Thursday, October 24, 2024

What do you think of Brigitte Macron being described as "a fascinating character"?

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A lot of people are whitewashing just how creepy Brigitte Macron is. Is she a “fascinating character”? Maybe. But so is Roman Polanski, and so is Woody Allen — famous men whose “fascinating characters” are overshadowed by their pedophilic tendencies… are these things viewed differently by society when the lecherous, predatory older partner is a woman and not a man? You bet.

Brigitte Macron was a forty-year-old teacher. Her own daughter was one of her pupils. And then her eye fell another student — fifteen-year-old Emmanuel Macron. She fell madly in love with him, and he with her. There’s a name for this, of course. Grooming. Brigitte herself speaks of it in more flowery terms:

"A love often clandestine, often hidden, misunderstood by many before imposing itself…"

All the romantic, flowery language in the world cannot undo the ridiculous power imbalance and age gap. I mean if young Emmanuel had been 18, it’d still be odd but perfectly legal. At fifteen, however, his brains were nowhere close to being fully formed. His parents sent him away to a school in another city to seperate the pair. But Brigitte, like that “misunderstood love” she so poetically waxed about, kept imposing herself…

Brigitte Macron ended up getting married to that classmate of her own daughter, whom she had an illicit affair with when he was a boy of just fifteen while she, herself, was a married mother of three. You can white-wash the creepiness and call her “a fascinating character” but I bet if she had been a man and Macron a woman, no one would have called this story romantic or sweet. 

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