Violence and inequality are effects. Their causes lie partly in the self-representation built within intimacy, where domination comes to compensate for the missing bond. Supporting young people on this ground is therefore central feminist work. Here are concrete ways of doing it, ways of being, of welcoming and of speaking.
Cause and effect
For years, I have taken part in projects entitled “violence prevention,” “raising awareness of equality,” “fighting gender stereotypes.” I have often felt in them a sense of absurdity that took me time to formulate. These schemes work on effects while believing they work on causes. Violence is not a cause, it is a result. Inequality is not a cause, it is a result. When we gather young people to make a film against violence or run a workshop on equality, we address the symptom, and we can spend years doing so without touching what produces it.
I am not saying we should not work on effects. Naming violence, making it visible, equipping the people who suffer it, all of this has its necessity. But confusing effects with causes condemns us to start over endlessly, and this confusion is massive in equality training as in prevention projects. They speak of behaviours to correct, almost never of what manufactures them. Yet what manufactures them has a place, and that place is the very one educational schemes do not want to hear about: the intimate construction of the representation of oneself, of which sexuality is one of the principal workshops.
Where domination comes to replace the bond
Sexuality is not only a matter of bodies and pleasure, it is a symbolic place where each person builds a representation of themselves within the bond to another. And it is in this construction that relations of domination can take root. There are people, men most often, for whom lived sexuality is poor, barely satisfying, including physiologically, but who find in it a satisfaction of another order, a narcissistic one, that of occupying the dominant position. When the bond is missing, when one does not know how to build it, when no one has taught us to know it, domination comes in its place. It offers a substitute assurance to those who lack the means of relationship.
This intuition is grounded by work from several disciplines. bell hooks, in The Will to Change (2004), shows that patriarchal masculinity first demands of men that they amputate their own emotional life, and that this amputation leaves them without access to the bond; unable to love, they seek power, which is its socially valued substitute. Domination appears there not as an excess of strength but as the symptom of a lack, which matches what I observe. Pierre Bourdieu, in Masculine Domination (1998), describes a libido dominandi, an eroticisation of the dominant position itself: the sexual act is socially constructed, for men, as a form of possession, so that satisfaction lodges in the relation of power more than in the encounter. And the anthropologist Maurice Godelier, in The Making of Great Men (1982), showed from the Baruya people of New Guinea that masculine domination is never a given: it must be manufactured, by institutions and rituals that minutely organise sexuality, its representation and its prohibitions. What ethnology establishes there is decisive for us: if domination is manufactured in the symbolic organisation of sexuality, it is also there that it can be unmade.
We can then measure what is missed by the common objection that these questions of intimacy would be a personal, peripheral subject, and not a real subject for feminism and equality. It is the reverse. Equality and violence play out at the surface; their causes are knotted in the representation of oneself within the bond, of which sexuality is a central workshop. Opening a space where young people can work on that relation is working at the heart of the subject, at the level of causes. And because this space is taboo, everything in it is fixed, locked, validated in silence; what cannot be spoken cannot be transformed. That is one more reason to go there, not a reason to turn away.
Abandonment disguised as protection
On this ground, almost all current educational discourse speaks in the place of young people. It decides in advance what is healthy and what damages, delivers the verdict, and calls that protecting. Paulo Freire formulated it once and for all in his Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1968): any action carried out for people without them, however generous, treats them as objects and renews the domination it claims to fight. A young person who is told what to think of their own intimacy is not protected, they are abandoned, since the one thing that would help them, a space in which to work through what they live, is withdrawn at the very moment we claim to give it.
Alice Miller devoted her work to describing this mechanism, and her thought is more nuanced than the use often made of it. In For Your Own Good (1980, translated into French in 1984), she analyses what she calls poisonous pedagogy, an expression she takes over from Katharina Rutschky: the whole of the educational violence exercised on children in the name of their own good. Her thesis is not that suffering makes people violent, which would be a determinism without exit. Her thesis is that it is denied suffering that is passed on: the child who is forbidden to feel and to say what is being done to them, who must even be grateful for it since it is “for their own good,” cannot work through this experience, and what cannot be worked through repeats itself, turned against oneself or against others. Hence the importance Miller gives to what she calls the helping witness, that person, sometimes only one in a whole childhood, who listens, who validates the feeling, who attests that what was lived was indeed lived. The presence of such a witness is often enough to interrupt the chain of repetition. Olivier Maurel extended this work in France with La Fessée (2001), which Miller prefaced, then by founding in 2005 the Observatory of Ordinary Educational Violence, whose distinctive contribution is to have shown how thoroughly this violence is naturalised, to the point that the same gesture is called cruelty when aimed at an animal, assault when aimed at an adult, and education when aimed at a child.
This detour grounds what I propose. If violence is born of the experience whose working-through has been forbidden, then listening is not a supplement of kindness in the support of young people, it is the exact mechanism by which the chain is interrupted. The adult who receives a young person’s speech about their intimacy, without judging, occupies the function of the helping witness. And the adult who refuses it, or who immediately turns it into a moral lesson, renews poisonous pedagogy in its contemporary form: contempt for the intimate experience of young people, naturalised as “protection” just as educational violence was naturalised as “education.”
The certainty of the method, not expertise in the subject
One obstacle remains, and it is often the one that paralyses teams: the feeling of not being legitimate. How can one support young people on sexuality, intimate images, desire, when one is not a specialist in these matters? This worry rests on a conception of legitimacy that needs to be displaced. It supposes that in order to support, one would have to hold an encyclopedic knowledge of the subject, to know what is true and what is false, what is healthy and what is risky, in every situation. No one holds that knowledge, least of all about another person’s intimacy, which is by definition singular and situated. So, for want of that impossible expertise, we fall back on the normative, we recite prudent generalities, we do what we feel is beside the point, and we feel it all the more because the young people feel it too.
