French secretary of state Marlene Schiappa criticized by own party over Playboy photoshoot

A top minister for French President Emmanuel Macron has come under fire from members of her own party for posing for the cover of Playboy. 

Marlene Schiappa, French secretary of state for social economy and associations, appeared clothed, though in a plunging white bodysuit with her legs apart, on the issue of Playboy France. In the magazine, a 12-page interview spread details her position on LGBTQ issues and women’s rights, Reuters reported. 

Le Parisien newspaper reported that Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne called Schiappa to tell her the decision to pose for Playboy was “not at all appropriate, all the more so in the current period.” Green MP and fellow women’s rights activist Sandrine Rousseau also doubled down on criticizing the timing of Schiappa’s cover, the BBC reported. 

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“Women’s bodies should be able to be exposed anywhere, I don’t have a problem with that, but there’s a social context,” Rousseau told BFM TV channel. 

The cover comes as France is in the midst of a social crisis over Macron’s decision to reform the pension system by raising the retirement age to 64 from 62 by 2030. Demonstrations, which began in January, escalated in response to Macron pushing the bill through the lower house of parliament without a vote. 

“France is going off the rails,” leader of the far left opposition party La France Insoumise, Jean-Luc Melenchon, tweeted, reacting to Schiappa’s cover, as well as Macron’s decision to give an interview to children’s magazine Pif Gadget, according to Reuters. 

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Since 2017, Schiappa has served a variety of high-profile positions, including secretary of state for gender and equality, and minister delegate in charge of citizenship. Before her career in politics, she was a feminist author, and as equalities minister in 2018, introduced legislation outlawing catcalling and street harassment. 

The BBC reported that she was accused of staging a visit to the so-called “no-go area” for women in Paris in 2017. 

“Defending the right of women to have control of their bodies, that’s everywhere and all the time. In France, women are free. With all due respect to the detractors and hypocrites,” Schiappa tweeted in her own defense Saturday. 

French Playboy’s editor Jean-Christophe Florentin also defended Schiappa as the most “Playboy compatible” of ministers in Macron’s cabinet because of her stance on women’s rights. 

“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,” he said.