‘The age of consent is inconsistent’

The French presidential frontrunner’s marriage to a woman 24 years his senior has captivated public attention.

Brigitte and Emmanuel Macron.

With Emmanuel Macron suddenly within reach of becoming French president, his intriguing marriage has captivated public attention.

Photos are everywhere showing the young candidate with his wife, Brigitte Trogneux, a woman 24 years his senior who was his drama teacher when he was 15.

Trogneux explains the determined young schoolboy seduced her. “Bit by bit, he defeated all my resistance, in an amazing way, with patience,” she told the BBC.

Macron sees his unusual relationship as an electoral plus. “He wants to give the idea that, if he was able to seduce a woman 24 years his senior and a mother of three children … despite opprobrium and mockery, he can conquer France in the same way,” says Macron’s biographer, Anne Fulda.

• PROFILE: Emmanuel Macron the maverick

Naturally many condemn such talk as somehow undermining efforts to protect vulnerable young people from sexual exploitation. We’ve learned all too much about institutional abuse of children by adults with responsibility for their care. There are very good reasons for rules about relations between teachers and pupils, which apply in France as elsewhere.

That said, perhaps the Macron marriage could open the door for a more nuanced conversation about the complexities of such relationships. It certainly is refreshing to see the French laissez-faire attitude to erotic matters assert itself with such a flourish when the nanny state has such a grip in so many other countries, including our own.

There’s no way such a man would have a hope of being head of state in Australia — the thought would have ABC’s Insiders audience choking on their organic muesli.

Far from applauding any man who boasts of his schoolboy ­seduction prowess, we now rewrite people’s sexual histories so that even relationships that prompt fond memories in the younger proponents are defined as damaging.

In 1993 Blanche d’Alpuget wrote on lust in the book The Eleven Deadly Sins in which she described her experience as a 12-year-old having a “wonderful love affair” with a neighbour, a 54-year-old District Court judge.

“He used to walk me home from the bus stop and he used to call me, ‘Mon petite souris Blanche.’ I think I was a precocious child and I was a child who certainly wanted to join the world of adults.”

D’Alpuget has always regarded this relationship as a positive experience.

“Contrary to the usual pattern of the child feeling helpless, hopeless, disempowered and ashamed, I felt the opposite,” d’Alpuget says in a foreword to her chapter, adding that she knew her father would probably kill the man if he knew about the affair, “so instead of seeing myself as a victim I had a sense of empowerment.

“We were both playing with fire, but he was the one who would get burnt. Inadvertently, the combination of the randy old pervert and my father set me up for life never to feel subservient or inferior to men.”

When her article was published, there were outcries in the media. Therapists said d’Alpuget had been psychologically damaged but refused to recognise it. Press reports of this incident invariably mention that she was “abused” when she was young.

This doesn’t make sense. Even though we seek to protect young people by establishing strict rules about adult responsibilities, does it follow we must treat d’Alpuget as delusional for defining her own experiences in her own way?

Geraldine Doogue once conducted a radio interview with a researcher talking about teenage males who have sexual encounters with older males or females. The expert said the problem was sometimes these young men didn’t define the experiences as abusive — they saw them as positive, valuable, pleasurable. But when ­Doogue suggested this might not always be a problem for these older teenagers, the researcher was horrified. She was convinced the destructive effects of these experiences eventually would take their toll.

The reality is, particularly with older teenagers, such experiences are culturally defined and their outcome quite variable. Just look at the age of consent issue. Different countries, different cultures don’t agree on when a young person is old enough to make their own decisions about sexual relationships. In Turkey the age of consent is 12; in South Korea it is 20. Within Australia it varies from state to state. In Victoria, it’s not illegal for a child under 16 to have sexual experiences with someone up to two years older but in Tasmania it’s OK for a 15-year-old to have sex with someone up to five years older.

Yet woe betide anyone who suggests the variation in these rules shows how culturally prescribed and confusing this issue can be. Flamboyant British commentator Milo Yiannopoulos lost his highly lucrative book deal last year over comments he made about sexual consent. The twittering mobs were furious that this self-proclaimed “Dangerous Faggot” was to earn a cool quarter-million for his new book.

An old video conveniently surfaced showing Yiannopoulos speaking in his usual joking style about the “arbitrary and oppressive idea of consent”. He said although 15 seemed about right there were “certainly people who are capable of giving consent at a younger age, I certainly consider myself to be one of them”.

All hell broke loose and he lost the book deal, issued an apology for having offended abuse victims and eventually publicly claimed he now believed these experi­ences were abusive. Later this year our cinemas will be showcasing a new movie, Call Me by Your Name.

Here’s the plot: A 17-year-old named Elio living in Italy during the 1980s meets Oliver, a 24-year-old academic who has come to stay at his parents’ villa, and a passionate relationship develops between them.

Of course, many such movies are European, like the string of novels revealing the complexities of liaisons amoureuses between older women and young men — most famously Stephen Vizinczey’s In Praise of Older Women, and Bernhard Schlink’s The Reader. Here are cultures that still celebrate the multiplicity of experiences that abound in matters of the heart.

In puritanical Anglo-Saxon countries we now use the protection of children to justify an increasingly narrow and repressive view of these complex relationships.

Yet romantic entanglements that push the envelope will continue to flourish, as Macron’s romance so amply demonstrates.