Paris (AFP)

Become in a few weeks one of the new faces of feminism, the elected Parisian ecologist and lesbian activist Alice Coffin, who released a book on Wednesday, assumes to target men in her militant and political fights, even if it means splitting.

At 42, this journalist by training made a remarkable entry into politics by demanding in July the departure of the deputy mayor for Culture of Paris, Christophe Girard, criticized for his links with the writer Gabriel Matzneff, implicated for rape on minors.

The day after a demonstration which led to the surprise resignation of this close friend of Anne Hidalgo, Alice Coffin explodes in the middle of Paris, shouting "shame, shame" while a tribute is paid to her.

"It was crazy to praise him like that. I had read the New York Times article on his proximity to Matzneff and I told myself that for this reason, symbolically, he could not come to power", tells AFP this woman with light eyes, short blonde hair in disarray, assuring that she knew nothing at the time of the rape accusations today brought against the former deputy.

After a "complicated" summer, she released her first work on Wednesday at Grasset, "Le genie lesbien", a "combat book" against "the invisibility of lesbians" but also "androbsession".

- Blacklisted -

Erected as a "new harpy of feminism" by the weekly Valeurs contemporaine, accused of being excessive, supported by her environmental group but blacklisted by the Parisian majority ... Alice Coffin divides and suffers insults and threats on social networks, which got him to be under police protection in August.

"What I am criticized for - and this is what I want to show in the book - is that I dare to point out men, their privileges and refuse all this discourse of complementarity between men and women", justifies the elected, who is "not afraid to speak".

Recently, she saw images from 2018, where she declared on the RT channel during a mobilization against PMA: "Not having a husband exposes me rather not to be raped, not to be killed, not to to be beaten up ".

Supported via the hashtag #JeSoutiensAliceCoffin, she is however criticized by Anne Hidalgo for fighting "not for equal rights" but "for the right to be different", and is accused of "binary thought" by the philosopher Elisabeth Badinter .

"I know that by choosing the generalization I displease, because it is impossible to understand that there is a male problem", continues the one who taught journalism since 2012 at the Catholic Institute of Paris and was not escorted at the start of the school year.

"But it's political speech, of course I don't think every man is like that."

Born in 1978 in Toulouse, where her two parents studied aeronautics, this oldest of six siblings then grew up in Paris.

She entered activism in 2010 by joining her mother, Colette, in the collective La Barbe, where activists introduced themselves wearing false beards into meetings mainly composed of men (general meetings of companies, conferences) to denounce male domination of places of power.

- "Les Z'amours" -

"She forged a very concrete activism there but also took blows, in the literal sense of the term", remembers the activist Veronica Noseda, her friend for 10 years, who played in the same women's football team "Les degommeuses".

For her, "there is a gap between the image constructed by her adversaries and what she is: a warm, attentive woman, with great energy and inventiveness".

In 2018, they slammed the door together on a meeting on assisted reproduction with Emmanuel Macron, to which they had invited, criticizing "the total erasure of lesbians on this subject".

Co-founder in 2013 of the Association of LGBT Journalists (AJL) and spokesperson for the European Lesbian Conference, she tells in her book how she convinced her partner for six years to participate in the television show "les Z'amours ", where couples come to share their daily life.

Regretting that they were ultimately never recalled.

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