Natural Women? Anti-Feminism and Michel Houellebecq's Plateforme

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Modern & Contemporary France

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Natural Women? Anti-Feminism and

Michel Houellebecq's Plateforme
Carole Sweeney
Published online: 01 May 2012.
To cite this article: Carole Sweeney (2012) Natural Women? Anti-Feminism and Michel Houellebecq's
Plateforme , Modern & Contemporary France, 20:3, 323-336, DOI: 10.1080/09639489.2012.674933
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09639489.2012.674933
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Modern & Contemporary France
Vol. 20, No. 3, August 2012, pp. 323–336
Natural Women? Anti-Feminism and

Michel Houellebecq’s Plateforme
Carole Sweeney
Downloaded by [Stony Brook University] at 03:38 27 October 2014
Michel Houellebecq’s novel Plateforme (2001) satirically proposes Third World sex tourism
as a remedy for sexual dissatisfaction in the West brought on by feminism’s destruction of
‘natural’ gender roles. As in Houellebecq’s previous work, feminism is lampooned both as a
sex-negative censorial force and as a kind of mercenary libertarianism. Plateforme more
fully elaborates this position suggesting that feminism is simply an affective projection of
neo-liberalism, responsible for an injurious and ‘unnatural’ sexual behaviour that has
destroyed kinship relations and contributed to the socio-economic emasculation of Western
men. As part of the novel’s Swiftian ‘modest proposal’, the narrative sets up a Manichean
opposition in which an essentialised ‘natural’ femininity, represented by Thai sex workers,
is set against the ruined sexuality of Western women. This article examines the ways in
which the novel’s ostensibly anti-capitalist critique invokes a quasi-primitivist discourse on
sexuality that returns women to a pre-Foucauldian essentialism of the ‘natural’ which
offers a site of sanctuary and solace for a masculinity besieged by the neurosis of post-’68
sexualities.
Plateforme, le roman de Michel Houellebecq publié en 2001, propose le tourisme sexuel

dans le Tiers Monde comme remède à l’insatisfaction sexuelle de l’Occident, due à la
destruction des rôles sexuels ‘naturels’ par le féminisme. Comme dans ses œuvres
précédentes, Houellebecq se moque ici du féminisme dans lequel il voit à la fois une force
de censure anti-sexe et une forme d’ultralibéralisme mercenaire. Plateforme développe
cette position en suggérant que le féminisme est simplement la projection affective du
néolibéralisme, responsable d’un comportement sexuel tout à la fois nuisible et contraire à la
nature, pour avoir détruit les relations de parenté et contribué à l’émasculation économique
des Occidentaux. Dans le cadre de la ‘modeste proposition’ swiftienne de l’œuvre, le récit
établit une opposition manichéenne entre une féminité naturelle essentialisée, représentée
par les travailleuses du sexe [prostituées] thaı̈landaises et la sexualité gâchée des
Occidentales. Cet article examine la manière dont la critique apparemment anticapitaliste
Correspondence to: Dr Carole Sweeney, Goldsmiths, University of London, English and Comparative Literature,
Lewisham Way, London SE14 6NW, UK. Email: c.sweeney@gold.ac.uk
ISSN 0963-9489 (print)/ISSN 1469-9869 (online)/12/030323-14

q 2012 Association for the Study of Modern & Contemporary France
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09639489.2012.674933
324 C. Sweeney
du roman a recours à un discours quasi primitiviste sur la sexualité, renvoyant les femmes à
un essentialisme pré-foucaldien du ‘naturel’, qui offre un lieu de refuge et de consolation à
une masculinité aux prises avec les névroses sexuelles de l’après-68.
In an almost obsessive working over of the terrains of modern sexuality, each of Michel
Houellebecq’s novels to date contain a sustained and contemptuous denunciation of
the radical politics of 1968, in particular the sexual politics of feminism. In
Houellebecq’s work, feminism, often haphazardly collapsed into much vaguer notions
of social and sexual liberation, signified the beginning of the end of ‘natural’ sexual
relations. Regarded in his work as little more than a new opening for the reification of
sexuality, feminism, it is suggested, has produced little more than erotic dysfunction
and a neurotic erosion of both a normative masculinity and femininity. A staple
Houellebecquian feature, anti-feminism reaches its apotheosis in Plateforme (2001),

