DOSSIER «LE SEXE, SANS COMPLEXE» | Qu’elle soit une simple thématique, un moteur narratif, un motif de subversion, un terrain d’exploration ou de réappropriation, la sexualité a toujours été présente dans la littérature, jusqu’à connaître un regain de popularité avec l’essor de la chick lit, de la new et dark romance, d’abord sur la plateforme Wattpad puis dans les rayons des librairies. On retrouve parmi la scène littéraire française de jeunes auteurs comme Simon Johannin, Pauline Delabroy-Allard ou Arthur Dreyfus, qui s’emparent de ce sujet, sans ornementation ni parade, pour en révéler tout son naturel brut. Mais il est un romancier qui s’affirme avec encore plus d’audace, alliant une écriture d’une coloration extrêmement classique à une observation crue, sinistre et sans fard du charnel et de la nature humaine. Ce romancier-là, c’est Jean-Baptiste Del Amo avec «Une éducation libertine».

BRIEF INSOLIT | After the removal of abortion rights from the U.S. Constitution last June, the Texas Attorney General expressed his willingness to reinstate a state law banning sodomy, if the Supreme Court allowed it. What exactly does this mean?

Caught between pornography and prudery, eroticism seems to be fading from the forefront of the Western scene. Difficult in...

DOSSIER «LE SEXE SANS COMPLEXE» | Shibari means «to tie», «to bind» in Japanese. Close to BDSM, this practice originates from samurai torture techniques. Now practiced in clubs all over Europe and Japan, shibari has joined the realms of performance art and so-called "wellness" sports such as yoga, breaking away from sadomasochistic sexual practices. So how and why did eroticism find its way into shibari, and finally out?

DOSSIER «LE SEXE SANS COMPLEXE» | The French historian René Rémond, who died in 2007, summed up the answer to this question in a shocking formula: sex, he wrote in 1987, entered politics in 1968! Does this aphorism imply that sex and politics, prior to that date, lived in separate spheres, intersecting only in the private lives of political actors and actresses?

DOSSIER «LE SEXE SANS COMPLEXE» | The prohibition of prostitution in certain European countries seems inconsistent, since pornography is legal there. Wouldn't a sound policy be to act upstream, to avoid encouraging on the Internet what we proscribe on the street, or to accept, like the old-timers, that it's better to regulate it, because it's a phenomenon that is, after all, inevitable?