The displacement consists in grounding one’s confidence elsewhere: not on knowledge of the subject, but on the certainty of the method. Jacques Rancière, in The Ignorant Schoolmaster (1987), showed that one can teach what one does not know, provided one takes the equality of intelligences as a starting point and not as a horizon. The same logic holds here. I do not need to know what this young person is living, nor what they ought to think of it, and I do not have to know it, since they are the one who holds that knowledge. What I can know with certainty, because experience and the work I have just cited confirm it, is that the method of listening emancipates: that a space where speech can take shape without being judged allows people to work through what they live, and that this working-through is what transforms. The educator who holds this methodological certainty no longer needs to pretend to know. Their position becomes tenable, honest, and solid, because it no longer rests on a knowledge they do not have. This is the difference I have long drawn between helping and taking over: helping is making it possible for the person to think for themselves; taking over is thinking in their place. One never takes over someone’s intimacy without confiscating it from them.
Ways of doing
Here, concretely, is what this method requires. These are not recipes to apply mechanically, they are gestures I have tested, to be mobilised according to situations, and each demands work on oneself more than material means.
Listening before speaking. I described in an older text the paradoxical injunction that structures the classroom: we demand silence of pupils, then we demand that they speak, and we obtain both poorly because listening cannot be commanded, it settles in. The way I propose reverses the order: it is the adult who listens first, for real, without taking the group’s noise personally, and this listening founds a principle of interaction that the group takes up in turn. On intimacy, this order is even more decisive. A space where one will be able to speak of what touches cannot be opened by a speech, it opens through a quality of attention that young people experience before anything is asked of them.
Going through a third object, never asking for the intimate face to face. One does not say to a young person “tell me about your sexuality,” any more than one asks someone about their traumas in a corridor. Speech about the intimate needs an object between the people, a film to make, a photograph, a character, a fiction, a sound creation, onto which projections can settle without anyone being exposed frontally. This is what I call the symbolic third: the third object allows a relation between two subjects, where the face-to-face installs a dual relation saturated with projections. A student once told me, with perfect accuracy, about a whispering device I had improvised: “I need an excuse to enter into intimacy with the other.” The method provides that excuse, that frame which authorises what ordinary social life forbids. And it leaves each person in control of the dial: in a fiction, one speaks of oneself as much as one decides, since it is the character who speaks. No one has to know which part is one’s own.
Anticipating shame, preparing exits for it. Sexuality is, in our culture, saturated with shame, and shame is the emotion that prevents speech: Boris Cyrulnik has shown that the ashamed person longs to be heard and cannot take the risk of being heard. I have detailed in this article, regarding adolescent spectators, what this emotion does to collective exchanges and how to work with it. The gestures hold as they are here: formulations that authorise without singling out (“there may be things that are hard to say, that is normal”), moments in pairs rather than in the whole group, a written or drawn trace that allows one to set something down without showing oneself, a right to silence given explicitly, and what I call empathic gentleness, which consists in putting oneself in the place of whoever will receive each sentence before uttering it. One reading marker, finally. A group that falls silent when the subject of the intimate approaches is not a group the subject does not interest, it is most often a group the subject touches. Silence is a working datum, not a failure.
Setting a frame that protects, from inside the relationship. Speech about the intimate needs explicit rules, spoken aloud: what is said here will not leave this room, no one is obliged to do anything, one can take part in the whole activity without ever disclosing anything personal. This frame does not protect only the young people, it also protects the adults, to whom it gives a clear countenance in the face of what might overwhelm them. And it is set from inside the relationship, not from above. A youth worker to whom young people were sending unsolicited intimate images found the right formulation: “I will not look at your stories, but what you send me directly, I take into account.” She names the contours of the relationship without judging the gesture, and within those contours she remains fully present. That is the whole difference between a frame and a verdict.
Committing oneself. bell hooks, who taught all her life students marked by dominations, made it a principle: never ask of people risks one does not take oneself (Teaching to Transgress, 1994). If I propose to a group an activity that touches the intimate, I take part in it, and my production passes under the same collective gaze as the others. If personal speech is called for, I can offer mine, situated, dated, presented as that of a specific person and not as the truth: “me, at your age, here is what troubled me.” This commitment does not abolish my position as an adult, it makes it habitable. It shows that vulnerability is not what one demands of others, it is what one shares.
Not aiming at avowal. This is the safeguard that keeps all the preceding gestures from tipping into their opposite. The objective is never to make young people speak about their intimacy, it is to make that speech possible. The difference is the one that separates a space from an extraction. A successful setting is not one where everyone confided, it is one from which each person leaves knowing that there exist adults capable of receiving this kind of thing, and that the day they need it, the space will be there. Some of the deepest effects of this work are invisible and deferred. To want confidences as proof of effectiveness is to reconstitute a pressure, that is, a domination, with the very tools that had been forged against it.
Feminism in practice
Working on equality and preventing violence, if we want to do it at the level of causes and not only of effects, means opening spaces for young people where their representation of themselves within the bond can be worked through, spoken, transformed, instead of freezing in silence within the taboo. It is a modest-looking work, made of prepared rooms, of pairs, of fictions, of respected silences, of weighed sentences. It produces no spectacular deliverables. But it is the work that touches the place where domination settles in when no one accompanies, and that is why it belongs by full right to feminism in cultural action, not as a side subject to be addressed if time allows, but as its heart. Educators do not need to be experts in sexuality to carry it out. They need a method whose solidity is established, listening, the third object, the frame, commitment, and the confidence that this solidity gives them the right to have.
