French Toast (8 page)

The way the French shop and prepare their food—as well as the obvious gusto with which they relish it—is an important cultural difference, one of the first and most lasting ones I encountered. But if food was a difference, just think of what I had to learn about the attitude of the French toward sex! Now that was a real eye-opener.

Sex is one area in which the cultural gap is
enormous
.

Probably the most obvious difference between the Americans and the French is the lack of prudishness with which the French talk about sex. After twenty years in France, I'm finally starting to get the jokes and even join in the laughter. Hey! I don't even blush when I walk by huge billboards with ladies in sexy bras or
men in sexy underpants or other various states of undress. Progress!

But I was shocked when I first arrived. I thought an off-color joke was a come-on. It took me twenty years of slowly steeping in the ribald Rabelaisian tradition to shuck my embarrassment and find a lot of this stuff funny. Yes, I was prim indeed.

As a child growing up in the great American Midwest, I learned right off the bat that there were three subjects one did not broach at the dinner table: sex, religion, and politics. Perhaps years of skirting the taboo trio gave me a much better sense of humor about much of what I hear at French dinner tables, where conversations are often
based
on one or more of the three forbidden fruits.

An example: There was a lively conversation in which, amid much laughter, we admired two newborn baby boys—their little hands and pretty skin and eyes, right down to their penises, where a very factual allusion was made in passing to the respective sizes. Up until that point, I had been translating much of the lighthearted banter for my brother-in-law, who was visiting from Chicago. But somehow, my midwestern upbringing got in the way of a truthful rendering of the penis comparison. I knew that he, a fellow midwesterner, would have been as embarrassed as I was. Something would definitely have been lost in translation.

Since they are not puritanical, the French talk about
sex very openly. This does not mean that they are a nation of sex fiends; it just means that there is no stigma attached to the discussion of sex in mixed company (or in general). Of course, that depends on who's discussing it and how. A reality check here: Most French people don't sit around talking about sex. They also talk about philosophy, politics, money (not all that much), food, and wine (a lot).

In France, sexual innuendos abound in conversations. These sexual references, many of which are puns or word associations, are much more frequent than dirty jokes. Locker room conversations, I am told, are looked down on. I mean, who needs to “talk dirty” when it's all out in the open? (On this score, if I may add an editorial comment, I think the French are saner than the Anglo-Saxons.)

“We're not puritanical and hence we're less hypocritical about sex than the Americans are,” remarked one Frenchwoman with a certain pride.

You can say that again.

To see how really unpuritanical the French are, you just have to look at their ads. Of course everyone sells consumer goods by using sex, but the French excel at it. French publicist Jacques Séguéla calls American publicity “efficient and aggressive” . . . to the saturation point. In contrast, he says that French advertising is “instinctive, passionate, sentimental, romantic, in brief, warm.”

Sometimes the ads are just “warm,” as he says. Sometimes they're hot.

One of the best-known and -remembered ones was a TV ad for Perrier. In it, the famous little green bottle is stroked by the expert red-nailed fingers of a woman who does not appear on-screen. The bottle, which starts out at 8 ounces, grows to 12 ounces under the expert palpatation. Then it grows and grows even more, until at one liter, it literally explodes its liquid into the air. “This spot,” concluded one French magazine, “was like the butter scene in
Last Tango in Paris
.”

Well, we certainly didn't see anything like
that
when I was growing up in Iowa. And we certainly didn't see what I saw one day while thumbing through the photo album of a very close French friend, one of the most conventionally bourgeois people you would ever hope to run across. There sat my girlfriend, barebreasted, on a beach, with her two little girls at her side. I wasn't surprised that she had been barebreasted on the beach. What surprised me was that she had included the photo in the family album, which everyone would look at, including her own mother! My immediate reaction to the photos was proof to me that my midwestern primness has not entirely deserted me.

By the same token, I used to be shocked by a lot of the conversations going on around me. But I now see that rather than turning my children into sex maniacs, the frankness with which sex is discussed has made them remarkably relaxed about it. They talk about sex like they talk about breakfast cereal. Of course I am speaking
about a milieu of freethinkers; in a traditional family, this freedom of speech is hardly the rule. Some French families are as prudish as any basic midwestern family, or more, believe it or not.

When translated, many French words and expressions sound absolutely terrible, much worse than they are in French. For example, an overnight bag is sometimes referred to as a “
baise-en-ville
” (screwing in town, literally). French author Jean-Claude Carrière cataloged hundreds of synonyms for the various parts of the body in his book
Les mots et la chose: Le grand livre des petits mots inconvenants (The Words and the Thing: the Big Book of Little Indecent Words)
. Among the synonyms for the male organ:
le phallus, le pénis, la verge
, but also ancient words such as
le vit
(donkey's penis),
le dard
(stinger),
l'épinette
(little thorn),
le braquemart
(short sword), and
l'arbalète
(crossbow). Add to this
la bite, la pine, la queue, le paf, le truc, le légume d'amour
(vegetable of love!) and you'll begin to get just a small idea of this vast subject. The chapter on synonyms for the male organ is eighteen pages long!

The open way in which people talk about sex is one thing that struck me as an enormous cultural difference. Another difference I discovered was in the relationship between men and women.

First, the facts: Frenchwomen didn't get the right to vote until 1945, ninety-six years after men had it. They are still paid less than men and are underrepresented in
all walks of life, in spite of a few notable exceptions. And, let's face it, a lot of Frenchmen (especially politicians) are male chauvinist pigs. One has only to view the almost all-male composition of the French National Assembly to see that women have definitely not “made it” yet in French society.

But one can't leave it at that.

