The Bonjour Effect

by Barlow, Julie

  By the same token, while France’s social benefits system protects people from a wide range of problems and issues, it can be surprisingly harsh. The social security and retirement benefits the French collect are almost always tied to the type of job they have and depend on how many years they worked. Retirement benefits in France are universal, but not generous. For health, the state refunds a maximum of two-thirds of costs, often less, so people cannot get by without a costly private insurance scheme—1 percent of households end up paying over $6,000 of medical expenses per year.11 It’s no wonder that French households save 16 percent of their income—three times the savings rate of the United States, according to the OECD. Given the nature of the job market, not to mention all those holidays, they need a lot of savings just to get by.

  16

  Boys and Girls

  It was a miserable winter day in Paris, cold, gray, and rainy, and our bus was packed with wet passengers. The windows were so steamed up all we could see outside were shadows of multicolored umbrellas clustered around the doors. At each stop, the bus driver tried to coax passengers to the back of the bus with the same mechanical appeal: “Avancez vers l’arrière s’il vous plaît” (Please move to the rear of the bus). No one was listening, so the driver attempted some dry humor: “Don’t worry, the people at the back of the bus won’t eat you.” That triggered a few smiles, but still no action, so the driver tried another tack: “It’s okay to touch each other, as long as you don’t have naughty thoughts.” That got chuckles all the way to the back of the bus, not to mention results.

  If a public employee in North America were to make a suggestive joke like that, he or she would quickly be staring at a disciplinary committee. In France, naughty little jokes are the salt of daily life. When we visited the Immigration Office to obtain work visas, the nurse who did Jean-Benoît’s medical exam mistakenly checked the “female” box on his form. At the X-ray stage, Jean-Benoît mentioned the oversight to the two female technicians, who proceeded to laugh out loud. Jean-Benoît quipped, “I can prove I’m a man, you know,” and one of the women shot back: “Oh, that’s no proof. They make excellent implants these days.” The joke had made the rounds of the office by the time we got to the front counter to pay. The clerks who handled signing visas were chuckling as they changed Jean-Benoît’s official sex back to male.

  One of our friends, Marie-Dominique, who regularly hosts American university students in her apartment in Paris’s eighteenth arrondissement, can’t believe how easily offended Americans are by jokes she makes about sex, or about relations between the sexes, and especially about women. North American–style political correctness just escapes her. But of course the French do joke about sex, and about the relations between the sexes, in ways that make North Americans shudder.

  Julie visited a doctor in Paris to have some wax removed from her ear. The doctor was a trim, high-spirited man who she guessed was in his midseventies. He led her into a cramped consultation room in the back of his office, where he pulled a hand pump and basin out of a cupboard. Then, while he was filling the pump with water, he instructed Julie to remove her shirt. “This is going to be wet,” he explained. Julie reeled. She’d had this procedure before, and no one ever asked her to strip half naked for it. As if to prove his point, he immediately removed his own shirt. To lighten things up, or perhaps to make fun of her prudishness, he leaned over and whispered in her ear: “We’ll have to be careful not to get caught.” Again, a North American doctor who casually joked about sexual scenarios with patients would be asking for trouble.

  It’s one of the most striking features of French conversation: they don’t hold back from making jokes about sex, even in professional situations, and even when children are present. The French willingness to joke about sex in public never goes as far as discussing one’s actual sex life—that topic is as private in France as it is in Anglo-American societies. And the French do have strange hang-ups when it comes to sexuality. They refer to toilets as les garçons et les filles (the boys’ and girls’ rooms), rather than les messieurs et les dames (gentlemen and ladies) or even les hommes et les femmes (men and women), as if they are trying to avoid thinking of grown-ups from the waist down. Yet the French are incredibly creative when it comes to coining new words for sex: since 1978, when the linguist Pierre Guiraud paved the way by publishing his Dictionnaire érotique (Erotic dictionary) that featured seven thousand words and expressions, including six hundred for the male sex, as many for the female sex, and thirteen hundred for coitus, not a year goes by in France without a new dictionnaire coquin (naughty dictionary).1

  This ease in making sex jokes, even with people they hardly know, is a good gauge of French attitudes about gender relations in general. When it comes to the French and relations between the sexes, foreigners are prone to launch into superlatives, and opinions are almost always polarized. Depending on whom you ask, France is either very progressive or entirely regressive. The truth is, France is both. On the one hand, French women play an important role in politics and intellectual life. Successive French governments have put in place incredibly progressive social measures, notably to get more women into the workplace. But then the French turn around and openly express sexist ideas. They don’t particularly like questioning gender stereotypes and cling to ideas that sound traditional to North Americans, like the idea that the sexes are “complementary.”

  In short, the French are masters of the art of uniting opposites.

