Summary of Premier Sexe by Éric Zemmour

Éric Zemmour, in Premier Sexe begins by stating his thesis in two observations:

1. the difference man/woman was first melted to give an undifferentiated being (from Antiquity to the last century)

L2. then feminine values have prevailed over masculine values throughout society
In the rest of the book, Éric Zemmour proposes to reveal how this transition was made, and how to recover masculine values.

FIRST CHAPTER – Summary of the First Sex by Éric Zemmour

The linguistic battle: The word “macho” is the first tool to impose the values of the woman. This word comes as an opposition to the old slogan “Be a man, not a chick”.

Mothers: Feminine values pass to the current generation because it is deeply rooted in men from a young age, as they are raised by mothers who hold this feminist discourse.

Soccer: Football players, previously virile men who got away with it, “boxers without the punches in the face”, are now, because of globalization, financial gains, become people, smooth, like a girl who dreams of being a singer.

The “metrosexuals”: They are a new category of men, feminized men.

The models: from now on the ideal prototype of the model tends more and more towards women with bodies of boys.

This propaganda promoting the depilated men, soft, and the sporting women, are diffused by the press. The media imposing this new figure of the model, the men to show to the others their success, start to want these women.
This “mimetic snobbery” however only affects the elites, and the average man continues to like callipygous women (= with generous buttocks), or with big breasts, etc., corresponding to the traditional criteria.

More generally, it is inequality that is seen as the new evil of society.

In the fight for these new values, feminists and homosexuals are united, typical of the social category “bobo” (bohemian bourgeois).

The political impact is important, since the mayors advocating these new values modify their city in this sense: fewer industries, factories (associated with virility), but more tourism, finance (associated with femininity).

The distinction between men and women, which is constantly present among Christians, who have a general binary vision (man/woman, profane/sacred, private/public), is increasingly obeying a principle of indifference, everything is equal.

In today’s society, the gay man is glorified, as opposed to the macho man, who is denigrated for his manly stupidity.

Éric Zemmour then relies on several statistics to legitimize his observations; for example, 1/5 of men wax, and rapid increase in sales of male grooming products.

POLITICAL FIGURES WITH FEMININE VALUES

François Hollande is mocked as a feminine man in an analogy with Machiavelli.

Ségolène Royal embodies the meeting of Catholic puritanism and feminism.

POLITICAL CHARACTERS WITH MASCULINE VALUES

Jacques Chirac and Jean-Marie Le Pen are, on the contrary, men who have remained virile, declaring in turn, “To our women, to our horses, and to those who ride them!
(Jacques Chirac) and ‘Post coïtum animal triste (Jean-Marie Le Pen)

Finally, François Mitterrand, thanks to his virility, has beaten Rocard on the political field, and Giscard is also part of the viral politicians.
As for the women, rare to express themselves, only Roselyne Bachelot and Clémentine Autain (who denies the relationship between power and sex) say they no longer attract desire once elected.

The introduction of women in politics is done notably by the people-ization of politics. The couple is a feminine value. The woman is also the means to soften an image, a role played for example by Marine Le Pen after Jean-Marie Le Pen.

Olivier Besancenot’s tears on TV are the perfect feminine weapon, but they also represent the Trotskyists’ renunciation of virile revolutionary action.

SECOND CHAPTER – Summary of the First Sex by Éric Zemmour

Éric Zemmour recalls the feminized behavior of men in the current society, by examples in particular resulting from television.
He contrasts them with the virile life of famous characters: Casanova in brothels, the fine parties with the Duke of Bemis, Flaubert and the oriental prostitutes, Maupassant who brought a bailiff to the brothels, Baudelaire also with Creole prostitutes.
Among politicians, Dominique Ambien is mentioned with a prostitute, J. F. Kennedy seducer and libertine, and Bill Clinton who has to apologize for fellatio in his office.

What Eric Zemmour criticizes is the moralizing and described as self-righteous speech of the new society that condemns the actions of these men, who had behaved too manly.

The father figure is associated with secrets, while the mother figure is associated with transparency.
However, secrecy is more and more hunted today.

The clients of prostitutes, men, are now brought to light, in the sight of all, and stigmatized.

