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EMILIA MILLICENT

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‘Why taking a lover won’t give you love’

In the second of a five-part column series on love, single girl Emilia Millicent tells us how a trip to the Royal Dramatic Theatre in Stockholm reminded her that boys are not toys.

'Why taking a lover won't give you love'

It was intermission. I perched on a bench in the foyer and watched people go by. A couple in their fifties stopped for a moment. He leaned against a wall, so tall the crest of his nearly bald head almost reached the art deco rose cornicing. She busied herself with a plastic bag.

I watched them for five minutes. Neither of them smiled once.

Why not just get divorced, I thought to myself. Such silence.

Then the bell rang. We stumbled back into the theatre. Our bums, fattened by years of champagne-guzzling and shrimp-sandwich nibbling, crashed down on cushioned red velvet chairs.

Thus is the peril of the middle class. We will eat ourselves to death in order to stave off the silence, the boredom, the angst. Or whore ourselves into an early grave.

Dangerous Liasions is playing at the Royal Dramatic Theatre (Dramaten) in Stockholm. In which cruelty is a blood sport.

As pointed out in the elegant programme, the book Dangerous Liasons was written seven years before the French Revolution. Unwittingly, perhaps, it painted a pretty good picture of what happens when people are rich enough to allow them leisure, and don’t know what to do to fill their spare time.

I watched the play with detached amusement. The scheming (but ultimately heartbroken) Marquise de Merteuil, the conniving (but ultimately heartbroken) Vicomte de Valmont.

Have I turned into one of them?

I fled the theatre as the cast took their bow. I’m ashamed to say it. I disturbed three fellow theatre-goers and thundered out of there like an Indian water buffalo trying to get its hooves unstuck from between the rocks in a small Alpine stream.

It hit far too close to home.

There have been periods in my life when I felt so bored I became self-destructive… destructive even. I wrote in my last column that I, out of respect for myself and others, would never consider being dishonest in a relationship. That’s true now.

It hasn’t always been.

At the age of 22, I did what the Marquise did – I took as my lover a modern version of the feckless naive boy Chevalier Danceny. My version was incredibly dim-witted and extremely inexperienced.

His dream was to join the army. I couldn’t think of anything more dull. Taking orders isn’t really my thing.

I had just finished my third-year university exams and had nothing with which I could fill the three-week void between studies and an impending, bound-to-be-boring summer internship. Putting it bluntly, I had too much time on my hands.

So I picked up a plaything, shook it about a bit, tried it out.

I realized my utter mistake a few weeks later when I was people watching on my first trip to Stockholm. A young family walked past, the man was pushing the pram. The toddler yawned indolently in the sunshine. The little postcard of nuclear-family bliss rattled my cage, big time.

My boytoy fling had already ended by then, but that I’d slept with someone who’d I’d never ever willingly raise a child with hit me with full force. The thought that something could have gone wrong, that I could have wound up pregnant with this man, this boy!, left me feeling fettered and defeated.

I realize I sound like a moralist. That is not true. I have very few opinions on other people’s consensual sexual relationships. But I had never slept with someone for whom I felt such utter apathy. It made me feel rather cruel.

Maybe not quite as cruel as Valmont feels in the end of his torturous treatment of the mild and pious Madame de Tourvel. Yet cruel, nevertheless.

SEE ALSO: “I will never cut corners romantically, ever”

As I’ve grown older, I venture to say grown up, that period of my life seems in hindsight to fit in rather well with my material circumstances. My family was solidly middle class. I had money enough to allow time in which I was bored. To play. A luxury, really.

As far as Dangerous Liasons is concerned, there is of course a modern twist. I gather from Swedish friends my age that a paradigm shift has taken place in Sweden in the last few years. To stimulate consumption the government gave income-tax breaks.

Now everyone owns two cars but no one really knows where to park them. Metaphorically.

It’s all about things. Literally.

The problem? Well, what if it affects us in more ways than materially? What if it affects us morally? Just as buying the latest GPS doesn’t give you a destination, taking on a lover doesn’t give you love. Seeing people as toys is a sure-fire way to lose a grip on your own kindness. You want me to summarize? It makes you into a bitch.

Confusingly, even what seems to be a moral code can sometimes be misleading. Let’s take feminism as an example.

Although the Marquise the Merteuil – played sublimely by Livia Millhagen at Dramaten – is a feminist avenger of her time…

“I’ve always known I was born to dominate your sex and avenge my own.”

