Myth Evaluation: False.
PART 3
DANGEROUS LIAISONS
MYTHS ABOUT FRENCH SEX, MARRIAGE AND CHILDREN
THE FRENCH ARE OBSESSED WITH SEX
Behold, my love, behold all that I simultaneously do: scandal, seduction, bad example, incest, adultery, sodomy. Oh, Satan! One and unique God of my soul, inspire thou in me something yet more, present further perversions to my smoking heart, and then shalt thou see how I shall plunge myself into them all!
MARQUIS DE SADE, FRENCH WRITER AND LIBERTINE (1740–1814), LA PHILOSOPHIE DANS LE BOUDOIR, 1795
For many foreigners, the word ‘French’ conjures up one image, and one image only: sex. From the aggressive, baise-moi stare of the archetypal French male to the smouldering sensuality of the Gallic femme fatale; from the pervy libertinism of the Marquis de Sade to the heavy breathing of stubbly Serge Gainsbourg; from the febrile eroticism of films such as Jean-Jacques Beineix’s Betty Blue to the explicit shagfest of Catherine Millet’s best-selling memoir, La Vie sexuelle de Catherine M (‘The Sexual Life of Catherine M’) – in the fevered Anglo-Saxon imagination, copulation and the French are entwined in an inseparable embrace.
Like the origins of the ‘adulterous French’ myth (for which see here), the sources of the myth of the sex-obsessed Gauls are hard to pinpoint in time. French literature has certainly much to do with it, Gallic writers having a well-known lack of inhibition when it comes to describing human sexual activity in all its forms. As far back as the sixteenth century, the French monk François Rabelais created one of the most priapic of literary personages in the form of the giant Gargantua, born sporting a yard-long erection. Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century French writing took up the literature of the libido with no less enthusiasm, delighting in the joy of smut from the explicit accounts of the sexual initiation of young girls in the writings of the Comte de Mirabeau to the darkly perverted violence of the Marquis de Sade. Even in the staid and moralistic nineteenth century, French poets and novelists kept the flame alight for the rude, the raunchy and the downright arousing: Alfred de Musset’s 1833 erotic novel Gamiani, ou deux nuits d’excès (‘Gamiani, or Two Nights of Excess’), with its graphic portrayal of the bedroom activities of a threesome, became a nineteenth-century erotic best-seller; while the poets Arthur Rimbaud and Paul Verlaine jointly composed what one imagines is the world’s only ‘Sonnet to an Asshole’ (‘Sonnet du trou du cul’). Throughout history, France has also been the haven for the ‘dirty book’, a shelter from censorship for Europe’s literary refugees. James Joyce’s novel Ulysses (1922) was published by a small private printing press in Paris, as was Henry Miller’s banned, sexually candid Tropic of Cancer (1934), and the taboo-busting Lolita (1955) by Vladimir Nabokov.
It’s true that the French have a certain obsession with sex, but it’s a particularly adult obsession. France is the thriftiest of all nations; to a Frenchman sex provides the most economical way to have fun. The French are a logical race.
ANITA LOOS, AMERICAN AUTHOR AND PLAYWRIGHT, (1889–1981)
Nor has French cinema shown any more coyness about the pleasures of the flesh than French literature. In fact, France practically gave birth to the soft-porn movie in the form of the 1974 erotic sensation, Emmanuelle. Based on the banned memoirs of a Thai-French actress, Emmanuelle spawned a whole series of hit movies and redefined a genre of the blue, as opposed to silver, screen: masturbation, the ‘Mile High Club’, skinny-dipping and rape were never to be off limits again, and the film even featured a scene in which a character lights a cigarette and puffs it with her vagina. Nor are erotic images confined in French films to the realms of erotica. Even (or perhaps especially) serious French art-house films have made an industry of exploring the pleasures of the flesh in graphic form: from Catherine Deneuve being ravished by a stranger in the woods in Belle de jour (1967), to Marlon Brando doing unmentionable things with butter in Last Tango in Paris (1972) and probably the most graphic scene of oral sex that has ever managed to escape the censor’s cut in a mainstream movie, in the 1986 classic Betty Blue. ‘Sex,’ observed the Marquis de Sade (who knew a thing or two about the subject), ‘is as important as eating or drinking, and we ought to allow the one appetite to be satisfied with as little restraint or false modesty as the other.’ The French would seem to have taken him at his word.
