French minister Marlene Schiappa criticized for Playboy cover

• French minister Marlene Schiappa appeared on the April cover of Playboy magazine.
• Her colleagues, including French Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne, criticized the move, CNN reported.
• Schiappa, a women’s rights activist, defended her choice to pose for the magazine on Sunday.

French minister Marlene Schiappa is being criticized by her colleagues for posing on the cover of the French edition of Playboy magazine.

Schiappa posed for the April issue of the magazine wearing a white outfit, per The Telegraph. Playboy interviewed the French politician on women’s and LGBTQ rights, the outlet reported.

French Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne told Shicappa, who is the minister delegate in charge of citizenship, that posing for Playboy “wasn’t appropriate, especially during this period,” a source close to the prime minister told BFMTW.

France is in the middle of a political upheaval after the government pushed through a move to raise the state pension age from 62 to 64. More than a million people in France protested the decision, setting fires and smashing storefront windows.

Jean-Luc Mélenchon, leader of the LFI party, criticized Schiappa on Saturday, tweeting that Schiappa posing for Playboy was one sign of France “going off the rails.”

Shciappa responded in a tweet on Sunday, saying that it’s a woman’s right “to have control of their bodies.”

“Defending the right of women to have control of their bodies, that’s everywhere and all the time,” she wrote. “In France, women are free. With all due respect to the detractors and hypocrites.”

Before her position as a minister delegate, Schiappa was the Secretary of State for Gender Equality. During that time, she proposed legislation that outlawed cat-calling. Lawmakers approved the law in 2018.

Playboy editor Jean-Christophe Florentin told AFP news agency that Schiappa was “compatible” for the magazine “because she is attached to the rights of women and she has understood that it’s not a magazine for old ‘machos’ but could be an instrument for the feminist cause.”