his third novel. Developing the earlier anti-feminist invective of Extension du domaine
de la lutte (1994) and Les Particules élémentaires (1998b), Plateforme provides a more
elaborately articulated anti-feminism through its narrative structuring conceit—a
quasi-Swiftian proposal advocating Third World sex tourism for men unhappy with
the demands of Western women ‘who do not appreciate men’.1 On a holiday to
Thailand where he enjoys and admires the sexual services of several Thai sex workers,
the narrator, Michel, meets a successful businesswoman, Valérie, who is intrigued by
the sexual appeal of Thai prostitutes and their appreciation by Western men. With her
partner in the leisure industry, Valérie embarks upon a new business enterprise setting
up discreet sex tourism in a number of Third World venues. This new venture debuts
in Thailand just as Valérie is killed on Patpong beach during a terrorist attack by
Islamic fundamentalists.
It has now become something of a critical orthodoxy in Houellebecq criticism to
align oneself broadly for or against the ostensibly reactionary agenda in his novels, or
more precisely, to take a decisive critical position in relation to the narrative techniques
employed to express controversial content. On one side of this critical debate, critics
such as Dominique Noguez (2003) and Fernando Arrabal (2005) assert that
Houellebecq’s agenda is clearly a satirical one and thus any offence expressed along the
way cannot be taken at face value (see also Bowd 2002). Others see Houellebecq’s
writing as an ‘insistent and acerbic critique of capitalism’ (Varsava 2002, 803) that
boldly offers a political agenda eclipsing all other concerns. Those on the other side of
this critical divide argue that, satirical or otherwise, ‘his texts express an unvarying and
unambiguous stance on women, Islam, blacks, homosexuals, ecologists, Americans, etc’
and despite his humorous agility in prodding the hallowed convictions of right and left
alike, Houellebecq does so ‘only to reveal an intellectual myopia of his own’.2 In her essay
‘La Barbarie postmoderne’, Marie Redonnet (1999) acknowledges the interpretative
dilemma posed by Houellebecq’s ideologically double-voiced writing position and
vigorously lambasts him for a ‘hypocritical double-crossing’. Houellebecq’s writing is,
Redonnet claims, thoroughly ideologically duplicitous as he ‘can turn precisely the kind
Modern & Contemporary France 325
of objections made by readers considered too critical back against them: the reader who
dares express a critical opinion is nothing more than a blinkered sheep, a censor, or an
interrogator who wants to caste literature in the name of political correctness and right
thinking’ (Redonnet 1999, 62). This ‘damned if we do’ ideological cul-de-sac
discourages us from speaking directly about difficult material, a critical impasse
recognised by Martin Crowley (2002, 19) as a textual and ideological ‘pre-emptive
closing down of the space of critical dialogue’. Houellebecq’s fiction, Crowley suggests,
both anticipates and deflects charges of being reactionary by a process, however
inconsistent, of disavowal that seems to forestall critical positions: ‘To criticize
Houellebecq for the insistent presence of such material in his texts is, however, to
already situate oneself in a position which these texts themselves criticize’ (20).
The slippery ideological territory of Houellebecq’s writing, then, requires more than a
simple identification and censure of his ‘modest proposal’, rather it necessitates a direct
engagement with what Crowley calls the prose’s ‘insulating frame’ (22). I argue here that
one can obtain some critical purchase, even dare to ‘express a critical opinion’, on
Plateforme’s anti-feminism, through scrutiny of the novel’s ideological manoeuvres to
determine how this anticipatory critical silencing is constructed. Specifically, I examine
the ways in which the novel’s satirical proposal of sex tourism, upon which the anti-
capitalist critique seems to rest, obscures a more troubling and deeply retrogressive
gender politics. Rehearsing another obsessive concern of Houellebecq’s, that of the
‘surestimation insensée’ of critical theory, in particular the work of Foucault, Lacan,
Derrida and Deleuze (Houellebecq 1998b, 314), Plateforme invokes the figure of the
un-socialised ‘natural’ woman in a quasi-primitivist sexual discourse that returns
women to a pre-Foucauldian, indeed pre-theory, biological essence in which they
function as the site of solace for a masculinity reeling from the wreck of culture that has
rendered their ‘natural’ roles obsolete.
The most ubiquitous of Houellebecq’s narrative framing techniques is, what might
be described as, ideological ventriloquism in which potentially controversial material
is situated or thrown somewhere other than in the authorial voice; a strategy of
disowning that ‘disallows any authoritative meta-discourse’ while simultaneously
refusing ‘the singularity of any one discourse’ (Schoolcraft and Golsan 2007, 365).
The following extract from Les Particules éleméntaires exemplifies this technique using
the alibi of a female character as a didactic ambassador who neatly sums up the
trajectory of a failed feminism in a personal anecdote:
“J’ai jamais pu encadrer les féministes . . . reprit Christiane alors qu’ils étaient à mi-
pente. Ces salopes n’arrêtaient pas de parler de vaisselle et de partage des tâches; elles
étaient littéralement obsédées par la vaisselle. Parfois elles prononçaient quelques
mots sur la cuisine ou les aspirateurs; mais leur grand sujet de conversation, c’était la
vaisselle. En quelques années, elles réussissaient à transformer les mecs de leur
entourage en névrosés impuissants et grincheux. À partir de ce moment – c’était
absolument systématique – elles commençaient à éprouver la nostalgie de la virilité.
Au bout du compte elles plaquaient leurs mecs pour se faire sauter par des machos
latins à la con. J’ai toujours été frappée par l’attirance des intellectuelles pour les
voyous, les brutes et les cons. Bref elles s’en tapaient deux ou trois fois, parfois plus
326 C. Sweeney
pour les très baisables, puis elles se faisaient maison avec des fiches cuisine Marie-
Claire. J’ai vu le même scénario se reproduire, des dizaines de fois.” (Houellebecq
1998b, 145–6)
Characteristic of much of Houellebecq’s narrative modus operandi in all of his novels,
this use of ‘thrown’ free indirect speech, what Douglas Morrey calls a ‘facile device to
evade responsibility’ (2009, 149) typically diverts the omniscience of the narrator into
refocalised essayistic asides giving the impression that the ideas expressed are those of
the characters and not of the author. A similar technique is employed to deliver
anti-Islamic comments though the voices of Arab characters who rather implausibly,
but conveniently for the novel, express their disdain for both Arabs and Islam.
The narrator meets an Egyptian biochemist who obligingly rails against Islam: ‘L’islam
ne pouvait naı̂tre que dans un désert stupide, au milieu de Bédouins crasseux qui
n’avaient rien d’autre à faire – pardonnez-moi – que d’enculer leurs chameaux’ (2001,
244– 5). This technique of narrative displacement is secondary, however, to the wider
ideological framing of a critique of Western capitalism which forms a central element
of the ‘double-crossing’ to which Redonnet refers. All of Houellebecq’s novels trace the
incursion of economic principles into the affective and subjective spaces of sexuality,
suggesting that erotic and loving relationships have become defined almost exclusively
by the dynamics of capital. In a collection of essays called Interventions (1998a) he
describes in some detail the deleterious effects of a ‘market society’ on the interiority of
the subject:
La logique du supermarché induit nécessairement un éparpillement des désirs [ . . . ]
D’où une certain dépression du vouloir chez l’homme contemporain; non que les
individus désirent moins, ils désirent au contraire de plus en plus; mais leurs désirs
ont acquis quelque chose d’un peu criard et piaillant: sans être de purs simulacra, ils
sont pour une large part le produit de déterminations externes – nous dirons
publicitaires au sens large. (Houellebecq 1998a, 72)
Elsewhere, in Le Sens du combat, Houellebecq writes: ‘Nous refusons l’idéologie libérale
parce qu’elle est/incapable de fournir un sens, une voie à la réconciliation/de l’individu
avec son semblable dans une communauté/qu’on pourrait qualifier d’humaine’ (2010,
84). This attention to the relationship between the economic and the affective is
scarcely new, or even particularly insightful; the meeting of Marxism and
psychoanalysis in the mid-1980s produced a good deal of invigorating theoretical
work in this area and many contemporary socio-cultural theorists have been exploring
what has been called ‘affective capitalism’.3 However, what is striking here is
Houellebecq’s positioning of contemporary feminism in relationship to this dynamic.
Feminism, according to Houellebecq in Interventions and elsewhere in his work,
operates as an apolitical affective outcrop of free-market economics, and as such
confirms his thesis of modern life as a process of ‘setting into place of multiple
relational exchanges that can be quickly renewed (between consumers and producers,
between employers and businesses, between lovers), so as to promote a fluidity of
consumption based on an ethic of responsibility, transparency and choice’ (1998a, 63).
What I want to argue here is that this ostensibly progressive, if derivative, hypothesis,
that advanced capitalism corrupts our ability to enter freely (already a problematic
concept) into erotic and loving relationships, cannot finally mitigate the suggestion
made in Plateforme that it is the mercenary nature of contemporary feminism,
regarded as little more than the sexual foot-soldier of neo-liberal capitalism, that has
facilitated this ruinous scenario. A reactionary attack on feminism masquerades as
anti-capitalist critique and the veneration for a ‘natural’ non-feminist woman, nascent
in much of Houellebecq’s earlier fiction, takes a central place in the examination of
sexuality and gender in Plateforme.
Setting up feminism as a case study of this anti-capitalist hypothesis, Plateforme
constructs a Manichean opposition between what we might call the ‘good-natural’
non-feminist woman versus the ‘bad-unnatural’ feminist woman. An authentic
non-feminist femininity, represented by the Thai sex workers, ‘a gift from heaven’, and
the main female character, Valérie (316) is represented as a sensual and sexual
sanctuary from a ruinous capitalism and set in distinction to a ‘bad’ and inauthentic
feminist femininity which is mercenary and emasculating, the very embodiment of
capitalism. Clearly, such a crudely drawn opposition is a profoundly regressive move
against over 50 years of feminist theorising on sex, gender and sexuality and, in one
sweeping gesture, collapses the distinction between nature and culture reinstating a
Darwinian biological essentialism that audaciously ignores almost all modern theories
of gender as a social and cultural construction since the beginning of the twentieth
century. At every turn, sexual discourses in Plateforme revert to what Pierre Bourdieu
calls a ‘phallonarcissistic vision of the world’, in which the feminine exists solely to
mutely reflect the presence of the masculine (1990, 30). Crucially, non-feminist
‘natural’ women are venerated with what Julia Kristeva calls a ‘pagan enthusiasm’
(1982, 166) central to ‘the phallic idealization of Woman’; an idealisation requiring
these sexually primitive women are separate from and thus untainted by the social
sphere, their subjectivity kept ‘separated from reason, language and the symbolicity
that . . . alters, socializes, and sexualizes it’. In their separation from the processes of
socialisation that threaten to politicise their sexual and gender identity, Valérie and the
Thai women, both young and exceptionally sexually acquiescent, function as conduits
to a sexual Eden of pre-capitalist existence in which an essential femininity is
ontologised as nature itself. It is crucial that non-feminist women are emphatically not
consumers of sexuality but skilled practitioners in the lost art of sensuality. They know
how to ‘make’ love in the real sense of making, pointing up a persistent anxiety in
Houellebecq’s work around the disappearance of physical skills and the spectre of a
useless masculinity:
Pendant ce temps des gens travaillaient, produisaient des denrées utiles . . .

