Observations on France
In Paris this summer, a new book on French women's sexuality is flying off the shelves. Femme désirée, femme désirante (Woman Desired, Woman Desiring) is by the gynaecologist Danièle Flaumenbaum, and it reveals something surprising. After working with female patients for more than 30 years, she informs us that most of them have never experienced orgasm.
Le Monde gave her revelations a spread and she has been interviewed by French radio, as well as Marie Claire and Elle.
For us, her ideas are an assault on a treasured stereotype - the French are supposed to ooze sex from every pore. What has gone wrong? Flaumenbaum blames a residue of Catholic morality, in which women are still seen in one of three roles, Sacred Mother, Virgin or Whore. "I, too, was trapped in the vision of myself as merely 'a good mother'," she admits. "I didn't know how to live life fully as a sexualised woman until my forties." And she believes that mothers unconsciously transmit their desexualised vision of womanhood to their daughters.
To us in England, where the media talk only too happily about women's sex lives, this feminine reticence may be surprising. Influenced by America, we have embraced a culture of counselling and therapy, but in France there is still much shame associated with visiting a psychiatrist.
Danuta Baldys, a 44-year-old French teacher, agrees with Flaumenbaum's thesis. "Something passes down the generations. A kind of prudishness, even if it's not conscious. I felt it from my mother and I even see it in my own children."
She is shocked by her friends' priorities. "They don't consider their own sexual pleasure or liberation, but fixate on how to look good and please men. France perpetuates this ideal of la belle femme, which has nothing to do with reality and which traumatises us. When I go to Poland [where she has family], my friends aren't obsessed with their bodies, diets and fear of ageing. In France, my friends believe you must suffer to be beautiful."
Fifty-seven years after Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex, it seems as though feminism has yet to percolate through French culture. There may be relative economic equality and an enviable free crèche system, but many women are still imprisoned by the pressure to spend time and money on le look.
A cult of suffering and sacrifice long endorsed by the Catholic Church seems to have turned itself into a religion of beauty. Anglo-Saxon grunge is seen as aberrant; in provincial supermarkets, many women are made-up and high-heeled, as if on their way to a party.
Flaumenbaum's book has clearly touched a raw nerve. France may elect its first female president next May, but Ségolène Royal has already said that, if she wins, she will not tolerate any insult to God.
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