On my first week at in Nantes, a small city in north west France, I went food shopping with a friend to the markets. As beautiful and non ironically French as my friend was, she told me that we must pay a visit her favourite cheese man. I don’t necessarily associate a picture of Johnny Depp when someone says ‘cheese man’, so as you can imagine I was very pleasantly surprised to be introduced to a handsome, ‘Gabriel’. Gabriel was a very charming Frenchman with a great smile and noticeably big hands. My friend introduced us and then promptly left saying that she had to fetch some other things. As our time together unraveled, Gabriel was undoubtedly one of the smoothest men I have ever met. In French he talked me through each one his beloved cheeses, and closely watched my mouth as I tried each one. After I decided which one I was going to have, my French friend returned. Gabriel then gave me mheese man was flirting with me” I said to my friend as we walked away. “Probably,” she laughed, “remember you are in France Taylor, and in regards to Gabriel, I’m pretty sure that man could flirt before he could talk”.
In a land far more permissive than Australia when it comes to sexuality, the French act like they were genetically programmed to seduce. When you speak the arguably sexiest language in the world, you can’t blame them for having a good foundation to work off. Anyone who speaks French as a second language will know how it can transform your once dull, and blazé expressions in English, into a passionate declaration of raw human emotion. Sex does not swim in a pool of taboos in France as it does in Australia, and the French have a much higher tolerance as to what shocks them. You’ve just told someone that you’re having an affair? That you’re gay? That you slept with your university professor? The French would give you one of their famous nonchalant shrugs, light a cigarette, and call you out as a cliché.
If someone in Australia holds a gaze with you for that 10 seconds too long, you would definitely feel a sexual tension with that person. In France, a flirtatious lingering gaze wouldn’t even make a middle aged lollipop lady blush. Flirting is France’s favourite national pastime. If flirting was an international sport, the French would win walking backwards, wearing 2 blindfolds, and drunk off their little wobbly froggy legs. The French are flirting with everyone from their baker, to their bus driver, to their boss. When two people flirt in Australia there is usually a very mutually expected outcome. In France, being sexually suggestive is in no way a direct approach to sexual intercourse. Exchanging empty sexual innuendoes by both sexes in France is seen as being playful, light hearted, and harmless. If everyone in France was having sex with everyone that they flirt with, I can promise you that nothing would ever get done in this country.
Although there are many other men like Gabriel in this fine land, the women are just as persistent. You see the French woman is full of endless contradictions, and this is only one of them. She’ll proudly mention in your conversation (out of nowhere) that she’s reading Simone de Beavoiur’s, Le Deuxieme Sexe for the second time this year, that her mum was one of the 343 feminists in 1971 who marched for ‘ Le Manifeste des 343 Salopes’ (Manifesto of the 343 sluts); and if you ask her if she’s a feminist, she’d reply, “of course I am, I believe in equality don’t you?”. But on her other soft, lotioned hand, she finds the word feminist very aggressive to her sexuality. The French woman seizes her sexuality as a woman and without apology, uses it to her advantage to get what she wants. Flirting is vital in maintaining the French woman’s feeling of empowerment and self esteem. The French woman naturally demands equal rights and her ideas to be heard, but at the same time she respects her male counterparts as males, as she knows they are, by nature, different. She believes in gender roles because she enjoys how men take out her seat before her at restaurants, the way they let her walk through the door first, and how she gets addressed as ‘Madame’. France is a competitive dog eat dog land for la femme of France. I count my lucky stars, because i’ve been very lucky to be surrounded by extremely nice French women in my time here; but even so, I can still feel up and down stares when they think I’m not looking. It’s every woman for themselves in France, and the essence of ‘sisterhood’ is not exactly present. People say that French women only stick to a couple of girlfriends because they take longer to trust people, but that’s a lie. Everyone knows that French women only have a few girlfriends because they can’t handle facing constant competition.
‘French women don’t just tolerate their husbands affairs – they expect them’ was the title of Lucy Wadham’s, famous article for the Daily Mail a few years ago. Infidelity in France does not carry the social burden as it does in the anglo world. Literally every single married couple I have met in France has had their own story tell about the twists of turns of their past marriages and relationships. One of my friends in France told me she cheated on her boyfriend with one his best friends to spice up their relationship. In such an individualist society as France, people are more often inclined to act out of personal gain. Look at France’s national motto of ‘Liberté, égalité, fraternité’. Their first and foremost declaration is ‘liberty’, the right to be ‘free’ in their society. The idea of being ‘free’ in France is deeply engrained into the national psyche, and this applies to their sex life where the individual is are free to commit adultery if need be.
When Bill Clinton decided to tell the whole world about his affair, France was hysterically laughing from the sidelines. Infidelity and extramarital affairs is nothing new in French Politics. The French couldn’t give two croissants if their President declared their sex life to the whole country. They believe that just because politicians are living in the public eye, that does not mean their private lives are up for national conversation. The French are extremely quiet and discretional people when it comes to their personal lives. They even prefer it if their President has an affair or two on the side, because it normalises them; they become more relatable. Chirac had many affairs, and he was one of the most celebrated French Presidents of the decade. Our ex-ex Prime Minister in Australia, Julia Gillard (it’s still recent, we’ve have 5 Prime Ministers in the last 5 years), was constantly questioned by our media as to how ‘original’ her decisions as a middle aged women to a) not have children, and b) not be married. The French respect clear divides between work, home, and play. Bill Maher has a great quote about the French where he says, “they have weird ideas about privacy: they think it should be private”.
The French are notoriously emotional characters, and they all have their individual philosophical ideas about why we’re on this earth. They understand that by nature we are complex and curious animals, and that we don’t always know what we want. They were raised to be open and comfortable with their body, and don’t have the same negative stigmas in their sexual decisions as we do in Australia. I’m not saying I prefer France’s ‘liberté’ mentality per se, because hearts are very much still getting broken; but I just think they’re generally more h onest . We are not as sexually free in Australia because our society has an undeniable power over us when it comes to sex. The big anglo beast has completely capitalised on sexuality and has turned it into something it was never meant to be. Even as a Scorpio myself, I have felt like a prude in France, and this is a direct reflection of my social conditioning in Australia. If you think the French are sex crazed hooligans, you need to remind yourself of our questionable anglo expressions such as ‘one night stand’, a ‘booty call’, a ‘hookup’, ‘dating’, a ‘DUFF’, a ‘MILF’, ‘a 10’, ‘marriage material’, etc. You’ll be disappointed to know that there is absolutely no translation for these expressions in French. And tell me, which countries in the world lost their housewives to that ‘erotic’ fiction novel, 50 shades of Grey? You can understand that when the book was made into a film in France, it didn’t break the box office. 50 Shades of Grey does not fit France’s genre of ‘erotica’, and that’s why anyone over 12 years old could watch it at the cinemas. The CNC’s president Jean-Francois Mary called the film, “more of a romance, we could rather call it a ‘bleuette’, rather a sentimental tale” he said. Vive la France.
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