Qu’avais-je produit, moi-même, pendant mes quarante années d’existence? À vrai
dire, pas grand chose. J’avais organisé des informations, facilité leur consultation et
leur transport; parfois aussi j’avais procédé à des transferts d’argent . . . En un mot,
j’avais travaillé dans le tertiaire . . . Mon inutilité était quand même moins
flamboyante que celle de Babette et de Léa . . . (88)
328 C. Sweeney
The novel portrays modern masculinity as more or less bewildered by his new role as a
worker in the immaterial economy, performing a kind of labour that is both intangible
and indefinable. The narrator, Michel, regards his job with the Ministry of Culture as
fundamentally abstract, almost shamefully mysterious and ineffectual, spending his
time moving intangible pieces of information around within a system that he does not
understand. ‘Nous vivons dans un monde composé d’objets dont la fabrication, les
conditions de possibilité, le mode d’être nous étaient absolument étrangers’ (217). As
an organiser of fiches and dossiers, the narrator’s occupation typifies many aspects of
labour in a post-Fordist economy in which the worker’s role is not one of a maker of
things, a producer of commodities, but that of an enabler and facilitator for the flow of
information and the intensification of the possibilities of differentiated consumption
which he himself must learn to negotiate in all its variations.4
A primitivised essential femininity functions as a compensation for the

