If fish don’t need a bicycle, why do women need men, asks French feminist author  

Le Genie Lesbian, roughly translated as Lesbian Genius, has created a virtual storm in the city of Love, Paris and fetched much notoriety for the author, Alice Coffin. The book is her first. She flaunts her identity as a lesbian and is one of the founders of the “LGBT Journalists Association”.

She has been a teacher at the “L’institut Catholique de Paris” university and an environment expert. But so virulent has been the reaction to her book that her teaching contract has not been renewed

She calls upon women to totally ‘boycott’ men saying,”It’s not enough to help one another, we have to erase them. Erase them from our minds, from our pictures, from our representation. I don’t read books by men anymore, I don’t watch their movies, I don’t listen to their music.”

Hitting out at politicians and leaders in the media she said that they were each worse than the other. “Let them go. They sow misfortune, we want joy. Being a lesbian is a party, they won’t spoil it.’ What she says is nothing that the world has not heard before but it’s her solution that has triggered a fierce controversy with people describing the solution as radical, a form of apartheid and a fundamentalist Fatwa.

She says that films made by men objectify women. ‘Following into a well-oiled mechanism created by the Catholic state, the movie industry turned women into objects to massacre, while still putting them on the highest of pedestal.”

‘Be beautiful and shut up, be beautiful and I rape you, be beautiful, you’re going to die, this is the movie industry,’ she says. She is hurt that women are not taken seriously: ‘When we, feminists, put together lists, produce data, they are outraged, they have the nerve to ask: “But you don’t think, you just hate men.” A Fulbright Scholar at Drexel University, working on The Negative Impact of Neutrality on LGBT issues in the French Media, she cannot be taken lightly.

Marlene Schiappa, former Minister for gender equality, accused her of promoting a form of totalitarianism in a radio discussion. Some, like author Agnes Poirier have argued that her book would be called ‘ridiculous’ by Simone de Beauvoir whose book ‘Second Sex’ published in 1949 is the Bible for French feminists.

A French writer, intellectual, existentialist, political activist and feminist, Simone had a long-term unconventional relationship with Jean-Paul Sartre whom she met in 1929 till he died in 1980. At some times it was even a love triangle but they carried on nevertheless without getting married.

When she wrote her book, it was called pornography and the Vatican had put it on the church’s banned texts.