Marlene Schiappa, a French minister, has sparked outrage after appearing on the cover of the adult magazine Playboy. Schiappa, who is the minister for the social economy and French associations, posed for Playboy to accompany her 12-page interview on women’s and gay rights as well as abortion. The minister’s photo was featured in Playboy’s French edition for the month of April.
Her decision to appear on the front page of the adult magazine has drawn the ire of both her political opponents as well as her colleagues. According to reports, French Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne told Schiappa that her decision “was not at all appropriate, especially in the current period.”
Green MP Sandrine Rousseau also opined, “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. Women’s bodies should be able to be exposed anywhere, I don’t have a problem with that, but there’s a social context.”
Meanwhile, the French minister defended her decision by tweeting on April 1, “Defending the right of women to do what they want with their bodies, everywhere and all the time. In France, women are free. Whether it annoys the retrogrades and hypocrites or not.”
Not a ‘soft porn magazine’
After the backlash, the adult magazine also came out in defence of the minister by saying that they are not a ‘soft porn magazine’.
The magazine’s editor Jean-Christophe Florentin told AFP that Schiappa was the most “Playboy compatible” government minister “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.”
“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, while admitting there were “still a few undressed women but they’re not the majority of the pages.”
This, however, isn’t the first time that Schiappa has landed into trouble. Earlier in 2010, she published a book with sex advice for overweight people, which some criticised for promoting damaging stereotypes. In 2017, she was accused of staging a visit to a so-called “women’s no-go zone” in Paris.