THE ELUSIVE DR CONDOM (skip)
The allegedly Gallic origins of the ‘French letter’, or condom, are as murky as those of the ‘French kiss’. ‘French letter’ appears to have been first used in relation to condoms in the nineteenth century, for no better reason than that condoms connote sex, and therefore must have something to do with the French. A nineteenth-century English guide to libertines entitled The Man of Pleasure’s Companion refers to the fact that ‘Gentlemen in London will be at no loss in easily obtaining these French letters.’ (Interestingly, the French term for a French letter is capote anglaise, or ‘English hood’.)
The more current English word for a ‘French letter’ or sheath – condom – is one of the great unsolved puzzles of etymology. Theories abound as to the origins of this very un-English sounding word. There are those who claim it derives from the Latin word condere, meaning ‘to conceal or protect’, or from the Persian word kondü, an earthenware receptacle for seeds or grains. Others assert that it came from the French village of Condom in the southwestern département of Gers, where the local butchers are said to have made condoms from animal intestines. It has been claimed that the word relates to a Dr Condom, personal physician to Charles II, who supposedly invented the device in the seventeenth century, but to date the existence of such a personage has not been established. The French would certainly have been baffled when, a certain Jean Condom playing for the French national rugby union team in the late 1980s and early 1990s, a banner appeared in the crowd during a Five Nations match versus England proclaiming: ‘Play safe – pass it to Condom.’
Nowhere is the hard-wiring into the British psyche of the idea of France as a nation of erotomanes more evident than in the range of English slang expressions that associate the French with sexual or amorous activity. In fact, it is virtually a foregone conclusion that, if a slang word or phrase in English has the word ‘French’ in it, then it will usually be something to do with sex. Thus – to cite just a small handful of examples – a condom is a French letter (see here), an established branch of uniform fetishism is that of dressing as a French maid, and syphilis was notoriously known as the French disease. A particularly vigorous and sensual osculatory contact of tongues in kissing is known as French kissing. Do these terms have any basis in historical fact? As far as the term French kissing goes, this seems to have first appeared in English slang in the 1910s, although there is no reason to believe that the French were the inventors of the technique. There is some evidence, however, to suggest that certain sectors of the French population were especially proficient at it. The marsh-dwelling inhabitants of the Vendée in western France are famed for having long acknowledged a courtship rite of prolonged public kissing, traditionally under a blue umbrella, known as maraîchinage (see here). Before marriage or even engagement, young lads and lasses were granted the right to snog each other for hours under this sheltering umbrella, a practice to which the great politician Georges ‘the Tiger’ Clemenceau, French premier during the First World War, was said to be especially partial. His biographer notes that he took full advantage of ‘the custom of maraîchinage, or kiss on the mouth, prolonged to the very point of acute joy’.1
And what of the French pox, French disease or mal français, used to refer to venereal disease (in particular, syphilis)?*
* The above are just some of the most common slang terms for venereal disease, especially syphilis, with the word ‘French’. Others include: The Frenchman, French measles, French crown, French marbles, French chilblains, French aches, and French cannibal.
Did the French really have anything to do with the spread of this scourge of the libidinous?
