Anxiety in the Dordogne 
Jeremy Harding
Every afternoon on RMC INFO, a French commercial radio network where phone-ins are the order of the day, the concerned but knowing voice of the sex counsellor Brigitte Lahaie can be heard fielding calls from listeners/participants. Her motto last week was ‘sexuality at the heart of a harmonious life’. One caller wanted to know if it was OK, as a woman, to be watching X-rated movies – isn’t that a man’s thing? – oh, and by the way, how do you go about removing the hair around your anus? It was all right, Brigitte thought, for girls to enjoy a bit of pornography (she’s an ex-porn star herself). And on the revealing supplementary, she felt that a bog-standard depilatory would probably be fine; maybe the caller’s partner would like to help her with the application.
Subscribers to the print edition can log in to view the entire article. For information about subscribing to the London Review of Books click here. This article is available for purchase online. Buy this article.
Jeremy Harding is a contributing editor at the LRB. His versions of Rimbaud’s poetry are published by Penguin along with John Sturrock’s translation of the letters.
Other articles by this contributor:
Diary from Paris · Among the Arsonists
Jeremy Harding goes to Beirut to meet the novelist Elias Khoury · ‘Before everything else, a writer of stories’
What to Wear to School · Marianne gets rid of the veil
Disaffiliate, Reaffiliate, Kill Again · Régis Debray
Kosovo’s Big Men · Jeremy Harding talks to KLA officers and an ‘official government source’ in Kosovo
At Quai Branly · Jacques Chirac’s museum
The Habit of War · Eritrea
Sarko, Ségo & Co. · The Banlieues Go to the Polls
screen layout
tell a friend