disappearance of traditional labour and gender roles as sexually abundant young
female bodies and their ‘small, strange, cleft organs’, their ‘chattes en mouvement’ in the
Parisian peep shows, offer a plenitude of realness, almost a quasi-spiritual deliverance,
from the narrator’s sense of masculine uselessness and unreality echoed in his view of
contemporary culture as exhaustingly over-complicated: ‘Les orientations contra-
dictoires de la vidéo d’art contemporaine, l’équilibre entre conservation et patrimoine
et soutien à la création vivante . . . tout cela disparaissait vite, devant la magie facile des
chattes en mouvement’ (22). Possessors of an almost cosmic warm and generous
fecundity in their real and pulsing sex organs, women’s bodies, specifically their
genitals, are interpellated as a site of a lost immediacy, what Fredric Jameson (1974, 59)
has called in a different context, utopian compensation for the modern subject. These
‘strange organs’ are real; bracingly simple, yet miraculously transformative auratic
spaces in which all social and cultural tension and contradiction is reconciled
(a favourite Houellebecquian word) within the primal folds of its accommodating
flesh. In a postmodern economy of signs characterised by the disappearance of the real,
the female body, in its fleetingly youthful prime, offers a return to the natural and the
lost purity of the real. Michel describes his hobbyist enthusiasm for gazing mesmerised
at ‘des chattes’ as one of his only remaining recognisable human qualities (23). Such
sexual enchantment is nowhere more keenly alive than in the expertise of Thai sex
workers in the Bangkok ‘hostess’ bars called, rather predictably, Naughty Girl, Pussy
Paradise, Classroom, Marilyn, and Venus. Choosing ‘Girl number four seven’ he
happens upon a sex worker who is particularly enthusiastic in her services, ‘qui a envie
de faire l’amour’ and, at the moment of an improbably mutual climax, Michel warmly
hugs her to him after her second orgasm, ‘une contraction très profonde, venue de
l’intérieur’, feeling peacefully, almost blissfully, ‘réconcilié’ in the post-coital moment
(117– 18). The reconciliation is presented here not as a solely physiological, that is
genital, state but as the natural union of two halves of a normative male/female sexual
divide.
Perfect examples of non-feminist femininity, Thai women desire a domestic status
quo, a prelapsarian conjugal scene of traditional gendered division of labour that
Western women have by and large rejected as limiting and oppressive. Writing
(in English) in Phuket Weekly, the owner of the Heart to Heart marriage agency in
Bangkok, Mr Sawasanee (another example of Houellebecq’s ideological ventriloquism)
concludes his article by claiming to be helping ‘modern Western women to avoid what
they despise’.
There seems to be . . . a near perfect match between the Western men, who are
unappreciated and get no respect in their own countries, and the Thai women, who
would be happy to find someone who simply does his job and hopes to come home
to a pleasant family life after work. Most Western women do not want such a boring
husband . . . [they] want someone who looks a certain way, and who has certain
social ‘skills’, such as dancing and clever conversation, someone who is interesting
and seductive. (124)
In contrast to this is a ‘bad’ femininity; that is, one fatally corrupted by feminism’s
encouragement of hedonism and sexual promiscuity: ‘Western women do not
appreciate men, as they do not value traditional family life’ (124). Feminism, the
narrative suggests, has insisted upon ‘unnatural’ social and sexual situations where ‘les
femmes deviendront de plus en plus semblables aux hommes’ and as a consequence of
going against nature women who espouse a feminist sexual politics have been destroyed
rather than liberated by sexual liberation and now know nothing of real bodily desire or
pleasure, focused rather on an actuarial calculation of the advantages of sexual congress
(143). Robert, a member of the package tour to Thailand on which Michel and Valérie
meet, is an enthusiastic habitué of the hostess bars, regarding them as a necessity for
Western men who are suffering from the disappearance of sexually compliant women
since the 1960s. As part of an extended and intermittently absurd racist diatribe taking
in the seventeenth century moralist François de La Rochefoucauld, European
colonialism, and anti-Semitism, Robert bemoans the disappearance of submissive
white women: ‘“Croyez-moi . . . la bonne chatte douce, souple et musclée, vous ne la
trouverez plus chez une Blanche; tout cela a complètement disparu”’ (112).
‘Une Blanche’ refers to Western European women who have grown up with the political
and sexual legacies of post-1960s feminism and whose sexual choices are not conducive
to traditional family life. The possibility of the obedient, docile female is gradually
disappearing in the West compelling men to travel to Thailand to be present at the
‘l’appel immutable et doux de la chatte asiatique’ (108) which offers them a conduit to a
natural, artlessly sexual sphere. These ‘petites salopes’ are a godsend, ‘a gift from
heaven’ no less, to men worn out trying to please difficult and un-sensual Western
women who immodestly flaunt an impenitently commodified sexuality that they do
not fully inhabit (113). As an example of this, the novel gives us the exceptionally, even
by Houellebecq’s standards of wearied disregard for narrative realism, cardboard
characters of Babette and Léa, his two attractive, but overtly sexy, French travelling
companions, ‘plutôt bimbos’ who, in their display of their bodies around the pool and
on the beach, are not ‘capables d’être des prostituées thaı̈es’ as they do not possess a
‘natural’ modesty and demureness (54).
330 C. Sweeney
The attack on feminism is nowhere more explicit that in the opening pages of
Houellebecq’s first novel Extension du domaine de la lutte (1994) in which we
encounter the ruins of a feminist sexuality. At an office leaving party, a woman,
described as ‘une connasse’, performs a striptease to the utter indifference of the
assembled party-goers. Just before the narrator passes out he mutters to himself,
‘Les ultimes résidus, consternants, de la chute du féminisme’ (3– 4). In his drunken
sleep he dreams of two women from his office singing the following ditty: ‘Si je
promène cul nu/C’est pas pour vous séduir-re!/Si je montre mes jambes poilues,/C’est
pour me faire plaisi-re!’ (4). This ode to exhibitionist, so scathingly satirised here,
self-empowerment and the dismally received striptease crudely suggest the bankruptcy
of a feminism that has rendered women virtually asexual in their refusal of the male
gaze. Compare this to the display of Thai women in a Bangkok bar whose acceptance
of the male gaze is unproblematic:
Sur la piste de danse, une dizaine de filles ondulaient lentement sur une sorte de
rythme disco rétro. Les unes étaient en bikini blanc, les autres avaient enlevé leur
haut de maillot pour ne garder que le string. Elles avaient tout autour de vingt ans.
Elles avaient toutes un peau d’un brun doré, un corps excitant et souple. Un vieil
Allemand était attablé à ma gauche devant un Carlsberg [ . . . ] Il fixait les jeunes
corps qui bougeaient devant ses yeux, complètement hypnotisé; [ . . . ] les filles
quittèrent la scène pour être remplacées par une dizaine d’autres, vêtues de colliers
de fleurs à la hauteur de la poitrine et de la taille. Elles tournaient doucement sur
elles-mêmes, les colliers de fleurs faisaient apparaı̂tre tantôt les seins, tantôt la
naissance des fesses . . . Il était au paradis. (106–7)
In this bucolic scene of sexual intoxication taking place to ‘un slow Polynesien’, the
male customer is erotically mesmerised by this performance of an ersatz Gauguinesque
scenario of a wholly accessible female body. Each of the proffered female bodies is
smooth, soft (‘douce’), and unresisting and the groups of ‘girls’ are suffused with the
apparently collective sensual aim of delighting the male gaze—a situation that has
been irretrievably corrupted in the West, with the exception of those women who are
carefully designated as ‘sluts’, ‘petites salopes’ and ‘bimbos’ whose sexual displays incur
nothing but ridicule and opprobrium from the narrator. Significantly, the economic
dynamics of the sexual exchange value of Western femininity are castigated in terms
that resolutely do not apply to the sexual economy of Thai prostitution which is
lauded for its cheerful and tender sale of sex. The heavily romanticised nudity of the
bar display and the subsequent sexual intercourse with sex workers Ôon and Sin form
part of a kind of sexual pastoral in which labouring brown (Third World) bodies are
rendered as uncomplicated sites of pleasure. Easily readable and uncomplicated
non-Western bodies possess here neither subtext nor context; they offer undemanding,
life-affirming sex to Western men with an expertise and tenderness that combines the
maternal—some even tenderly bathe and dry their customers after sex—and the
sexually compliant ‘salope’ (115).
Any ethical complications of the sex industry have been made to disappear by
the Thai women’s blissfully transformative sensuality which elevates sex work to a
quasi-sublime realm of sensual and undemanding idealised femininity long since

