La Seduction: How the French Play the Game of Life (14 page)

A young man and a sour-faced young woman are passing each other on the street. The woman is dressed in dark brown and carrying a duffel bag. Her shoulders are hunched, her long hair unkempt and falling into her eyes. The man, serious-looking in glasses and a trench coat, turns around as she passes and utters three words: “You are ravishing.” Her eyes open wide, a small smile forms on her lips. She is transformed. Her hair flies in the wind, her lips form a big smile, her jacket opens to reveal full breasts under a tight pink shirt.

I discovered a variation of this cartoon in an illustration by Sempé, the artist made famous in the United States with his work in
The New Yorker
. It shows an elegant woman of an indeterminate age walking on a Paris street. She wears a ruffled skirt and a close-cropped jacket, high heels, earrings, a necklace, and a hat and has a confident walk. She is smiling. Seven men—a team working on a building renovation—whistle at her as she passes.

She could have been Sophie-Caroline.

Do professional women feel they are at a disadvantage and not taken seriously in a society that can seem so sexually charged?

I belong to a club of about two hundred high-powered women, among them corporate executives, judges, lawyers, elected officials, doctors, journalists, museum curators, academics, writers, fashion designers, and cultural figures. Founded in 1985, it is probably the most powerful private women’s club in the country. It is also secretive and virtually unknown. It is not included in any of the books or articles on the influential private clubs of France. By choice.

Commercial and political self-promotion is forbidden. There is nothing specific about sisterhood or the promotion of women in our bylaws. To become a member, you must be sponsored by a “godmother” and undergo a “tryout,” at which you give a three-minute presentation in French about yourself and your professional accomplishments, delivered with just the right balance of self-assuredness, humility, and humor. Only a handful of members are foreigners.

The club sometimes meets in a private upstairs dining room at Fouquet’s, the glittery restaurant on the Champs-Élysées that has welcomed famous diners like Charlie Chaplin, Maurice Chevalier, Marlene Dietrich, Winston Churchill, and Jacqueline Onassis. Nicolas Sarkozy was there on the night he was elected president. The waiters (most of them men) regard us with a blend of humor and haughtiness.

Some of the women who come to the club for the first time express either discomfort or amazement. “It’s a pleasure to say ‘
Bonsoir à toutes
,’” said one women invited as a guest, as she used the feminine
toutes
to refer to “everyone.” “I have to confess that I like men,” she went on, “and at first I resisted coming to an all-women’s club.”

Our gatherings are organized for serious conversation, much needed in a country where women’s salaries are about 20 percent less than men’s, where women hold only slightly more than 10 percent of board seats in the top 650 companies, and where only 18 percent of the deputies in Parliament are women. (French women received the vote only in 1944, so they have had a lot of catching up to do.) Each table has an assigned head whose role is to lead the discussion. Seat assignments for our dinners are strategically thought out to facilitate getting to know as many other members as possible.

But these encounters are also designed for fun. Most of the women get dressed up, in well-cut suits or dresses, high heels, and good jewelry. A money-saving suggestion to eliminate champagne during the cocktail period before dinner was resoundingly rejected. A number of women said they’d rather give up dessert.

Michèle Fitoussi of
Elle
suggested I poll members of the club on their views about seduction. Because of the club’s strict rules about soliciting, I was permitted to send the poll only to part of the membership, and even then, on a personal basis. About three dozen responded. Most of them got into the spirit, saying they could never live without seduction. For some, the concept invoked the “smile,” the “look,” “elegance,” “refinement,” “charm,” “culture,” and even “gallantry.” Others saw it first and foremost as a “game” associated with the ideas of “lightness,” “pleasure,” and “banter.”

“It would almost be considered rude not to try a little seduction in all kinds of situations,” said Nicole Bacharan, a political scientist who specializes in American politics. “But it should not be taken seriously. French seduction is often directed toward everybody, but nobody specifically. It doesn’t need a purpose.” A writer in our group said that seduction “is something instinctive, sort of like breathing.”

The subtlety of the French language fueled the ability to seduce, they reported. “It’s a game with language before being a strategy of conquest,” said Nicole Gnesotto, a political scientist and one of France’s leading experts on the European Union. “It is based on humor, irony, complicity, and what is left unsaid. Italians play even more with words than we do, but they have real intentions, whereas we play with seduction but don’t try to bring it to a conclusion.”

Despite her serious, high-level position, Gnesotto has a range of uses for seduction: “with my florist, to be offered an extra rose; with my regular shopkeepers with whom I perpetuate the same rituals of seduction, just for pleasure; with the bureaucracy to try to get a little favor—to get the bus driver to let me off where I want and not have to wait until the stop.”

Only one member who replied, Florence Montreynaud, the strictest feminist in our group, rejected this exercise. “I’m troubled by the word and the idea of ‘seduction’ which is too sexual for me,” she wrote in an e-mail. “It’s to turn away from the right path, to try to be attractive in a disloyal way.”

I asked the women whether they are outraged by the perpetual game of seduction in their professional lives. I found that if American women engage in a perpetual battle of the sexes, French women are more likely to collaborate with the opposite sex. In France, said Marie-France de Chabaneix, the founder and president of a dietary and cosmetics company, women use seduction “as a weapon to defend themselves against the machismo of men.” A professor of rhetoric said that as a teacher, “You have to play with seduction. Otherwise students don’t listen to you.”

Most of the women believe that the use of one’s femininity is a convenient tool in nonsexual situations and everyday life. One government jurist found seduction helpful “to convince the garage owner to repair my car before anyone else’s.”