Here the French do have a lot to complain about, because – while the geographical origin of syphilis remains a mystery – if there is one place in which the disease almost certainly did not originate, it is France. The exact provenance of syphilis is to this day the subject of raging dispute, but the balance of the evidence seems to point to it being brought from what is now the Dominican Republic to Europe by the Spanish sailors on Columbus’ ships returning from the Americas.2 The first major epidemic of the great pox broke out in Naples in 1495,3 when the French were besieging the city – hence the popular attribution of the disease to them. However, the outbreak also occurred only a few years after Columbus’ return from the New World, after several of his sailors had been treated for a mysterious ailment on their return to Barcelona; moreover, many of those same sailors went on to serve as mercenaries in the French and Spanish armies fighting it out in Naples. Some of them then proceeded to fight for James IV of Scotland and his ally the English Yorkist pretender Perkin Warbeck, whereupon the mystery scourge hit Scotland, too. By the sixteenth century, syphilis had reached China and Japan, and by the 1700s even the remote islands of the South Pacific had succumbed. As the dreaded pox hopped from place to place, it was rechristened with the name of the country from which it last hailed: thus the Christian, Polish, Spanish, Russian, Persian, Neapolitan, Portuguese, English, and Turkish pox travelled all the way to Asia. But to the British it remained firmly a foul French disease that left Englishmen wasting away.*
* Interestingly, the French refer to syphilis as la maladie anglaise.
In fact, the image of the gaunt and palely syphilitic, opium-dosed English poet of the nineteenth century is matched only by that of the gaunt and palely syphilitic, absinthe-soaked French poet of the same period. As the French novelist André Gide once observed, ‘It is unthinkable for a Frenchman to arrive at middle age without having syphilis and the Croix de légion d’honneur.’
More recently, ‘French’ has come to be associated in slang use with oral sex – viewed for many centuries as a ‘French perversion’.†
† The slang term French art in the late nineteenth century meant not the works of the Impressionists but the art of fellatio.
Thus a whole sub-genre of mainly gay terminology developed in the 1950s around the word ‘French’ to describe a wide range of oral sexual activity: French artist, Frenching or French culture (fellatio); French active/passive (the passive or active partner in fellatio); French dip, French dressing or French-fried ice-cream (semen or pre-coital fluid); and French language expert or French by injection (anybody well-versed in fellatio).4 It is a telling point that in the leading modern reference work on slang, Jonathon Green’s Dictionary of Slang (2010), more than 75 per cent of the slang phrases containing the word ‘French’ are connected with sex.
But are the French truly as sex-obsessed as their cultural output and our idioms and phrases for them might suggest? Certainly, they are less hung up about sex than the British. And, while their writings literally drip with the juices of often perverse sexual fantasy, they are not nearly as obsessed as the British with sexual perversion in daily life. The French do not, for example, have tabloid newspapers that describe sex crimes such as rape in pruriently forensic detail, while simultaneously adopting a tone of shock and moral outrage (in fact they do not have tabloids, period). French crèches do not have fortifications, security cameras and alarm systems like their British counterparts. French nursery staff are not banned from dabbing sun cream on their charges for fear that such an act might generate accusations of sexual abuse. One is free to take pictures of one’s children on a French beach, without fear of people suspecting you of being a paedophile. It is not that sexual perversion and/or paedophilia do not exist in France – it does, of course, as it exists everywhere. It’s just that the French don’t seem to be as paranoid about it, as ready to see perverts lurking on every playground, beach and street corner, as the British. The French would be far more shocked at the prospect of an ex-soft-porn model writing books for young girls, than at crèche workers smearing sun cream on kids in their care.
Of all the sexual aberrations, chastity is the strangest.
ANATOLE FRANCE, FRENCH POET AND NOVELIST (1844– 1924), QUOTED IN THE HERETIC’S HANDBOOK OF QUOTATIONS
Nor would the French appear to be the permanently switched-on sex machines that the fervid Anglo-Saxon imagination would seem to suggest. A 2010 survey by the French polling group Ifop found that more than three-quarters of French couples have bad sex lives. More than one in three French women said they used excuses such as headaches, tiredness or the children to get out of having sex. And nearly one in six Gallic males did the same.5 One of the world’s leading sex surveys, the Durex 2005 Global Sex Survey,6 found that only 38 per cent of French people were happy with their sex lives, compared with 51 per cent of Britons.