destroyed by Western feminism. It is left to ‘gras and intelligent’ ‘prof de lettres’ Josiane,
the point of any ideological opposition to the narrator’s point of view in the novel, to
articulate any ethical concerns around ‘tourisme sexuelle’ (74). Described in
surpassingly offensive terms as ‘exactement le genre de salopes qui m’avaient fait
renoncer à mes études littéraires, bien des années auparavant’ (81), Josiane is the
embodiment of an imagined feminist censoriousness whose sexual politics is ‘épuisé’,
reduced to an over-simplified set of readings about child prostitution and sexual
slavery; crude observations that are promptly shot down by the narrative’s lengthy
semi-factual essayistic aside on the logistics of sex tourism in Thailand, Cambodia and
the Philippines (81). Associated with the disapproving attitude of the Guide du Routard,
and one of those ‘connards humanitaires protestants’, Josiane exists only to reproach
and condemn in her exaggeratedly anti-sex utterances (55). Disregarding any historical
specificity or cultural or ideological complexity, feminism is here reduced to two
exceptionally simple caricatures of its second and third waves, both held in equal
Houellebecquian contempt. A cartoon of sex-negative 1970s and 1980s feminism,
Josiane’s disapproval of sex tourism represents a crude version of Second Wave
feminism that is distinct from the ‘bare-assed’ or ‘do-me’ sexual exhibitionism
characteristic of post-feminism that is equally disparaged in Houellebecq’s fiction.5
The turn to a ‘sex-positive’ feminism in the 1990s spoke to groups of women who
wished to ‘disassociate themselves from what they perceive as puritanical and
monolithic feminist thinking’ (Genz and Brabon 2009, 94). However, as Shulamith
Firestone presciently noted at the beginning of the 1970s, a rejection of earlier forms of
feminism in favour of more explicitly sexual forms of behaviour, rather than benefiting
women actually worked against them by ‘creating a new reservoir of available females
[ . . . ] to expand the tight supply of goods available for sexual exploitation’
(Firestone 1970, 127 –8). This is a view more recently expressed by Imelda Whelehan in
Feminist bestseller where she worries that such a strong emphasis on sexual expression in
post-feminism might well be a ‘chimera where woman were being sold the idea of sex as
liberation but often it cast them in just as strong a thrall to men, with new pressure to
perform sexually at every occasion’ (2005, 109).
In their examination of the individualist and consumerist turn in 1990s post-
feminism, Interrogating postfeminism, Yvonne Tasker and Diane Negra (2007) describe
the ways in which criticisms of earlier feminist politics of the 1970s and 80s make use
of an ‘invented social memory of feminist language’ that characterises feminist critique
as ‘shrill, bellicose and parsimonious’ sex-negative ranting (2007, 3).6 This is precisely
the function of the character Josiane whose only function in the narrative is to
articulate the ‘unsexy’ censorial objections of an imagined feminist sexual politics. The
character of Valérie, on the other hand, expresses the possibility of an essential and
‘natural’ femininity, untouched by any social or cultural change. On their first
meeting, Michel’s initial impression of Valérie is striking for its immediate
appreciation of her passivity; ‘attitude de soumission’, ‘mignonne’ with an agreeable
‘canine docility’, she appears to Michel as ‘soumise en général’, maybe ‘prête à se
332 C. Sweeney
chercher un nouveau maı̂tre’ (47ff.). This submissiveness he perceives in Valérie is not,
however, that of a potentially transgressive S/M dynamic.7 Valérie’s sexual charms are
more conventionally situated within a fundamentally subservient femininity; her
erotic allure is subtle, even demure, it is only on closer inspection that Michel notices
that she has a ‘bouche bien chaude’ that is ‘prompte à avaler le sperme d’un ami
véritable’, which of course she will do regularly just before serving Michel his morning
coffee in bed before going off to work her ‘insane hours’ bringing relief to sexually
disadvantaged Westerners (49). Lecturing Valérie on how she possesses the real
sensuality of a non-feminist woman, Michel points up her constant willingness to
perform fellatio on him, testament to a sexual generosity, he argues, that has all but
vanished from Western sexuality, but most strikingly so in women:
‘Suce-moi’ . . . ‘“Tu vois, je te dis, “Suce-moi”, et tu me suces. A priori, tu n’en