What continues to strike me is that Frenchmen and Frenchwomen like one another's company. They don't seem to feel any need for systematic antagonism.

There's a lightness in male-female relationships that we Anglo-Saxons don't always get, at least not at first. Visiting Paris for the first time, the beautiful young American daughter of a dear friend of mine told me she was upset at being followed down the street by a French fellow. “But,” she said, a bit mystified, “when he saw I wasn't interested, he just said, ‘Good-bye,' smiled, and went on his way.”

That's because the rules of the game are different. “Frenchmen seek seduction, not domination,” a French gentleman friend told me. This world traveler and woman-watcher observed that in the States, letting a woman pass in front of you, opening a car door, paying the bill at a restaurant, giving the
baisemain
(kissing her hand—horrors!), which only a decadent European would do anyway, are all viewed with the utmost suspicion. “The idea that a man would take a woman to dinner, do all of the above, and not try to bed her is
inconceivable in the States,” he told me with a Gallic shrug of disdain.

One reason that Frenchwomen do not fear male-female games—or the opposite sex—is that flirtation does not imply or require follow-up. Flirting, he explained, is the same as strolling. “It's for the pleasure of it. What might come afterward is fun if it happens, but it is not the primary goal.”

Some people maintain that the relationship between Frenchmen and Frenchwomen is very special. As far as I can see, there is a tacit agreement between the two sexes. As long as women regiment the action from behind the scenes, which they do, everybody gets along. Frenchwomen understand this and they're much too clever to get into a confrontation with men. The “special” relationship between men and women in France is based on the premise that if you don't rock my boat, I won't rock yours (my opinion).

In her book
XY: De l'identité masculine (XY: Of Masculine Identity)
French author and sociologist Elisabeth Badinter maintains that the uniqueness of male-female relationships in France comes in part from the fact that Frenchmen acknowledge their feminine side. A case in point: Frenchmen don't see buying lingerie for their girlfriends as a threat to their manliness,
au contraire
. Badinter says the Scandinavian man is “soft” and the American man is “tough,” whereas the Frenchman is the perfect combination.

“The American type of tough guy has no equivalent in France,” she writes. “Of course, we have the patriarch, the ordinary macho, but not the extraordinary supermacho.” Rambo and the Terminator, she says, are definitely American specialties.

Ah, so that “feminine side” explains why I have a soft spot for Frenchmen, thought I, after reading Badinter's theory. They do have an endearing side. I exclude, of course, all those macho dudes behind the wheels of their teeny-weeny R5s or Peugeot 305s or the guys who yell “
Connasse
” (translation unprintable) out their car window: They don't look to me like they're “acknowledging their feminine side” one bit.

“What,” asked an American man one day, upon learning that a mutual friend was going to marry a Frenchman, “do these Frogs have that we don't?” To be sure, not every Frenchman is Gérard Depardieu or Jean Reno—but still, there are a few things that Frenchmen have in common that make them so . . . French.

For one thing, a sense of seduction. As a journalist friend of mine remarked, a Frenchman is capable of flirting with you over the phone, sight unseen. She recounts a phone interview with the late Yves Montand in which he was positively seducing her with his charm. What did he care if she was sixty-five or twenty-two? He had never seen her and probably never would—but why not be agreeable just in case? The point is that, as any self-respecting French male would, he wanted to win her
over. The sexual tension, the recognition that one person is a man and that the other is a woman, permeates life in France. There is none of this “Oh, we're doing business; we're all neuter” stuff. No one, thank God, forgets what sex he or she is.

France has not succumbed to the politically correct movement in the area of sex (thank goodness). Thus, a woman is delighted, not shocked, when a man notices her new dress, and the man is not afraid that an innocent compliment will lead to a complaint of sexual harassment. Hey! But then no self-respecting Frenchwoman would consider herself “victimized” by a man's paying attention to her.
Au contraire!

Many Frenchmen have a wonderful sense of humor about the whole game of flirting. France is probably the one country an attractive single woman can live in peacefully, because a woman is allowed to take or leave the attentions men lavish on her. To be more explicit: If you tell a man to bug off, he will. He was just trying, and if he succeeds in getting your attention or making you laugh, well, it was worth the attempt. One American woman who lived with a Frenchman for many years told me, “As far as making you feel like a woman, the Frenchman wins hands down.” And she added, “The French are the only men I've ever known who can make
love with their shoes and socks on in the heat of the moment, because they're not concerned about whether they look ridiculous or not.” For this woman, the American male, on the other hand, might get a better score both on treating women as equals and the use of soap, two points on which not all Frenchmen would get a passing grade.

In a general sense, soap or no soap, Frenchmen are not afraid of body contact. It's not unusual to see grown men giving each other kisses and bear hugs. They're not afraid to go into a lingerie shop and choose underwear for their partner. (You can see them in the shops, earnestly studying the different colors and shapes.) An Englishman who wanted to get a pretty slip or bra for his wife said he finally couldn't bring himself to do it because his sister, who ran a lingerie shop in England, had confided to him that the men who came in the boutique to look at the underwear were trying it on for themselves! He ended up buying his wife a painting.

What about the myth of the French lover? One American woman who lived with a Frenchman for twelve years puts it bluntly: “The French don't wash enough to be sexy. For me,” she explains, “cleanliness is next to sexiness. Americans like to take a shower before they get started and the French just like to dive into it without having had a shower in three days.” This, of course, is a generalization, and I've heard stories of very clean (by American standards) Frenchmen. But it is perhaps
true to say that for a Frenchman, squeaky-clean leaves nothing much to desire. Not for himself, nor for his mistress. Wasn't it Napoléon who on his way back from battle wrote to Josephine, “Don't wash; I'm on my way”?