La Seduction: How the French Play the Game of Life (19 page)

That kind of allure doesn’t come with a wardrobe.

French men are aware not only of their own look but also of the care and ingenuity that goes into a woman’s demeanor and sense of style. There is a brief exchange in François Truffaut’s 1977 film
L’homme qui aimait les femmes
(
The Man Who Loved Women
) that captures the centrality of women’s clothing in the life of a certain kind of French man.

Bertrand, the film’s protagonist, subscribes to a telephone wake-up service, and the same woman calls him every morning. He flirts with her; she resists. Then one morning, she lets him in on a secret.

No American man I know would know so much about the engineering of a particular brand of bra. In fact, no American man I know would know anything about a bra. What makes France different is that many men there are truly interested in the minutest details of what a woman wears.

Alice Ferney captured that sense in her novel about infidelity,
La conversation amoureuse
. The first time Gilles sees Pauline, long before they have an adulterous affair, he notes that her yellow dress is made of “fine poplin.” Gilles, it seems, has a passion for knowing a lot about women. “He knew the names of fabrics because he was a man who loved women,” Ferney wrote. “Whatever interested a woman interested him.”

For an official visit to the White House in 2007, President Sarkozy arrived not with a wife (his marriage was breaking up) but with three women who worked for him: Finance Minister Christine Lagarde, Justice Minister Rachida Dati, and Rama Yade, a deputy minister of foreign affairs. Sarkozy was concerned with the way they would present themselves as officials, of course, but he also told them how to dress. As recounted in a memoir by Sarkozy’s friend Jacques Séguéla, the advertising magnate, the president told Yade that she was “too beautiful for one of those ‘frou-frou’ dresses,” instructed Dati that she “should not abandon her habit of Dior-ized elegance,” and advised Lagarde to “leave her jewels in the safe.”

Even Charles de Gaulle showed interest in the dress of women he found feminine and seductive. “Madam,” he reportedly would ask, “what fabric is your dress made of?”

In France, knowledge about women’s clothing is not only an indication of a man’s appreciation of a woman’s attire but also a tool of seduction. It shows that he is paying attention, and for a woman, this is important. In the sequel to the cult comedy
La boum
, a middle-aged couple is having dinner at a restaurant. As a playful test of their love, the wife asks her husband to describe what she’s wearing. “How am I dressed?” she asks. He freezes. “There, below, under the table,” she continues. “Am I wearing pants? Boots? A skirt with a slit? High heels? Black stockings?” He doesn’t have a clue, demonstrating to her that he has been distracted by work and hadn’t looked at her on their way to the restaurant. The relationship deteriorates, for other reasons. Later in the film, as they are saying good-bye at a train station, he says, “Ah, I forgot. Under your gabardine coat, you’re wearing a straight navy blue skirt with a slit, the white blouse I bought you for Christmas, new navy blue sandals, and there, under your hair, little hoop earrings that no one can see, except me, when I…” He kisses her neck. The audience assumes he has won her back.

In France, as much attention is paid to specific body parts as to what covers them. In the United States, the focus tends to be on full breasts and flat bellies; in France the female body part that seems to get the most attention is not the breast, but the
fesses
—the curves perceived best from behind. The word
fesses
, which doesn’t really translate well into English, is less formal than “buttocks,” but more elegant than “ass” or even “butt.” “Derriere” isn’t bad, but then, that’s a French word, too.

In 2003, the weekly news magazine
L’Express
devoted a fourteen-page supplement to the subject, with a caption on the cover that read: “
Fesses
: The rising curves.” The supplement cited a poll by the BVA organization stating that only 38 percent of French men found the most fascination in a woman’s breasts, while 50 percent preferred her
fesses
and legs. “The third millennium announces the return of the full posterior as the barometer of seduction,” the magazine said.

A special report on
fesses
in
Elle
magazine in 2006 offered a guide to four different types: the hanging, the saddlebag, the flat, the fat. There was also a timeline of changes in
fesses
preferences over the years: “long and thin” popular in the 1990s—an androgynous silhouette where the
fesses
seemed to disappear—was replaced by rounder, “perfect curves” a decade later.

Naturally, a body part this important must be carefully presented, especially when it is clothed but even when it is not. For the one hundredth anniversary of her birth, Simone de Beauvoir was celebrated with half a dozen biographies, a DVD series, a three-day scholarly symposium, and the cover of the magazine
Le Nouvel Observateur
. The cover showed Art Shay’s famous photo of her nude (except for her high-heeled mules) from behind, fixing her hair in her Chicago bathroom. The cellulite on Beauvoir’s thighs and buttocks was airbrushed away, adding to the indignity and sparking a debate on sexism, feminism, and journalistic honesty.

The fact is, the
fesses
are accepted as a respectable topic of conversation in polite society. My French researcher, Sanae Lemoine, and I were talking about Brigitte Bardot, and she told me that for her grandfather, it was Bardot’s backside that beckoned. “I remember my grandfather saying he would go see her movies for her
fesses
,” she said. “If he wanted a ‘beautiful’ woman in a more classic and less vulgar or sexual way, he would go see a movie with Simone Signoret.” Indeed, in the film
And God Created Woman
, a male admirer says of Bardot as he watches her walk, “She has an ass that sings.”

The
fesses
are taken so seriously that a Frenchman wrote a book called
Brève histoire des fesses
, a scholarly history of them in art and society from classical antiquity to the present. The author, Jean-Luc Hennig, argued that the
fesses
are the voyeur’s natural territory. They give pleasure not so much in physical interaction but rather as ideal objects for contemplation, in painting, prose, language, sculpture, and sexual attraction. At times forbidden objects of desire, at others flamboyantly accentuated and celebrated, the
fesses
give rise to a seductive practice and discourse all to themselves, he wrote.