…it doesn’t give her happiness.

So off with our heads.

Emilia Millicent lives in Stockholm and works in finance during daylight hours.

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HEALTH

IN PICTURES: 7 of the French government’s sexiest public health adverts

An advertising campaign aimed at convincing young people to get the Covid vaccine has attracted international attention, but it’s not the first time that French authorities have sexed up their public health messaging.

IN PICTURES: 7 of the French government's sexiest public health adverts
Image: AIDES.

It’s an international cliché that France is the land of l’amour – or at least the land of le sexe – and that reputation does seem to be justified, given how often French public health bodies have turned to sex in an attempt to get their message across.

From the suggestive to the downright scandalous, here are seven examples of health campaigns which relied on that oh so French fondness for romance.

Get vaccinated, get laid

The Covid campaign in question was created by regional health authorities in the southern Provence-Alpes-Côtes d’Azur region.

The poster which has got people hot under the collar features two very attractive and very French-looking people kissing, seemingly in the back of a cab after a night on the town. “Yes, the vaccine can have desirable effects,” it says.

The campaign has proved so popular that it will soon be expanded.

Promoting road safety

Earlier this year, the French Road Safety Delegation released a video ahead of Valentine’s Day, which showed a couple sharing an intimate moment in the bedroom.

The full 30-second video featured the slogan, “Life is better than one last drink for the road”.

Another image of two people kissing, seemingly without clothes, included the line, “Life, love. On the road, don’t forget what truly matters.”

Fight against HIV/AIDS

While the link between road safety and sex isn’t immediately obvious, less surprising are the references to intimacy in the health ministry’s HIV awareness campaign from 2016.

Each of the different posters shows two men embracing. Straplines include, “With a lover, with a friend, with a stranger. Situations vary, and so do the protective measures.”

The posters shocked conservative sensibilities, and several right-wing mayors asked for them to be taken down in their towns. 

HIV awareness campaign

Just a few days after the controversy over the ministry’s posters ignited, the non-profit AIDES launched its own campaign, and it didn’t hold back.

The posters showed scuba instructors, piano teachers and parachutists, all of them naked alongside their students. The slogan: “People undergoing treatment for HIV have a lot of things to pass onto us. But the AIDS virus isn’t one.”

“Even if we’ve been spreading this information since 2008, we realise that a lot of people don’t know that antiviral treatments prevent spreading,” head of AIDES Aurélien Beaucamp told France Info.

“People are still afraid of those who are HIV-positive.” 

Government-mandated pornography

It’s common for sexualised advertising campaigns to be labelled pornographic by critics, but in 1998, the French government went a step further and created actual pornography.

READ ALSO Language of love – 15 of the best romantic French phrases

The health ministry commissioned TV station Canal Plus to create five short erotic films to encourage the use of condoms and prevent the spread of HIV. The campaign featured up-and-coming directors such as Cedric Klapisch and Gaspar Noé.

“The only possible way to look at, to get people to protect themselves, is to show, show everything, show simply and without creating an obsession of the sexual act and the act of wearing a condom,” Klapisch said, according to an Associated Press story published at the time. 

You didn’t really think we’d include images of this one, did you? (OK, here’s a link for those who are curious).

A controversial anti-smoking campaign

https://twitter.com/MarketainmentSE/status/212863393143586817

It’s time to forget what we said about romance, because there is nothing romantic about this 2010 campaign from the Droits des Non-Fumeurs (Non-smokers’ rights) association and the BDDP & Fils communications agency.

The campaign featured several images of young people with a cigarette in their mouths, looking up at an adult man who rested his hand on their heads. The cigarette appeared to be coming out of the man’s trousers.

The slogan said, “Smoking means being a slave to tobacco”. The association said the sexual imagery was meant to get the attention of young people who were desensitised to traditional anti-smoking messages, but the posters caused outrage, with members of the government publicly criticising the choice of imagery.

Celebrating LGBTQ+ love

On the other end of the spectrum is this very romantic video from the national health agency Santé Publique France. It was released on May 17th 2021, the International Day Against Homophobia, Transphobia and Biphobia, and was part of a campaign against anti-LGBT discrimination and violence. It is set to Jean-Claude Pascal’s Nous les amoureux

Showing a diverse range of couples kissing, holding hands, and healing each other’s wounds, the video ends on the word play: “In the face of intolerance, it’s up to us to make the difference.”

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