The most exasperating thing I heard was that there are no fixed rules. You just have to intuit them, as if you are feeling your way up a vertical rock formation. There has to be perpetual fine-tuning, deciding the border between “empathy, closeness, affection and ambiguity and too much intimacy that can get out of control,” said an investment adviser.

It is quite easy to get it wrong. One woman in a senior government position told the story of inviting an older colleague to lunch one day. “I suggested we have lunch to talk about work,” she said. “You can’t imagine how surprised I was when he answered: ‘I thought you were already in a relationship!’” The seductive professional woman, she added, has to watch out for another reason, jealousy: “Seduction is a tool for certain women, but dangerous, because it strongly displeases others.”

Every woman polled said that when it comes to male-female relationships in the workplace, there is a cultural divide between France and the United States. Some called the American approach more straightforward and serious; others praised the American efficiency that avoids vapid speech and playacting. But some women found that this seriousness robs the work environment of creativity, instinct, and sensitivity. Nothing seems worse to these professionals than to be considered feminists in the American way. To avoid it, they advised, women should use humor, not anger, to get their points across. “The American executive woman, the entrepreneur, has to assume a distance, like putting on armor,” said the investment adviser. “She needs to be harsher and more manly to be convincing. Her feminine attributes—sensitivity, softness, charm—have to be erased because they ‘weaken’ her and are not synonymous with efficiency, performance, excellence. What a serious business it is, work without seduction!”

What surprised me most was that a number of my women’s club members do not favor uniform gender standards in the workplace. I responded that if they have to play the femininity game, they will always be treated as somehow inferior. Not so. Here’s what one member said: “If you want to have equal opportunity and treatment in professional life, you should above all stick with seduction. It’s the only way to avoid frightening men.”

Most of the women in the club who had spent time in the United States consider the politics of American feminism divisive, brutal, and unnecessary. All have stories to tell about sexual harassment consciousness-raising.

For Fabienne Haas, a corporate lawyer and mother of two, it happened when she was a young intern at a white-shoe New York law firm. Fabienne is nearing fifty, but she wears V-necked lacy camisoles under her sober suit jackets. In New York in her midtwenties, she was buttoned up to the neck. A married male associate in the firm, four years older than she, had been inviting her regularly to lunch, a gesture she found endearing as she was on a tight budget. But one day a colleague spotted him touching her hand and reported the incident to management. She was ordered to show up at an emergency meeting at 8 a.m. the next day. There were six male lawyers in the room. She was terrified. “Did he try to abuse his power? Did he try to pressure you?” she was asked. “I tried to keep a straight face and convince them nothing wrong had happened.”

Stéphanie Cardot, a mother of three in her midthirties who runs her own company, said she adored the American system, which rewards efficiency and hard work above all. She criticized the failure of the French corporate world to modernize its business strategies and eliminate cronyism. Stéphanie has impossibly big blue eyes and near-perfect English laced with colloquialisms acquired during her years living in New York. She wraps herself in her femininity, even though she is tough as nails in her decision making.

“In the U.S., you seduce by hard work and by being more professional than everyone else, which is all good, all very efficient,” she said over breakfast one day. “You have great results. But relationships are really dry. What I can’t accept is the lack of seduction in everyday life. In France, on the other hand, there is too much of it. Seduction is used as a way to be a little bit lazy. What I mean is French people—especially the elite—have always had this belief that work is ugly and that intelligence, pure intelligence, and seduction will get you anywhere.”

That said, Stéphanie failed to understand the American obsession with political correctness. “All this sexual harassment business is just killing the reality of the man and the woman together in the workplace,” she said. “How can you show real charm if you are afraid you are going to be sued for sexual harassment or whatever. It comes to a point where some men will not stay in an elevator with a woman. They will not open the door for you or light your cigarette.”

Stéphanie told me about the time she failed the sexual harassment test needed for a work contract with an American corporation on Wall Street.

“So I sit down and the first question is: ‘You’re a woman. You walk into a room full of guys, and they’re telling a dirty joke. They stop telling the joke. Is that sexual harassment?’ I’m thinking to myself, ‘No, it’s not, and besides, I want to know the end of the joke!’ But I say to myself, if I’m being asked the question in the first place, the right answer must be ‘Yes.’ So I click ‘Yes.’

“And the next question is, ‘You’re a woman. You walk into a room full of men, and they’re telling a dirty joke, and when you come in, they keep telling the joke. Is that sexual harassment?’ So I think that if the previous answer is yes, this one must be ‘No,’ so I click ‘No.’”

She was wrong both times. It was a no-win situation. “So I’m like, either I don’t get to hear the end of the joke, or I get to hear it and I’m seen as the slut of the office,” she said.

After she failed the test, the human resources department gave her sexual harassment training. “The trainer says to me, ‘Okay, you walk into the office one morning after you’ve just cut your hair, and I say, ‘Oh, Stéphanie, you’re gorgeous this way!’ What do you tell me?’

“So I say, ‘Thank you!’ He says, ‘No! You report me to HR. I just sexually harassed you.’

“I say, ‘I’m sorry. I just don’t get it.’ He gives up. He’s like, ‘You know what? Just get out of here.’”

There is something light and fun going on in the way French men and women relate to one another but also something very strategic and deliberate. There is nothing ad hoc about the French style of seduction. “It’s as if we French constantly play with it,” a French woman in her early twenties explained. “Look at French girls when they go abroad! They accentuate their French accents; they try to be more French. French seduction includes consciousness of what it is. It’s the knowledge of codes that are universally recognized as French.”