Read Online French Toast by Harriet Welty Rochefort - Free Book Online Page A

frankness with which sex is discussed has made them remarkably relaxed about it. They talk about sex like they talk about breakfast cereal. Of course I am speakingabout 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 inall 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.
    But one can’t leave it at that.
    What continues to strike me is that Frenchmen and Frenchwomen like one another’s company. They don’t seem to feel any need for systematic antagonism.
    There’s a lightness in male-female relationships that we Anglo-Saxons don’t always get, at least not at first. Visiting Paris for the first time, the beautiful young American daughter of a dear friend of mine told me she was upset at being followed down the street by a French fellow. “But,” she said, a bit mystified, “when he saw I wasn’t interested, he just said, ‘Good-bye,’ smiled, and went on his way.”
    That’s because the rules of the game are different. “Frenchmen seek seduction, not domination,” a French gentleman friend told me. This world traveler and woman-watcher observed that in the States, letting a woman pass in front of you, opening a car door, paying the bill at a restaurant, giving the
baisemain
(kissing her hand—horrors!), which only a decadent European would do anyway, are all viewed with the utmost suspicion. “The idea that a man would take a woman to dinner, do all of the above, and not try to bed her isinconceivable in the States,” he told me with a Gallic shrug of disdain.
    One reason that Frenchwomen do not fear male-female games—or the opposite sex—is that flirtation does not imply or require follow-up. Flirting, he explained, is the same as strolling. “It’s for the pleasure of it. What might come afterward is fun if it happens, but it is not the primary goal.”
    Some people maintain that the relationship between Frenchmen and Frenchwomen is very special. As far as I can see, there is a tacit agreement between the two sexes. As long as women regiment the action from behind the scenes, which they do, everybody gets along. Frenchwomen understand this and they’re much too clever to get into a confrontation with men. The