The New York Times - November 22, 1986
Judith Miller

The sharpest reaction to the deluge last summer has come from the Government, which is considering new taxes on hard-core pornography.

But the soft-core pornography industry also shows signs of concern. Last summer billboards all over Paris displayed a cover of the soft-core weekly Newlook, showing two nude women, until the magazine withdrew them, saying that perhaps it had "gone a little too far."

Nevertheless, soft-core pornography continues to flourish. Sextel, a company that links telephone subscribers to computerized sexual messages and graphics, has been one of France's fastest growing services on "Minitel," the minicomputer supplied to all French telephone subscribers. The usual supply of printed soft-core pornography is unabated.

And in the summer "Le Diable au Corps," a film based on Raymond Radiguet's classic novel and featuring an explicit sexual act, appeared in Paris movie houses without an X rating. Hard-core pornography is controlled in France, but there are no controls on erotic material that is not considered pornographic.

In the midst of this onslaught, Le Nouvel Observateur, the popular weekly, complained in a series of articles that France was turning into an "all-sex society."

A month later the National Assembly approved a proposal to increase the value-added tax on pornographic literature and films. The action stunned the French, since it was the first time the extreme right-wing National Front Party, which sponsored the amendment, had won support for one of its proposals.

For technical reasons the tax approved in the Assembly has not yet been imposed. But there is a complementary proposal in the Senate for a new tax of 30 francs (about $4.50) on videotapes considered pornographic or likely to incite violence.

The Government has also proposed imposing the maximum value-added tax, 33.3 percent, on "services and products forbidden" to people under 18. (In a separate action, France has lifted its longstanding ban on advertising of condoms. The ban had reflected the Government's concern over the low birth rate; lifting it evidently reflected the national worry over the spread of AIDS, acquired immune deficiency syndrome.) "We've reached the saturation point of eroticism," said Jacques Seguela, a public-relations expert who pioneered overtly sexual advertising. Sensing a more conservative mood here, he has asked his company, Agence Roux, Seguela, Cayzac et Goudard, to explore the advertising implications of the trend.

France has long been schizophrenic about pornography. On the one hand the French have relished their country's reputation as the world center of sensuality, and France has for decades had one of the most liberal attitudes in Europe on publication and distribution of literature and works of art.

On the other hand, France, a Roman Catholic country, has had protracted debates about where to draw the line between pornography and eroticism. This is not an easy distinction in France, where bare-breasted women are the norm on beaches and nudity in films, magazines and billboards does not raise eyebrows.

In 1975 the Government created a new class of X film, which, because of sexual content or "incitation to violence," was closed to people under 18 years old. The law required that such films be shown in special cinemas. In 1978 there were 171 such cinemas; today there are 82.

The current concern, however, is not hard-core pornography, but the use of sex to sell everything from films to toothpaste in France. Earlier this year, for example, a Government-sponsored television advertisement aimed at encouraging the French to vote featured Marianne, symbol of the Republic, clad in a diaphanous form-fitting toga.

The prominence of sex as an advertising theme, French feminists say, is far more overt here than in the United States. Here, the law permits anything to be published that does not "offend good mores or modesty."

'We have nothing against nudity," said Bettey Fournier, of Maison des Femmes, a Government-supported private group whose members counsel women on professional or personal problems.

"What we oppose is the exploitation of women and sex to sell things. Women in France are rendered objects. It's a real cultural problem, because French women are still taught that they must be submissive and seductive, that their primary function is to be beautiful and to please men."

Sex, and the pursuit of sex, she said with a sigh, is a "national preoccupation."

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