Éric Zemmour quotes a passage from Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Discourse on the Origin of Inequality:

“Let us begin by distinguishing the moral from the physical in the feeling of love… It is easy to see that the moral of love is a false sentiment; born of the use of society, and celebrated by women with great skill and care to establish, and make dominant a sex that should obey.”

He applies this analysis to the scale of the millennium, to see how in the West exclusively, women have tried to channel the impulses of men so that they no longer consider them only as an object of desire.

It is the reign of co-education which is then denounced: “We live indeed a time of totalitarian, castrating co-education,” in particular in the nursery school. The children are inculcated the idea to find lovers, germ of what will become the feminization of the relations between men and women, through the couple and a confusion of sexual desire/friendship.

This message finds an echo in the reality TV (the island of the temptation for example, where the infidelity becomes necessary sign of unloved).

In these new androgynous couples produced by society, Éric Zemmour sees the incarnation of Plato’s myth where the two parts of a split body would seek each other.

The family relations where the father exalted his power, incited his sons to have virile, sexual, and therefore unfaithful behaviors, have been replaced by the reign of Love, without Father, without authority.

The formerly accepted differentiation between the mother, associated with love, and the prostitute, associated with sexual desire, is gradually disappearing.

By noting that the divorce requested by the woman increases when the man is unemployed, and that the woman works on her side, Éric Zemmour concludes that the divorce is not only a material question, but rather refers to this unconscious or at least implicit need for a virile, hard-working man.

Respect is in these circumstances, for Éric Zemmour, a “mass desire killer”, which is not recognized for what it is.

Just as in the 19th century, men went to “fuck whores” while they respected their wives, in the 21st century men flee from “white women” who are thought of as their equals and respected as such.

Swinging, which is in full swing, would be an unconscious way of desecrating one’s own wife, who is given to other men, in order to make her more desirable: the woman throwing herself into desire, unable to control what happens to her, leaves all the room to the superiority of the man.

In the same way, pornography would be a mirror of the feminization of the society: as the stake becomes financial with the globalization, pornography passes from scenes with intrigues to sequences of raw images, soon mixed with violence, scatology and zoology. This passage would be the sign that the man seeks in the virtual pornography a compensation, to what they do not find more in the real life: the energy and the violence, the domination of the man.

THIRD CHAPTER – Summary of the First Sex by Éric Zemmour

Éric Zemmour begins by making the hypothesis, contrary to the history admitted until now, that it is men who wanted this differentiation between the man and the woman.

He thus retraces the history of humanity according to this new schema, identifying the Great War of 1914 as an upheaval, that of the humiliation of virility.

In reaction, man asserts himself and overplays his virility, notably during episodes of totalitarianism. But for Éric Zemmour, this needs to overplay is precisely the admission of a weakness, which is why “This fascist or communist virility is a fantasy of homosexuals”.

Then, Éric Zemmour exposes again examples of feminization of the society: the couple John Lennon (housewife) and Yoko Ono (businesswoman), the men present at the childbirth (according to a poll, 38% of the men would like to be pregnant if the technology would allow it), the chicken dads.

This feminization finds traces in the past of France – with notable Madame de Pompadour, the salons, Madame de Maintenon – and against which Montesquieu and Jean-Jacques Rousseau would have protested.

And to oppose Molière who criticizes the learned women who “preferred the book to the bed, the knowledge to the pleasure” to the political correctness of today.

As for political life, it has constantly been tainted by the role of women, who have constantly provoked catastrophes and wars (Éric Zemmour gives examples), which has resulted in the rejection of women from politics. The right to vote for women given late, in 1944, is no longer an acceptable reproach, it is not a delay of France in social matters, but on the contrary a justice.

Éric Zemmour quotes Hélène Vecchiali on the evolution of education in France:

As Hélène Vecchiali notes, “the Ministry of Public Instruction became the Ministry of National Education. The paternal project of instructing[instruere meaning “to arm for battle, to equip, to equip”, editor’s note], was replaced by the maternal project of educating[educare having as its first meaning… to feed!, editor’s note].

Éric Zemmour, First Sex

Religion is intimately linked to the idea that has been constructed of marriage. While Judaism established only a simple contract, within a polygamous family, Christianity forced monogamy, eradicated all eroticism from the public sphere, and sacralized marriage.

