What French Women Know by Debra Ollivier

Author:Debra Ollivier
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Group US

I used to be Snow White, but I drifted.

—MAE WEST, HONORARY FRENCH GIRL

Let’s get one enduring perception/reality problem out of the way right now. PERCEPTION: the French are all adulterous. Everyone has, is, knows, or wants to be a mistress. REALITY: according to an exhaustive study comparing the sexuality of Americans and the French, Americans are actually more adulterous than the French. “The difference between France and the States is that in France the extramarital partner lasts a long time, whereas in the States it’s often a one-night stand,” summarized research director Alain Giami. “We’ve noticed that Americans have more of them [affairs], in shorter duration, than the French. The major difference between French women and American women can be summarized as follows: the French are marathoners, and Americans are sprinters.”

In other words we all push the marital envelope, we just wear different running shoes.

Of course we never look at it that way. On the one hand, French history is so densely packed with tales of parallel lives and liaisons dangereuses that are so intimately woven into its cultural heritage, that to whip up a polemic around the subject would be banal by French standards. On the other hand, we Anglos are convinced that we have the monopoly on moral values, even though it’s often the biggest moral pontificators among us who literally get caught with their pants down.

The relationship between love and marriage is a relatively recent one, lest we forget. Love, with all its voluptuous tentacles, often found its place outside the confines of conjugal life. Volumes have been written about French courtesans who’ve seduced and serviced men of all ranks; more contemporarily, French literature and cinema have brought to America a world where innumerable affairs within affairs are nestled like Russian dolls in snug, libidinous stacks. If you take all this at face value (and unless you live in France, how can you not?), everyone is fooling around with somebody else’s husband, brother, father, uncle, neighbor, plumber, car mechanic, accountant, or music teacher. The French, it seems, just can’t take their hands off each other’s spouses.

In the real world, adultery creates pyrotechnics in French relationships, like it does in other relationships, and it’s one of the top reasons for divorce in France. Not all French men and women are happily passing off their spouses while they shrug away the tribulations of conjugal life with a cruel and jaunty c’est la vie. That said, the French are more at ease with the notion that one single person can’t easily satisfy a lifetime of personal desire, and they’re fascinated by infideli ties as a prism through which to explore this wild terrain of the human heart. There is little American-style fire and brimstone in French film, where lovers pay the price of pleasure with their lives in freakish fashion. Recall the hapless French—ahem!—lover in Unfaithful who ends up wrapped in a carpet and thrown in a trash heap, or Glenn Close’s demonic bunny-in-the-boiler breakdown and subsequent bathtub demise in Fatal Attraction.

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