly begun to speak when an esteemed professor fled the room vociferously deriding me for using the work of a paedophile. She collapsed in the hallway outside, fearing, as she told those who rushed to her aid, that she might be about to have a heart attack. 

Inside the conference room, the delegates found me culpable of causing “distress by Foucault.” It was only the intervention of a highly respected black lesbian radical feminist whose credentials as a non-Foucauldian were indisputable, and who came to stand shoulder to shoulder in support of hearing me out, that the baying crowd was eventually quelled. I will never forget her kindness and good sense.

But what struck me then, and what has preoccupied me since is the similarity of the professor’s emotional responses and those of the trans activists and trans allies who have plagued my academic career since 2016. These latter accuse me of wanting nothing more out of life than to suppress gender non-conformity, to hoard all human rights for myself and other women and they allege that my “hate” literally causes the murder of men who identify as women. In other words, my speech can cause death. Who knew?

I will continue my journey with Foucault since I am intellectually enabled by the conceptual lens he has provided. It is not just that “he has some good ideas” as my friend described in her email. Many theorists have those. I use Foucauldian concepts because they are a unique resource. No philosopher to my knowledge has analysed and encapsulated the high political and emotional stakes involved in the modern construction of the sexed (and gendered) “soul.” Using Foucault’s concepts, neither deifying the theorist nor demonising the man as a “child rapist” without evidence, enables me to carry out a critical appraisal of the current fashion for “true identity,” whether of the “trans woman,” the “trans child,” the “paedophile” or the “Minor Attracted Person” (MAP).

By the way, I never was allowed to continue with my talk at the radical feminist conference.