As for the legendary adventurousness of the Gallic lover, the Durex 2005 survey came up with some surprising results. According to the survey, only 14 per cent of the French liked experimenting with sex aids (as compared to 32 per cent of British), and only 33 per cent liked to try out new ideas in the bedroom (as compared to 42 per cent of Brits). Only 15 per cent of French (versus 17 per cent of British) had tried out three in a bed, and 3 per cent (versus 5 per cent) sadomasochism. Only 2 per cent of the French (versus 5 per cent of Brits) had experimented with tantric sex, and only 21 per cent (versus 37 per cent) had tried a spot of bondage. The Marquis de Sade must be turning in his grave. Most surprising of all, only 42 per cent of the French (versus 52 per cent of the British) had had a one-night stand. When it comes to the nitty-gritty, the favoured sexual position for French women is apparently ‘doggie-style’ (or rather more gracefully in French, the levrette or ‘greyhound’ position). This contrasts with the plain vanilla Americans who go for the missionary, and the buccaneering Brits who are alleged to prefer the ‘cowgirl’ (or ‘woman on top’, for the more prosaically inclined).7
In fact it seems that, in terms of innovation between the sheets, ordinary French folk are downright conservative compared to the kinky Brits. They seem to be into boring old unadorned, vanilla sex between a man and a woman, in bed, without the intrusion of any ‘marital aids’ made of plastic, leather or rubber, whips, chains, or wacky Oriental theories (although they do seem to be on the adventurous side in terms of sexual positions). ‘Continental people have sex-life: the English have hot-water bottles,’ the Hungarian writer and wit George Mikes once observed.8 Perhaps that opinion needs to be revised to: ‘Continental people have sex lives: the English have sex toys.’
Myth Evaluation: False. The French are not sex-obsessed but they are less hung up about sex than the English. The English, on the other hand, are obsessed with the sex lives of everybody, including the French.
THE FRENCH ARE UNIQUELY TOLERANT OF ADULTERY
Marriage: the cause of adultery and prelude to divorce.
LÉO CAMPION, BELGIAN ARTIST AND ANARCHIST (1905–92)
‘Marriage is a prison whose doors are always open to adultery,’ wrote the Swiss-French poet and dramatist Louis Dumur in 1892. His view of marriage is one widely believed to be representative of the French. French married couples, so the saying goes, are as ready to bed-hop as their Anglo-Saxon counterparts are to partake of a bedtime cup of tea and Digestive biscuit; and a ménage à trois is not just the norm, but virtually a requirement of the glamorous haute-bourgeoisie. Liberté, Egalité, Infidélité, in fact, could more or less be considered the unofficial motto of the French Republic.
Women react differently: a French woman who sees herself betrayed by her husband will kill his mistress; an Italian will kill her husband; a Spaniard will kill both; and a German will kill herself.
BERNARD LE BOVIER DE FONTENELLE, FRENCH SCIENTIST, PLAYWRIGHT AND ESSAYIST (1657–1757)
Precisely where the Anglo-Saxon view of the French as a nation wedded to unfaithfulness comes from is hard to pinpoint. Possibly, it originated with the perceived sexual incontinence of
the old French monarchy; or possibly, from the Anglo-Saxon Protestant suspicion of the moral laxity of Catholic Europe. On the other hand, it could simply be part of the age-old habit of attributing bad habits to one’s neighbours and rivals. Certainly, during the ancien régime, infidelity was an institution for French monarchs. There was even a special post created for the official royal mistress at any one time, the maîtresse-en-titre. Louise de la Vallière, Madame de Maintenon, Madame de Pompadour, Madame du Barry… these sumptuous and shrewd women showed, by their often spectacular ascent to the dizzy heights of power, that the worlds of le boudoir and le pouvoir were not so very far apart in French politics. In this respect, the monarch sent to the guillotine during the French Revolution – Louis XVI – was something of an aberration, since he appears to have taken the unprecedented and somewhat bizarre decision to remain faithful to his spouse (although the same could not be said of his wife, Marie Antoinette). Clearly things were all up with the French monarchy if the king felt he could function without a mistress, and so after the unfortunate Louis was decapitated in 1793, the awards for the most high-profile royal mistresses of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries sadly passed from the French to the British.*
* The French did in fact flirt with a few (brief) returns to a monarchical system after the Revolution of 1789, but none of these stood the test of the turbulent times.
They Eat Horses, Don't They? Page 10