Another explanation is that, unlike in the States, many French young people do not travel far to university and either continue to live at home or stay in close physical proximity to their parents. This can also weigh on the daughter. A recent article in a French women’s magazine pointed out how truly horrible adolescent daughters can be with their mothers, either by freezing them out or by running away from home—anything to get away from mom. A third explanation, which crosses my mind when I am up against a cold, superior-looking type of Frenchwoman, is that perhaps only their mothers can stand them—shame on me!
Mothers and daughters may have close links, but it doesn’t seem to be a very sexy thing to have babies and then spend your life as a professional mother. The good side of this is that, in general, when you go to a French person’s house for dinner, you will be spared the child routine, the horrors, say, of wading through an entire meal with a two-year-old you have to praise every two minutes, because children are really supposed to be seen (and then only at the appropriate time) and not heard.
French mothers seem to be bogged down by the duty side of motherhood (they would probably say that American mothers seem to hone in on the enjoyment part and disregard the discipline side). They bring the kids up, dress them well (my kids looked like ragamuffins compared with French kids, because they were dressed for fun, and fun for toddlers means dirt), feed them well, make sure they work well at school. The motherhood job seems to be a serious one indeed. An example: When I dropped my kids off at primary school, my parting words for the day always were, “Have fun!” Next to me, I would hear the French mothers admonishing their children to “be good” (sois sage). Voilà la différence.
Then there is the French mother-in-law. Since I have one (and we get along famously), I can say that there is only one real problem, and that is that she is French and I am American; so I am always wondering whether she is doing what she is doing because she is French, because she is my mother-in-law, or just because she’d do it anyway. (She’s probably asking herself the same about me.)
Example: the lesson on how to wash leeks. My mother-in-law tells me they are to be split lengthwise, as opposed to being snipped up brutally, the way I do it. Salads: Wash them at least six times so there is no dirt left. Tomatoes: Don’t just dump them into boiling water, as I do, and leave them to their fate; position them gently on a fork and swirl them around. And last but not least: dates. Never bite into a date without opening it up first. There might be a horrible insect or a worm in there. My love of dates has been spoiled forever.
Would an American mother-in-law have inculcated all these food tips in me? Of course, food is sacred to the French, and an American wife is always vaguely suspected of either poisoning her husband or allowing him to starve. Early on in my marriage, I invited my in-laws to visit us in our town, which is far from Paris. When my mother-in-law arrived with a baked chicken, I knew we still had a culture gap to close! (In her defense, I know now that she was just trying to save me trouble, but at the time, I think I had the persecution complex that many Americans married to Frenchmen have, and I entertained the darkest notions.)
The phone. I have been trying for years to communicate the fact that even if I lived in the same town with my mother in the States, I probably wouldn’t call her every single day, not because I don’t want to talk to her, but because I don’t feel a duty to do that any more than she feels a duty to call me. My mother-in-law assents, but I know that in her heart of hearts she finds it hard to believe.
The American woman who has decided to marry a Frenchman and have his children is always conscious of the fact (whether she is made to feel conscious or she just feels conscious is another story) that, first of all, she took a man who could have married someone of his own nationality, and, second, she is not who she is but who the French think she is. Even her children think she is strange. I have suspected this for a long time in my own family as I watch the amused, tolerant, and sometimes embarrassed looks my boys cast at me when I am being so “un-French” in front of their French friends.
French sociologist Gabrielle Varro confirmed this for me when she wrote in her very interesting study La femme transplantée: Une étude du mariage franco-américain en France et le bilinguisme des enfants (The Transplanted Woman: A Study of the Franco-American Marriage in France and the Bilingualism of Children) that “in fact, the forty-year-old American woman is often much more ‘extroverted,’ more enthusiastic and demonstrative than her thirteen or fifteen year old child, who is exposed to an entirely different style of behavior and who has moreover a tendency to judge his American mother’s behavior as extravagant and puerile.” Varro is talking about the American woman who grew up in the United States in the fifties—but from my own experience, I could say that holds true of others, as well.
My kids were so afraid I would embarrass them that they would loudly announce the arrival of a friend the first half second they were in the door. “JEAN-PIERRE IS WITH ME,” my oldest would yell, hoping I wouldn’t be singing at the top of my voice or guffawing over the phone. He would then whisk the visitor back to his room and, later, whisk him out the door just as quickly.
In addition to mastering the Frenchwoman, I had to master the stereotype that some Frenchwomen have of American women. One popular French stereotype of the American woman is a lady with rollers in her hair and a rolling pin in her hand to bang on her husband’s head should he dare get out of line. Her husband, of course, has been castrated a long time ago by this she-devil. This stereotype was reinforced by Lorena Bobbitt.
At a luncheon with a group of Parisian intellectuals, the conversation turned to American women. The Frenchwoman sitting at my left posed the inevitable question: “Is it true,” she asked in feigned innocence, “that American women are loud and domineering?”
