Leïla Slimani

speaker

494 appearances 2 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 22 Aug

Leïla Slimani’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.

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Fresh Air · French-Moroccan writer Leïla Slimani on feminism & freedom · 27 Jul 2026 podcast

Sometimes men are punished for homosexuality, sometimes for adultery, but it's mostly women.

For me, I think I had a very dark vision of sexuality.

I was always worried.

I was incapable of abandoning myself to sexuality because from the moment I became a woman, my mother always told me about sex in a way that she was telling me about danger.

The danger of getting pregnant, the danger of going to jail, the danger of being raped, all the dangers.

So for me, being a woman was dangerous.

And I was always afraid.

I was always thinking that someone was judging me, that I was not a good woman, that I was not doing the right thing.

And

I was thinking that for us women, it was impossible to be innocent, that from the beginning we were guilty, guilty of something.

But I couldn't understand and I couldn't know exactly what I was guilty of.

Yeah, they did.

But the souvenir of all I faced and all I experienced because of those fears is still here.

And I think that even in the West, being a woman is difficult.

When I arrived in France at the age of 18, I had a lot of

fantasies about Paris.

I thought that it was a city of glamour and city of love and city of freedom where I could do whatever I wanted.

But it was not as glamorous and easy as that because there was men following you in the subway and in the street at night.

So I think also I was very disappointed of discovering that, that my fantasy about the West and my fantasy about

this world where women were totally free was a fantasy and was not totally true.

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