French painters and songwriters have portrayed
fesses
in disarming and vulnerable situations. François Clouet’s painting
Le Bain de Diane
(1565) demonstrated a bottom perfectly at ease and revealingly coquettish, while Gustave Courbet brought to life the white-skinned, working-class
fesses
in his
Les Baigneuses
(1853). In the song “Vénus callipyge,” Georges Brassens proclaimed his attachment to them (though using
cul
, a more indelicate term than
fesses
) with lines like, “
Au temps où les faux culs sont la majorité / Gloire à celui qui dit toute la vérité!
” A loose translation would be: “At a time when hypocrite-asses are the majority, glory to the one who tells nothing but the truth!”

In late 2009, a book and a television documentary,
The Hidden Side of the Fesses
, broadcast by Arte, the European cultural television channel, charted how this body part helped shape civilization. The companion book was such a popular Christmas present that it sold out in most bookstores. The film was the most watched documentary in 2009, drawing even more viewers than a documentary purporting to tell the truth about Michael Jackson. Allan Rothschild, the codirector of the film, declared that France has a special relationship with the
fesses
. They are bared on advertising billboards, in fashion magazines, and in pharmacy windows, examples of what appears at first glance to be an exceptionally relaxed French attitude about nudity.

That first impression can be misleading. Nudity may seem to exist at the opposite pole of bodily allure from the elaborate dressing of couture, but in France the two have something important in common: both are the subject of careful presentation. To the French, showing the nude body to its best effect is not a simple matter of undressing. Even nakedness can be—and should be—a matter of style.

I discovered this truth most vividly on an autumn night in 2009, when I stood with dozens of other spectators waiting patiently behind metal barricades at Printemps, the elegant Paris department store, for a glimpse of an unusual window display. The night rain, steady and cold, could not keep us away. Shortly after 9:00 p.m., a screen covering a corner picture window lifted to reveal five female dancers in uniform. From afar, they seemed to be dressed as the Queen of England’s guards at Buckingham Palace. Despite the dim lighting, on closer inspection, it was clear that they were wearing little except black fur hats strapped to their chins, high-heeled boots, black collars, red epaulets, white gloves, brass buttons, garters, and bits of ribbon. Shiny white tassels hung from their waists in front and in back to strategically cover their privates. Their breasts and
fesses
were stark naked.

The boulevard filled with martial music and the harsh voice of a male commander barking orders. The dancers saluted, strutted, marched, turned, and cocked their heads. They did not undulate or swivel their hips. Their breasts were firm and perky, their
fesses
taut and muscular. No body part bobbed or jiggled. The show—presented in cooperation with the Crazy Horse cabaret theater to “celebrate charm and seduction”—lasted for just five minutes.

I felt cheated. The dancers were so regimented that their performance seemed utterly unerotic. I didn’t understand how precision and control could translate into charm and seduction.

The audience loved it.

The young French woman standing next to me marveled, “What discipline! What elegance!” Another woman said she was “entranced by the absence of vulgarity. They are naked in such a way that they don’t look naked anymore.” A third was impressed by the perfection of the costumes and makeup that made the dancers “look like dolls.” A male television reporter asked a number of spectators whether they considered the show to be a “sexy atomic bomb.”

For them, French artistry was on display. The nude bits seemed beside the point. We were in front of an iconic department store on one of the busiest boulevards in the heart of Paris. We were a long way from Bloomingdale’s. A long way from Las Vegas, too.

The director of the Crazy Horse, which is known for its nearly nude performers, is Andrée Deissenberg, a long-legged blonde who is half-French, half-American. I called on her at the theater one evening after the window display and before I watched the full show. I learned that most Crazy Horse dancers have studied classical ballet. They must measure between five feet six inches and five feet eight inches in height, with no more than ten and a half inches between their nipples and five inches between their navels and their pubis. They are weighed once a week. They are forbidden to have tattoos or undergo cosmetic surgery. Their identities are kept from the public: they are given stage names, and there will never be revelations about where they live, dine, or shop. They are never completely naked, even if their only clothes are strips of colored lights and high heels they never take off. “High heels enhance the leg line,” said Deissenberg. “You walk differently; you act differently. When there is a little bit of artifice, there’s the whole seduction thing going on. When you’re naked, the audience is going to fall asleep.”

She called the five-minute Printemps window show inspiring. “The dancers were in perfect control, perfectly lit,” she said. “It was an act, on a stage. It was great, fantastic, and it inspires so many younger women.”

Inspiring was not the word I would have used. “Inspired to what? To be sexy?” I asked.

“To be and to feel beautiful and desired,” she said. “Women want to play with their sensuality, with their sexuality, with their femininity, to take control. And not just to be, you know, on the receiving end, but to be on the taking control end. On the dictating.” In other words, she was saying, Crazy Horse dancers are feminist mistresses of their own destinies.

Deissenberg had worked in both Las Vegas and Paris, so I figured she was a good source on the differences between the two cities in matters of sexuality and seduction. Las Vegas is direct, not subtle or mysterious, she told me. “America is
Playboy
girls with big breasts showing everything. In Vegas, everything is lit up and bright. There is absolutely nothing left to the imagination. It’s like Ya-ta-ta-ta, show me. It doesn’t speak to your brain. It speaks to a few people’s pants, maybe, but not to their brains. And the brain—that’s where beauty is.”