éprouvais pas le désir [ . . . ] Offrir son corps comme un objet agréable, donner
gratuitement du plaisir; voilà ce que les Occidentaux ne savent pas plus faire. Ils ont
complètement perdu le sens du don . . . ils ont beau s’acharner, ils ne parviennent
plus à ressentir le sexe comme naturel. (236)
Above all, Valérie is lauded for possessing the most hackneyed attribute of femininity;
she is endlessly self-sacrificing; ‘one of those creatures who are capable of devoting
their lives to someone else’s happiness’ (360). Both sexually acquiescent and
adventurous, Valérie is, however, crucially not visibly ‘sluttish’ like her travelling
companions Babette and Léa, or the Russian teenage girls who are, Michel scornfully
notes noticing them on the beach, ‘parvenues au dernier degré de la pétasserie [ . . . ] les
sordides petites suceuses’ (341). Like the Thai sex workers, Valérie is outwardly modest
in her sexuality; even when performing the most audacious of sexual acts she possesses
a ‘une joie facile, innocente, éternellement bienheureuse’ (267). Thus, the Thai sex
workers have their exact romantic counterpart in the sexually obliging and hard-
working Valérie who cheerfully labours away to promote sex tourism in South East
Asia, Africa and South America in between episodes of uninhibited sex with Michel
and an assortment of sexual partners. In fact, Michel rewards her with the somewhat
dubious accolade of being as sexually skilled as a prostitute. With her perky breasts and
supple vagina, at 28 Valérie has the body of a 17 year old, the optimum age of sexual
attractiveness in all of Houellebecq’s fiction with ‘les seins étaient toujours aussi fermes
[ . . . ] Son cul lui aussi était bien rond, sans aucune trace de graisse’ (61). Passive,
adventurously bi-sexual, devoted to her ‘master’ and younger looking than her years,
Valérie is the incarnation of the retrogressive phallonarcissistic fantasy. However, while
she is endlessly sexually accommodating, she is crucially (and wholly implausibly)
lacking in any previous sexual experience which prevents her from being ‘an old slag’,
like the Russian teenagers. It is imperative that good women have not participated in
long-term sexual promiscuity as this destroys a capacity for romantic love and sensual
innocence. This idea of innocence is subject to a typical Houellebecquian double-
standard; sexual promiscuity is inherently ruinous for European women for whom
‘Love as a kind of innocence and as a capacity for illusion, as an aptitude for
epitomizing the whole of the other sex in a single loved being rarely resists a year of
sexual immorality, and never two’ (Extension du domaine de la lutte, 1994, 113). This
definition of sexual immorality, however hollow it may be, does not apply to the Thai
sex workers or to the men who pay for their sexual services.
Depicted as a psychologically and intellectually blank child-woman who does not
recognise or realise her exchange value in the Darwinian sexual marketplace, Valérie is
completely disengaged from consumption, sexual and otherwise; ‘Elle aurait sans
doute pu en tirer mieux part, jouer sur le maquillage, se coiffer différemment,
consulter une esthéticienne’ (61). Protected from the vicissitudes of the sexual open
market by her long working hours, she represented as unadulterated, unlike most
Western women who are focused, Lilith-like, on the highly commodified processes of
seduction. This is the Sex and the City ‘high-maintenance’ consumerist version of
liberal feminism that increasingly came to define post-feminism in popular culture in