  In what other country but France could two liberated thirtysomething twin sisters publish a book with the title La femme parfaite est une connasse (The perfect woman is a stupid bitch)? This 160-page booklet, authored by thirty-three-year-old Anne-Sophie and Marie-Aldine Girard, was the surprise literary hit in France in 2013 (six hundred thousand copies sold). A humorous guidebook for the modern young French woman, it ridicules the French woman’s effort to incarnate an unattainable ideal: stay thin, be superorganized, and personify the perfect hostess, all at once. In a similar spirit to the British author Helen Fielding’s fictional Bridget Jones series, the French authors offer raucous advice on how to deal with being dumped, having dreadful holidays, and showing up in an unflattering photo (and even how to face the new French stigma of not being able to speak English). The book has been translated into eight languages but curiously, English wasn’t one of them. In an interview, the authors commented, “English-speaking journalists are so convinced the French woman is perfect, they actually peg us as the stereotypes we are trying to defeat in our book! We’re telling women to stop feeling guilty about not being perfect.”

  Gender relations in France are like two documentary films with two versions of the same story, playing simultaneously.

  Sex and gender relations are not the same thing, but they are linked. In Anglo-American cultures, the French have the reputation of being liberal if not libertine about sex, partly because they speak more freely and often creatively. Whether they are actually more active in bed is entirely hypothetical. Consider the high-profile case of a libertine like Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the former French economy minister and the former head of the International Monetary Fund, who was accused, briefly, of the rape of a chambermaid at the Hotel Novotel in New York City and was charged with pimping in France in relation to orgies that took place in the North of France.2 There is nothing particularly French about Strauss-Kahn’s behavior. What was uniquely French was the degree to which his behavior had been hushed up by the press for most of his political career and the manner in which French intellectuals and politicians tried to excuse his behavior when he was formally accused of rape in New York City. This speaks of a double standard in law for celebrities but also of a particularly high tolerance for questionable sexual behavior.3

  There is no question that French politicians, even at the national level, can be atrociously sexist, particularly when it concerns female opponents. Female reporters in France complained of politicians stroking their hair, telling them they were “prostitute
s waiting for clients,” complaining about them wearing turtlenecks instead of low-cut blouses, groping them in their offices, and worse.4 The blatant sexism is astonishing given how widely represented women are in French politics, and in the Fench job market. Then again, North American journalists are subjected to this kind of harassment, too. The real difference in France is probably just how blatant it is.

  At any rate, wherever the two societies place in the sordid ranking of sexist behavior, it’s probably fair to say the state of affairs in France is not helped by the fact that there are very few taboos in talking about sex or gender relations. One reason, as the historian Theodore Zeldin argues, might be that the sexes started mingling—and conversing—in France earlier than elsewhere. In his book, Conversation, he argues that women and men in France engaged together in the art of conversation long before this became the norm in the United States. In Zeldin’s opinion, it was this mixing of the sexes, not French men’s reputed gallantry, that gave the French tongue its reputation as “the language of love.” Women were also present in the workforce in France much earlier than in Britain or the United States, and in much larger numbers. So the sexes mingled outside homes.

  The Quebec author Louis-Bernard Robitaille, an astute commentator on French society for the last thirty years, points out in his book Les Parisiens that French women have for centuries enjoyed a degree of freedom of speech, and behavior, that would have been considered provocative in American or British circles (the tourists from these countries were the first to reprehend French women’s conduct). Before the mid-twentieth century, the list of outstandingly influential French women was virtually unmatched in most European societies: from the seventeenth-century trailblazers of salon culture like the marquise de Rambouillet (who founded one of the most influential early French salons) or Madame de Pompadour (mistress, but also aide and adviser to King Louis XV), or, as we have seen, Madame de Staël, to writers and creators like George Sand, Colette, Simone de Beauvoir, Marguerite Duras, Coco Chanel, and Sarah Bernhardt, not to mention Nobel Prize–winning scientist Marie Curie, who discovered radium.5

  On the other hand, French women were slow to gain legal rights: women obtained the right to vote only in 1944, or twenty-four years after American women did. We witnessed one case of historical sexism that was almost comical in scale. In 2013, the French government finally repealed a two-hundred-year-old French law that made it illegal for women to wear pants. The law was originally passed in 1800 to prevent women from cross-dressing in order to practice a male vocation. A French senator and member of Parliament finally proposed repealing the law because it contradicted the principle of equality between men and women inscribed in the French constitution since 1946. The question was, why had it taken almost seventy years?6

  One reason the French talk so freely about gender is that the French love of conversation generally trumps ideology. There’s less taboo about expressing sexist attitudes publicly in France, even when everyone knows they are sexist—up to a point of course. The French just like to feel free to say what they think even when attitudes are outdated. In July 2014, the French government introduced a new law that would oblige employers to extend parental leave. The legislation had been a subject of debate all year. The catch was that in order for a couple to benefit from extended leave, the father had to share the congé (leave) and spend some time at home with the kids. The idea was popular on the whole, and the law passed despite men’s hesitations.7 But when it was announced, men reacted in a way that struck us as way too blunt. One French man told a journalist, “I’d be happy to spend more time with my kids if it didn’t have negative repercussions on my career, or affect my salary.”8 That kind of public comment would get women’s groups up in arms in North America, where it sounds like a declaration of male entitlement. To the French, such a remark is not necessarily viewed as sexist but realist: men who approve of the extension of parental leave to men, and who avail themselves of the benefit, could indeed see their careers stalled by other men who disapprove of it. (Just ask a woman.)

