one day.
Besides, these behaviors are right in line with other propaganda—be it sexual or not—that the child has to endure. Television would be enough for it, on which those commercial breaks with a happy-family-eating-cauliflower-à-la-turd have, without any doubt, a greater power of indoctrination than sentimental songs and kisses about love-always.
Our family is on vacation here. In the morning, Jean and Sylvie, with sand in their hair, salt at the corner of their lips, gulp down their café au lait in big swigs, like kittens who are about to be weaned. Their parents watch them, a little jealous of such appetite… You’ve got to be a born mother through and through to write such phrases; and you wonder whether it’s a question of someone touting a rising birthrate or a vapid incitement to pedophilia. Living souls, you will see how alike they are (Samuel Beckett).
The book is a kind of photo-roman, and the cliches that pepper its sentences are nothing next to those that illustrate them. These incredible, enormous photos, more doctored and more indecent than the covers of women’s magazines, reveal to us the ways of a wholesome young-executive family that is “photogenic” to a nauseating degree. A socio-economic ideal through which the doctors sing their hymn to reproduction.
“ The reproduction of what? ” asks Sylvie.
“ Of the species, darling! ”
Dad is tall, muscular, dynamic, circumcised (it’s cleaner); Mom is blond, thin and pretty; both of them are about as likeable and exciting as surgical instruments. Function demands it.
Beautiful children with long hair (they’re “free”) and simpleton eyes (they’re “well-behaved”); Juliette languorously plump with her “little future being” ( You love him, even without knowing him? asks Jean. “ I want him, understand, ” answers Juliette, blushing a bit ) , large garden, lawn, flowers, shrubs, hammock. You see everyone naked: when they are fashionable enough to be presentable, the family of today aren’t afraid of their bodies. Anyway, seeing what’s left of them, they would have no reason to be. The little boy? He’s atrophied down there, and, in any case, the book coldly affirms for us that at his age you only get hard when you’re sleeping. Mom hides her lovely pussy and her lovely tits behind her flat and barely slit little girl. As for dad, for a long time his paternal appendages reduced by conjugal duty haven’t come to life for more than one night a week.
They shower, they touch (decently), they go swimming, run madly through the meadows, barefoot and hand in hand—an essential ritual when you have a second house and a good camera to immortalize such crazy happiness, such a “spontaneous snapshot,” which is staged before being canned. And then they talk about love, since they can’t make it: biology, sexuality, chromosomes, contraception, Freud, childbirth, you name it, and it happens, as long as every moment they can repeat babies, babies, babies… They say the word “jerk off” one time ( but I prefer , says Dad, using the accurate term: masturbate ) and even a pervert comes into the discussion ( Jean nods: “I saw one in the park!” ) . A necessary audacity: because, in this ocean of well-being, you have to ward off the anxieties inspired by the other world—the one outside the book, outside the bell jar of designer families, the unclean worldinhabited by the non-beautiful, the non-beautiful world where the non-rich live, the non-happy, the non-designer, the non-eunuchs, all the sick people.
It’s interesting to compare this family to the large, no-frills traditional family from the preceding volume. With them, no one was a nudist; as often happens, the small children went nude on the beach, but their parents didn’t imitate them. There was a large group of characters: eight people divided into four age brackets (grandparents, parents, teenagers, children), each forming an asexual couple (except for the
Besides, these behaviors are right in line with other propaganda—be it sexual or not—that the child has to endure. Television would be enough for it, on which those commercial breaks with a happy-family-eating-cauliflower-à-la-turd have, without any doubt, a greater power of indoctrination than sentimental songs and kisses about love-always.
Our family is on vacation here. In the morning, Jean and Sylvie, with sand in their hair, salt at the corner of their lips, gulp down their café au lait in big swigs, like kittens who are about to be weaned. Their parents watch them, a little jealous of such appetite… You’ve got to be a born mother through and through to write such phrases; and you wonder whether it’s a question of someone touting a rising birthrate or a vapid incitement to pedophilia. Living souls, you will see how alike they are (Samuel Beckett).
The book is a kind of photo-roman, and the cliches that pepper its sentences are nothing next to those that illustrate them. These incredible, enormous photos, more doctored and more indecent than the covers of women’s magazines, reveal to us the ways of a wholesome young-executive family that is “photogenic” to a nauseating degree. A socio-economic ideal through which the doctors sing their hymn to reproduction.
“ The reproduction of what? ” asks Sylvie.
“ Of the species, darling! ”
Dad is tall, muscular, dynamic, circumcised (it’s cleaner); Mom is blond, thin and pretty; both of them are about as likeable and exciting as surgical instruments. Function demands it.
Beautiful children with long hair (they’re “free”) and simpleton eyes (they’re “well-behaved”); Juliette languorously plump with her “little future being” ( You love him, even without knowing him? asks Jean. “ I want him, understand, ” answers Juliette, blushing a bit ) , large garden, lawn, flowers, shrubs, hammock. You see everyone naked: when they are fashionable enough to be presentable, the family of today aren’t afraid of their bodies. Anyway, seeing what’s left of them, they would have no reason to be. The little boy? He’s atrophied down there, and, in any case, the book coldly affirms for us that at his age you only get hard when you’re sleeping. Mom hides her lovely pussy and her lovely tits behind her flat and barely slit little girl. As for dad, for a long time his paternal appendages reduced by conjugal duty haven’t come to life for more than one night a week.
They shower, they touch (decently), they go swimming, run madly through the meadows, barefoot and hand in hand—an essential ritual when you have a second house and a good camera to immortalize such crazy happiness, such a “spontaneous snapshot,” which is staged before being canned. And then they talk about love, since they can’t make it: biology, sexuality, chromosomes, contraception, Freud, childbirth, you name it, and it happens, as long as every moment they can repeat babies, babies, babies… They say the word “jerk off” one time ( but I prefer , says Dad, using the accurate term: masturbate ) and even a pervert comes into the discussion ( Jean nods: “I saw one in the park!” ) . A necessary audacity: because, in this ocean of well-being, you have to ward off the anxieties inspired by the other world—the one outside the book, outside the bell jar of designer families, the unclean worldinhabited by the non-beautiful, the non-beautiful world where the non-rich live, the non-happy, the non-designer, the non-eunuchs, all the sick people.
It’s interesting to compare this family to the large, no-frills traditional family from the preceding volume. With them, no one was a nudist; as often happens, the small children went nude on the beach, but their parents didn’t imitate them. There was a large group of characters: eight people divided into four age brackets (grandparents, parents, teenagers, children), each forming an asexual couple (except for the
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