Had I been French, I would have immediately responded with something witty. But not having learned how to be what the French call spirituel—that is, how to let ’em have it without appearing heavy—I did not rise to the occasion.
If you live in France for any length of time, you need to cultivate the art of being vache. Vache (yes, it means “cow”!) is a word that encompasses the concepts of petty, mean, spiteful. And just as, at their best, Frenchwomen can be witty, charming, and endlessly feminine, knowing how to converse, how to receive, how to dress, at their worst they can be vache. Even being vache is subtle. It is knowing how to utter that little phrase that can be interpreted however one wants. It is knowing how to send the dart without being transparently offensive.
Examples of vache comments include: “Oh, I like those living room curtains. I put the same ones in my little girl’s bedroom.” Or, a younger woman admiring an older woman’s new diamond ring: “Ah, l’alliance de la quarantaine” (a ring your husband buys when you hit forty and he can finally afford it). Or how about “I’ve always loved you in that dress”?
Then there’s the way Frenchwomen wear clothes. It’s not that they have more clothes or better clothes. It’s just that they manage to do something with them that ends up looking chic. My friend Anne-Marie has only about three outfits to her name, but she manages to make myriad different looks by cleverly using accessories. Of course this is a stereotype about Frenchwomen. Obviously, not all Frenchwomen know how to dress, but it is true that the ones who do know really understand what to do with little.
I love to watch Frenchwomen shop. They can be so terribly hostile. In a boutique one day, a more than middle-aged woman stooped to try on a pair of shoes. They didn’t please her. The saleswoman brought another pair, and another. The lady looked her in the eye and boomed, “You aren’t going to impose your taste on me. I’m the one who’s imposing around here.” I almost would have taken the poor saleslady’s side if I hadn’t remembered that, before the economic recession set in, you would go in to buy a pair of shoes and if you didn’t walk out with a pair, even if they pinched your feet and looked terrible, you were treated like the poor cousin of someone’s poor cousin.
I have observed that Frenchwomen do have a thing for shoes. On vacation with an American couple and a French couple, I watched the Frenchwoman tiptoe over ancient Turkish ruins in dainty open-toed heels, while the American woman and I clodded around in our dirty tennis shoes. Guess who looked better? By the same token, I have yet to see a French woman executive trodding along the streets of Paris in a business suit and tennis shoes. I decided to try out the nice shoe look one day and dressed in slacks and heels. The reaction of my American friends: “You’ve gone native!”
I love clothes and shoes, and I love the way the Frenchwomen select and wear them. But I must admit I quake upon entering boutiques. I steel myself for the saleswoman’s inevitable lines: “This is the last belt [or skirt, or top] I have; you’d better take it.” Or “I have the same belt [or skirt, or top].” I refrain from answering that if she has the same, I certainly don’t want it. I note, as the years pass, that either I am getting bigger or the dresses and skirts are getting smaller. The French equivalent of size eight would seem to be the ideal dress size in France. A twelve is just all right, and a fourteen is bringing us to Elephant Land. What do you expect in a country where women pay so much attention to their ligne and their toilette?
Presumably, unlike me, Frenchwomen don’t break out in a cold sweat when contemplating the joyous experience of shopping for clothes. They might, however, break out in a cold sweat, hives, or something else when they contemplate their horrendous underrepresentation in the National Assembly. Only 6 percent of the National Assembly is composed of women. In “macho” Spain, it’s over twice that. Still, while a lot of Frenchwomen would like to be better represented, they aren’t taking to the streets, and they don’t hate the men who are there in their place.
Actually, maybe they should take to the streets. But then, horror of horrors, they might start resembling American feminists! That, one can fairly presume, is not something to which any Frenchwoman would aspire.
Interview with Philippe
HARRIET: What difference do you think there would be if, instead of being married to an American woman, you were married to a Frenchwoman?
PHILIPPE: We wouldn’t have a parliamentary debate on women’s equality every morning before breakfast. She would just take control without saying a word.
HARRIET: What about issues such as who packs the bags?
PHILIPPE: She would do it, and make me pay for it without my ever knowing it.
HARRIET: What’s another difference?
PHILIPPE: Frenchwomen will leave you alone when they see you are tired. For example, a Frenchwoman wouldn’t persist in an interview like this when she sees how wiped out I am after a week of work. You, on the other hand, would interview me on my deathbed.
HARRIET: And yet another difference?
PHILIPPE: Only American women marry four times, kill off four husbands, and then go off to Europe and have fun.
HARRIET: Okay. Okay. Why is it that if a man is loud in France, no one pays any particular attention, but if a woman speaks or laughs loudly, everyone turns around and stares at her?
PHILIPPE: Because women are supposed to be more refined than men. Equality of sex in the States means that women should be as stupid as men.
HARRIET: Sexist . . .
The French and Sex,
Love, and Marriage
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 rema
rkably 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.
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