The panel nods understandingly

Hugh Schofield at the BBC wrote a piece last January on a tv confrontation in 1990 between a Paris literary dude who boasted of “seducing” young girls and a woman who pointed out it wasn’t something to boast of.

The footage can easily be found on the internet. In a jocular tone the programme’s respected presenter, Bernard Pivot, asks Matzneff (then aged 53) what it is like to be a serial “collector of young chicks”.

All bald-headed suaveness, Matzneff explains how he prefers school-age girls who have yet to be “hardened” by disillusionment over men. He says they come to him because he listens and takes them seriously.

The panel nods understandingly. A Catholic woman who is there to defend fidelity in marriage laughs, as if at a charmingly naughty child.

But then Pivot turns to a woman who has so far been silent, a Canadian writer called Denise Bombardier, and the atmosphere suddenly changes.

“I feel like I am living on a different planet,” says Bombardier coldly. And she launches into a devastating attack on her neighbour.

Does he not understand anything about the rights of children, she asks. Has it never occurred to him that these young girls may end up damaged?

But the intellectuals of Paris gave her a hard time, not him. Imagine my surprise.

She had been warned by her publisher that attacking Matzneff would not go down well – and so it proved.

In newspaper articles she was described as “frustrated” and a “bitch” (the French is even more obscene).

“So (Bombardier) has discovered that in the year 1990 girls of 15 make love to men who are 30 years older than they are! Well, big deal!” wrote one critic.

Ah yes, girls of 15 “make love” to men of 45 – aka men of 45 rape girls of 15. It’s all in your point of view, eh what?

But what interested me was the “how times have changed” bit.

It is a measure of the extraordinary rapidity of moral change in our times that none of this could conceivably happen today.

By no stretch of the imagination could a contemporary author write so blithely of his seduction of underage girls – and, in Matzneff’s case, of boys too.

And even if he did, there would certainly be no-one leaping to his defence, accusing his detractors – like they accused Bombardier 30 years ago – of reactionary neo-Puritanism and failing to understand the wellsprings of teenage sexuality.

Ohhhhhhh yes there would. There would be the “sex-positive” types who do in fact very much accuse critics of reactionary Puritanism, and there would be the likes of Peter Tatchell and NAMBLA.

There is moral change but there’s also a lot of two steps back.

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