CHAPTER 4 – Summary of the First Sex by Éric Zemmour

The fatherhood, ‘social invention’ according to Margaret Mead, is, however, an achievement spread all over the world.

However, fatherhood is not the protection of the man granted to the woman; on the contrary, the woman finds herself alone to provide for her needs. This is what happens with primates. Hence this subtle but important reversal of the situation: feminism, for whom emancipation is the sign of their victory, is in fact moving towards a questioning of the protection that men gave them (a sign of weakness, of femininity), freeing the place for a return to true paternalism, and therefore non-protective.

Divorce, contrary to the general discourse, would not be the consequence of individualism – it is enough to see that the divorced remarry or wish to remarry – , but the consequence of the couple. The ideal of the couple, embodied by the dreams of Madame Bovary, is confronted with the reality of the man: he is conquering, full of sexual desires.
In the feminizing society, marriage, historically a financial and contractual institution, is replaced by the couple made of feelings and love.

Thus, marriage as a contract (stable), embodied by Napoleon and his Civil Code, is opposed to the couple susceptible to divorce (unstable), encouraged by the policies of the Fifth Republic.

Another opposition is made between the solitary character of women, as opposed to the tendency of men not to remain alone.

” They are more demanding. They always dream of Prince Charming,
even if they deny it. Especially if they deny it. The more refined ones discover, but a little late, that encounter after encounter, story after story, it is always the same thing, the same disillusions, the same constraints.”

Éric Zemmour, Le Premier Sexe, 2006

If men have followed this trend towards feminization, in front of fathers who take care of their children, chicken dads, they have finally become tired of it. This explains why women are now left alone to take care of their children, the father having left, consenting only to pay in return. This phenomenon is reinforced by women’s magazines, insisting on the union between the divorced mother and her child.

The women, who are emancipated, are then deprived against this abandonment that they reproach to the man. It is in short the realization of the saying “You only reap what you sow”. They have no other solution than the help of the society. It is then that the judges, most often women, according to what Éric Zemmour writes, take revenge in a certain way by taking the money from the husbands who have abandoned their wives. One sees the paradox between the desire of emancipation, and the claim of a repair of this excess of emancipation (the divorce).

Éric Zemmour is then moved to see men out of the ground to confirm or deny suspicions of paternity, like Yves Montand. This earns him this sentence, about Don Juan, a character famous for his multiple relationships: “Even dead, Don Juan is now under surveillance.”

Then the question of abortion is addressed. This one is notably linked to the demographic one: the abortion rate could constitute a threat for the reproduction of the human species, Éric Zemmour even going so far as to evoke “the programmed disappearance of the European peoples”.

Immigration, used as a palliative, would be the symbol of the failure of feminized Europeans, forced to resort to the virile forces of other continents.

The figure of the “young Arab”, in the words of Éric Zemmour, would represent the perfect virility: at the same time rejected by feminists who call him macho, excluded from civilization, but also desired, for the same reasons.

In a particularly provocative passage, Éric Zemmour himself points out, speaking of the “heaviest unspoken fact of French society”, Éric Zemmour describes the figure of the “young Arab” in these terms:

He has a language close to that of Neanderthal. He is the man before civilization. He reacts in a binary way, “lopesa” or “respect”, whores in miniskirts or veiled saints, whore or virgins. He has not read Stendhal (…) But he sometimes offers his conquest to his friends during the famous “tournantes”.

Éric Zemmour, The First Sex, 2006

According to Éric Zemmour, the Arabs were able to keep all their evil impulses intact and powerful, but these were constrained by the religious and family framework. In France, however, in the absence of these frameworks, their virile impulses can be released and fully expressed.

This behavior necessarily makes the French or European children envious of the virile freedom enjoyed by the “Blacks”: “Our children, so well brought up, do not admit to themselves that they would like to imitate them. Just a little. Just once.”

Those who go to the end of this envy are often those who “vote Le Pen”, incarnation of a “phallus by proxy”: they are indeed jealous, and by definition themselves feminized, and find in the virile figure of Jean-Marie Le Pen a way to express themselves.