  In a French study on sexism in the workplace, carried out in nine of France’s largest companies among a total of fifteen thousand employees, 80 percent of women and 56 percent of men claimed to have witnessed sexism at work. Some 90 percent of female employees said it was “easier for men to pursue a career” because of sexism, and 62 percent of men agreed. Again, to the French, these men don’t come across as entitled or complacent. They sound like they are telling the truth.

  But the French do occasionally draw the line. During the Sochi Olympics in 2014, a duo of commentators on France Télévision, Philippe Candeloro and Nelson Monfort, commented not just on performances, but on the physical attributes of female athletes, in particular, figure skaters. They made a notoriously sexist comment about the skater Valentina Marchei: “[She] has a lot of charm, a bit like Monica Bellucci, just a little smaller in the chest, but what can you do?” They had commented on skaters’ “pretty little bottoms” in the past. France’s media regulatory agency, the Conseil supérieur de l’audiovisuel (French Broadcasting Authority), got hundreds of complaints about the pair during the games (many more complaints than it ever gets about English words), and they issued a warning.

  Closer to home, we witnessed French people promoting women’s rights and sexist attitudes at the same time. Brigitte, the divorced engineer who was our friend and neighbor, and a midlevel executive at a computer engineering firm, told us about the challenges she faces after jumping the gender barrier first into engineering, then into management in an engineering firm. “You can’t give men orders. So I have to use other methods to get the message across,” she explained. “Like humor.” Then she explained one of her favorite techniques. “I do a helpless woman routine,” she said, tossing her hair over her shoulder, rolling her eyes, and fluttering her eyelashes like a silent-movie star in distress. “It just works.”

  When we were exchanging notes on our perception of feminism in France, we realized something that we had never thought about before. Julie thought there were a lot of feminists in France and Jean-Benoît thought there were few. The reason was that French women declared themselves as feminists willingly to Julie, but not to Jean-Benoît.

  There are a number of factors that explain why, when it comes to gender relations, the French can seem one thing and the opposite. In the first place, the French don’t tend to be very ideological about the relations between the sexes. French feminists historically rejected “radical feminism.” Until the 1960s, the feminist movement everywhere was mainly focused on the issue of women’s rights. Then, in the middle of the 1960s, when women in most developed countries had obtained equal rights, feminism switched its focus to attacking sexism (which of course hadn’t disappeared). French feminists agreed with the principle, but refused to take the approach Anglo-American feminism adopted, which to some extent meant rejecting femininity and the principle of complementarity between the genders. The famous French intellectual Élisabeth Badinter got flack from American feminists in the 1980s when she declared that women and men were “collaborators, not adversaries” in seduction, as in life.9

  But Badinter’s posture, contradictory as it might seem, is representative of how most French women think. Few French women, even feminists, see any merit, or any interest, in eschewing the accoutrements of femininity. This is pretty obvious to anyone walking around Paris, or any other French city for that matter. We were strolling in Paris’s Jardins des plantes when we saw a woman in overalls and clogs walking with her daughter. We could tell from one hundred meters away she wasn’t French, and sure enough, when we got close enough, we heard her American accent. One sporadically sees French women dressed for work in running shoes, but more often than not, they are wearing them because the outfit calls for them (sneakers, which the French call les runnings, les baskets, or even now, les sneakers, were very trendy the year we were in France). On one of our first excursions in Paris’s moneyed sixteenth arrondissement, we stared in a
mazement as a young woman pedaled by us on a Vélibre, one of Paris’s rental bikes, in stiletto heels. Only two weeks after school started our daughters asked us to take them shopping for scarves. “Even men here wear pretty scarves,” they reported after spotting a man in the metro in a pinstripe suit with a white cotton scarf looped elegantly around his neck. And so they do.

  Generally speaking, the French also respect tradition for its own sake. In 2002, France had passed a law that would allow French parents to legally give their offspring either parent’s surname, not necessarily the father’s. Ten years later, 82.6 percent of children had still taken their father’s name and only 8.5 percent had taken both parents’ names. At the immigration office, while Jean-Benoît was busy transforming his official sex from female back to male, Julie noticed that her papers designated her as “Barlow épouse Nadeau” (Barlow wife Nadeau). It was strange because Julie’s Canadian passport had no mention of Jean-Benoît’s surname—in Quebec, women legally keep their maiden name after marriage unless they specifically ask to change it to their husband’s. As we discovered, France has almost the same law: since 1794, French women’s legal name is the one they had at birth; they are allowed to assume their husband’s name after marriage, even if their legal name remains their maiden name. But most French people we spoke to had never heard of the law, including, strangely, the immigration office at the Paris Préfecture de police. No matter how hard Julie tried to remove the “épouse Nadeau” from her French visa, the clerk insisted it couldn’t be done. “C’est d’usage,” she proclaimed. That’s how it’s done.