French Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne has called Junior Social Affairs Minister Marlène Schiappa to tell her that Schiappa's interview in the April/June edition of Playboy magazine is not at all appropriate in the current climate of strikes and economic hardship.
Marlène Schiappa poses for the glamour magazine, dressed in various blue, white and red designer garmernts, to illustrate a 12-page Playboy article in which she talks about women's rights.
"Defending the right of women to do what they want with their bodies: everywhere and all the time," Schiappa wrote on Twitter on Saturday. "In France, women are free. Whether it annoys the backward and the hypocrites or not."
It has certainly annoyed Elisabeth Borne.
The prime minister called Schiappa to tell her that her appearance was not at all appropriate, especially in the current period.
Greens MP and fellow women's rights activist Sandrine Rousseau, an outspoken critic of the centrist government, asked: "where is the respect for the French people?
"People who are going to have to work for two more years, who are demonstrating, who are losing days of salary, who aren't managing to eat because of inflation?
"There is a social context."
Playboy is not for old machos
Playboy has defended the spread which will appear in its French-language April/June edition.
Schiappa was the "most 'Playboy compatible'" of government ministers "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," editor Jean-Christophe Florentin told the AFP news agency.
"Playboy is not a soft porn magazine but a 300-page quarterly 'mook' (a mix of a book and a magazine) that is intellectual and on trend," Florentin added, while admitting there were "still a few undressed women but they're not the majority of the pages."
Other criticism of Schiappa has focused on the broader issue of the centrist government's communication strategy.
President Emmanuel Macron, who rarely gives interviews to the French press, offered his thoughts on political power and pensions in a long interview published in children's magazine "Pif, le mag" last week.
Schiappa, a regular on French TV talk shows, brought in legislation outlawing catcalling and street harassment while serving as equalities minister in 2018.
The mother-of-two was a prolific author and blogger before her career in politics, writing about the challenges of motherhood, women's health and pregnancy.
She also penned a 2010 book that offered sex tips for the overweight which some critics saw as propagating stereotypes.