the 1990s.8 Michel describes Parisian women in precisely these terms, depicting sexual
encounters with them as little more than difficult pantomimes of sexual
disappointment: ‘Séduire une femme qu’on ne connaı̂t pas, baiser avec elle, c’est
surtout devenu une source de vexations et de problèmes’ (142). Third-wave feminism
is ridiculed for producing sexually calculating women who approach love and sex with
the deadening spirit of consumption as if they were shopping for shoes. In complete
contrast, Valérie is uninterested in material or sexual consumption; she is completely
unmoved by ‘produits de marque’ such as Kenzo blouses and Prada handbags, longing
only for the desire to seduce (62, 317).
Concurring with the narrator’s characterisation of modern women, Valérie happily
agrees that Western men need the restorative and tenderly expert touch of sex workers
(not from the West though) who seem not only willing but cheerful in their work
unlike, the ‘sexy, cool’ Parisian women who need to be dined and talked to before the
serious job of sex can begin (362).
C’est vraiment rare, maintenant, les femmes qui éprouvent du plaisir, et qui ont
envie d’en donner [ . . . ] Quand on considère les conversations fastidieuses qu’il faut
subir pour amener une nana dans son lit, et que la fille s’avérera dans la plupart des
cas une amante décevante, qui vous fera chier avec ses problèmes, vous parlera des
ses anciens mecs – en vous donnant, au passage, l’impression de ne pas être tout à
fait à la hauteur – [ . . . ] on conçoit que les hommes puissant préférer s’éviter
beaucoup de soucis en payant une petite somme . . . ils trouvent plus simple d’aller
voir les putes. . . . Enfin, pas les putes en Occident, ça n’en vaut pas la peine, ce sont
de vrais débris humaines. (142)
Houellebecq’s novels systematically condemn women over 40, particularly those who
have grown up and been interpellated into the feminist movement, to a de-sexualised
decrepitude. Charged with having brought this sexual obsolescence on themselves by
their allegiance to an ideologically broken feminism, such women are depicted as
pitiful losers in the new libidinal economy, living out their remaining years in isolation
and unrequited sexual longing. While the male clientele of the Thai brothel bars are
described in sympathetic, even tender, terms, middle-aged women who seek similar
334 C. Sweeney
paid sexual encounters are described as repugnant and wretched figures. Sitting in a
Cuban bar, a group of ‘quinquagénaires québécoises’ with their repugnantly aged
bodies are depicted as grotesque, even lethal, in their hideous sexuality:
elles étaient trapues et résistantes, tout en dent et en graisse, et parlaient
incroyablement fort; on n’avait aucun mal à comprendre qu’elles aient rapidement
enterré leurs maris. [ . . . ] Lorsque l’ancien bellâtre s’approcha de leur table elles lui
jetèrent des regards énamourés, redevenant presque des femmes. (208)
Far from liberating individuals from the dynamics of consumer capitalism,

