> More or less the entire French Intellectual establishment argued at that time

Then the question is, how does one become intellectual establishement. Sounds like dissenters were somehow excluded from that nebulous subjective category.

That was indeed what I was referring to. Rather than interpreting your first paragraph as a pardon of Foucault, I consider it a condemnation of the group entire.

If your (or their, the french intellectual elite's/literati's) philosophy is so morally vacuous that it fails to recognize the sexual exploitation of children and young teenagers as reprehensible, then it is worth less than nothing. It is an evil.

Consent is not enough, is the common modern view. Power structures and actual power matters too.

In some sense, surely advocating (almost successfully, if I recall correctly) for a repeal of age of consent laws must be worse than the crime itself. That is, if we are of the opinion that pedophilia is wrong. Consider the difference between orchestrating many murders and a single murder as an analogy.

No, Foucault (and the others on that list) have been let off the hook for too long. The aesthetician in me is horrified, youth is beauty and they want it defiled?

And a disclaimer; I am of course a conservative in every sense of the word, and this is my perspective.