It would be this same process, identified abroad and recuperated by politicians, which would have produced, for example, the communication strategy of George Bush, who strives to incarnate the virile man by “anti-intellectual remarks” and “redneck airs”, the cliché of the Texan cowboy, even though he comes from an elite background.

Israel would constitute another form of this virility by proxy: by encouraging the Israeli army, “young Jews from working-class neighborhoods” find the expression of an assumed virility, disobedient to international law.

It is this virilization of Jews, previously at peace in the Arab world but with an inferior status, which would explain the current war between Israel and the Arabs.

It is also by the will of domination of Arab men that Éric Zemmour explains the obligation for women to conceal their feminine assets: by fear of women, who threaten the domination of men, the Arabs overplay their virility. Hence the veils or boys’ clothes imposed on women.

The loss of virility of Arab fathers is caused by the judicial institution that forbids hurting his child and by unemployment. The loss is just as important in Black Africa but for other reasons.

According to a certain reading, it would be possible to see how the femininity of France, confronted with the virility of the suburbs, would have given rise to the riots of 2005: “They, the men. They will burn, destroy, immolate the symbols of her gentle mothering protection, the schools, the public transportation, the firemen.”

CHAPTER 5 – Summary of the First Sex by Éric Zemmour

Women, in seeking emancipation through work, are not doing anything other than returning to a situation that has always been in France. Indeed, women have always worked; the 19th century is the only exception.

But this work, in today’s society, remains precarious for women: women make up 80% of monthly salaries below the minimum wage. Inequalities with men are also undeniable. With equivalent qualifications and seniority, the “discrimination” is only 6%.

Éric Zemmour has an explanatory version of this phenomenon that goes against the grain of the usual discourse. For him, it is capitalism that has introduced women, not women who have succeeded in introducing themselves into the capitalist system. Inequalities are amplified by the fact that women tend to favor positions where there is no question of power.

The most profitable jobs are occupied by men, and it is only the sectors that are neglected by men, less profitable, that are offered to women.

All the jobs held by women are automatically proletarianized. The breakthrough of women in politics is only one example among others: politics has less and less power or money, it decides less and less, reduced to the social.

In a rather long enumeration is presented to the feminine paradox, where the woman seems always behind in relation to the society: “they obtain the parity when the politics is not useful anymore; they vote to the left when the Revolution is finished; they become an argument of literary marketing when the literature dies.”

Women are never at the origin of an innovation, they always recover what is left to them, which they then sterilely occupy. But the feminization of men risks to inhibit in the same way any innovation on the part of men.

Intellectual stagnation, previously attributed to old age, finds another cause: devirilization, in other words, feminization.

Éric Zemmour then reminds us that in America and outside the West, virility remains assured and defended, even though the feminized man was born in the United States, with the male reaction prevailing.

Christianity, advocating goodness, is associated with femininity while Islam, synonymous with a return to patriarchy, would be more virile.

Éric Zemmour concludes his book with prognosis, if not a prediction: women would become aware of their status, of the trap set for them by capitalism, and out of regret for the virility of men would no longer resist a return to virility. The problem would rather come from men themselves, who would prefer their femininity, their castration, at the price of future submissions and humiliations.

→ Summary of Merci pour ce moment by Valérie Trierweiler

→ Summary of get us out of this crisis now! – Paul Krugman

QUOTES from Premier Sexe by Éric Zemmour:

Today, young girls, always on the verge of anorexia, make themselves a boyish body to please homosexual designers who do not like women.

Éric Zemmour, The First Sex, 2006

To their archaic fear of the phallus, of the “rape of the penetration”, the women of today answer by an unhealthy desire of the same, an immense lesbian temptation.

Éric Zemmour, The First Sex, 2006

Feminists also found themselves in this situation because they have always considered, while saying it or without daring to say it, the penetration as a conquest, an invasion, a rape even when it is consented. Which is not wrong.

Éric Zemmour, Le Premier Sexe, 2006

The couple is the feminine value par excellence.

Éric Zemmour, The First Sex, 2006

Paternalism is replaced by maternalism.

Éric Zemmour, The First Sex, 2006

Men, women, children. The old secular trilogy has exploded.