Houellebecq suggests that ’68 merely intensified the opportunities for the
commodification of sexuality and he is by no means alone in this view. David
Harvey, for one, has pointed out that ‘the counter-cultural movements of the 1960s
created an environment of unfulfilled needs and repressed desires that postmodernist

popular cultural production has merely set out to satisfy the best it can in commodity
form’ (1990, 63). While Plateforme does offer a compellingly splenetic, and at times
fiercely original, account of the affects of neo-liberal consumerism on sexuality, it is
one finally compromised by its failure to achieve real complexity in both logic and
range. In short, the novel fails as critique. Its vision is finally too limited, resorting to
an intellectually spurious concept of the ‘natural’ to articulate the concerns of culture.
Standing metonymically for a more general sense of what Houellebecq has called the
‘la lâche hantise du politically correct’ of culture, feminism can only be argued away
back to the natural by a facile process of gender re-essentialisation (1998a, 75). It may
well be however, as many have argued, that this failure of ideological complexity in the
novel is precisely the point and that Houellebecq’s writing points up the collapse of
meaningful critique in a system so totally reified that no speaking position exists
outside of its contaminated heart. Such a postmodern textuality would require a
narrative and ideological balancing-act in which the text is simultaneously complicit
with and critical of its own subject. The enthusiasm with which the idea of the ‘natural’
woman is evoked in Plateforme effectively compromises the novel’s satirical intentions
and points up the lack of any discursive and ideological distance from the subject
matter which is essential for the production of real critique.
Notes
[1] This is quoted in English in the novel as it is referring to an English-language publication Phuket
Weekly, aimed at Western tourists interested in marrying Thai women (123 – 124).
[2] Schoolcraft and Golsan (2007, 365, 366). On the question of Houellebecq’s ideological
complicity with his subject matter see also Waldberg (2002, 39). See also Abecassis (2000),
Huston (2006) and Cruickshank (2009).
[3] For a succinct overview of the beginnings of this relationship see Laclau (1987). Fredric Jameson
provided a seminal examination of this in ‘Imaginary and Symbolic in Lacan: Marxism.
Psychoanalytic Criticism and the Problem of the Subject’ (1977). See also a special issue of the
South Atlantic Quarterly ‘Psycho-Marxism: Marxism and Psychoanalysis Late in the Twentieth
Century’ 97, no. 2 (1998).
[4] On post-Fordism and immaterial labour see Hardt and Negri (2000, 289– 94), Jessop (1996) and
Sweeney (2010). See also Boltanski and Chiapello (2002).
[5] For an invaluably informed overview of this ‘do-me’ or ‘raunch’ culture feminism see Genz and
Brabon (2009, 91 – 104).
[6] For a detailed examination of third-wave and post-feminism in the French context see Still
(2007). See also Allwood (1998) for an invaluable overview of the relationship between
masculinity and feminism in France from 1981 to the present. For specific discussion of the
sexual politics in Houellebecq’s work see Clement and Van Wesemael (2007), Clement (2004)
and Crowley (2002). See McNamara (2002) for Les Particules as a novel of male sexual
ressentiment.
[7] In all of Houellebecq’s work, S&M gets very short shrift as a sexual practice that is over-
rationalised, a ‘univers purement cérébral, avec des règles précises’ characterised above all by a
profound sense of sadness and destruction (in Plateforme, 236– 7). See Reader (2006) for a
detailed examination of the sexually abject in Houellebecq’s work.
[8] On 1990s post-ideological feminism ‘anchored in consumption as a strategy’ and the

depoliticisation of feminism in the 1990s see Baumgardner and Richards (2004), Hennessy
(2000), McRobbie (2009) and Modleski (1991). See also Fraser (1998).
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