A well-known novelist, filmmaker and commentator, Mr. Moix has made plenty of provocative statements before. But this time he committed the twin sins of inelegance and indiscretion. As a public intellectual he’s supposed to play the “seducteur” who engages in a chaste flirtation with his audience. Announcing that he wouldn’t sleep with some of them kills the mood.

And in a country that lives by the maxim “Not all truths should be told,” knowing what not to say — and what parts of your life to conceal — are key social graces.

“He can sleep with whoever he wants, Yann Moix, who cares?” the 20-something humorist Agnès Hurstel said on France Inter radio. “Desire, erotic thoughts, are never politically correct.” What’s unacceptable, she said, is that Mr. Moix spoke to the magazine “as if he was on the couch of his shrink.”

Mr. Moix tried to explain that he’s a prisoner of his preferences and of his own fear of aging. His relationships with younger women often end painfully after a few months, dooming him to a perpetual adolescence. “It’s not something enviable, it’s something sad,” he said on a French talk show. His new book is based on his misery after a breakup.

But his remarks caught Frenchwomen in a take-no-prisoners mood, and feeling a new solidarity. #MeToo has made them more alert to the discrimination they face. They sense that they are still having to tolerate treatment their American counterparts have squashed, especially at work, and that this isn’t changing quickly enough.

The bedroom was one place where Frenchwomen were winning. Surveys report that they are far more likely to remain sexually active after age 50 than their American counterparts . The way the French see it, everyone is entitled to sex and love, and “there’s beauty in every age.”

Still, aging while female isn’t simple. Even in France it takes delicate internal calibrations to keep counternarratives at bay and stay “bien dans votre âge” — comfortable in your own age.