Éric Zemmour, The First Sex, 2006

The man must not be any more a predator of the desire. (…) Any seduction is assimilated to a manipulation, to violence, a constraint.

Éric Zemmour, The First Sex, 2006

[The man] He must only love.

Éric Zemmour, The First Sex, 2006

They do not want to be one among others, they want to be unique. Not only objects of desire, like thousands of others, but loved.

Éric Zemmour, The First Sex, 2006

The marriage jumped the first. It became the marriage of love. An oxymoron.

Éric Zemmour, The First Sex, 2006

Love is the sacred of the time. Formerly, thirty years ago, we lived without knowing it in archaic times: the leader of the pack, the father, wanted to be the power, the only hard penis, the only phallus of his house.

Éric Zemmour, The First Sex, 2006

It was the law of the father, who obliged the son to go and get hard and fuck somewhere else.

Éric Zemmour, The First Sex, 2006

This fascist or communist virility is a fantasy of homosexuals, Gide in Moscow, Brasillach in Berlin

Éric Zemmour, The First Sex, 2006

the suffering of the man devitalized by defeat, who takes revenge on the woman who slept with the German, the victor, the Man. With an erect penis as a
weapon. With an erect penis as a weapon.

Éric Zemmour, Le Premier Sexe, 2006

These baby-boomers will be the generation of all renunciations, all abandonments, all irresponsibility. This generation wants to abandon the death drive that has been the hallmark of virility for millennia.

Éric Zemmour, Le Premier Sexe, 2006

It is the Church which will gradually eradicate the erotic practices, the collective baths and the habit preserved until the Middle Ages to offer his wife to his guest of passage. Of course, the Church tolerated manly excesses; of course, there were mistresses and brothels; of course, marriages continued to be arranged until the beginning of the twentieth century.
The beginning of the 20th century, that is to say that the social still prevails on the love

Éric Zemmour, The First Sex, 2006

As long as male ideology imposed itself on society, marriage remained a commercial arrangement.

Éric Zemmour, The First Sex, 2006

From the moment when the society becomes feminized, it is the couple and not the marriage which becomes the great quest.

Éric Zemmour, Le Premier Sexe, 2006

It is that all the society, men and women, are carried away by the romanticism of the couple. It is all the society, men and women, which dreams of becoming a woman.

Éric Zemmour, The First Sex, 2006

Society is confronted with a major contradiction: advocating an exclusive individual freedom, it favors more and more self-service divorce. But to correct the devastating effects of this mass divorce, it accumulates constraints to frame the excesses of male sexuality.

Éric Zemmour, Le Premier Sexe, 2006

Everything is done to allow the woman to force the man to become a father.

Éric Zemmour, The First Sex, 2006

Since the ’70s, in western societies, children belong to women.

Éric Zemmour, The First Sex, 2006

Everything happened as if French and European men, having put down their phallus, unable or unwilling to impregnate their women who had become resistant, had called for help from their former “servants” whom they had emancipated.

Éric Zemmour, The First Sex, 2006

Feminists vomit him [the young Arab] but they do not dare to say it because of their anti-colonial heritage.

Éric Zemmour, The First Sex, 2006

Zionism is, first of all, a historical attempt to do away with the “feminized” image of the European Jew

Éric Zemmour, The First Sex, 2006

Like all small males since the beginning of humanity, young Arabs are afraid of women. Fear of these machines to castrate

Éric Zemmour, The First Sex, 2006

Capitalism has transformed these ambitious armadas [of women] into new “useful idiots”.

Éric Zemmour, Le Premier Sexe, 2006

For a long time, the deputies have been transformed into social assistants.

Éric Zemmour, The First Sex, 2006

Women believe to take what they take from men. In truth, men give up the appearances of a defunct power.

Éric Zemmour, The First Sex, 2006

Women drive when speed is limited; they smoke when tobacco kills

Éric Zemmour, The First Sex, 2006

everything also happens as if, unconsciously panicked by the accelerated feminization of their men, they try a desperate backtrack.

Éric Zemmour, Le Premier Sexe, 2006

It seems to me, on the other hand, that the greatest resistance will come from men, too happy to have finally gotten rid of the burden that runs between their legs.

Éric Zemmour, The First Sex, 2006