La Seduction: How the French Play the Game of Life (6 page)

“How seductive you are,” a roguish Michel Piccoli tells the icily beautiful Catherine Deneuve in the 1967 film
Belle de jour
.

“Your compliments are too subtle,” she replies sarcastically. By being so direct, he has crossed the line.

If talking is the way the word is expressed, then it’s useful to cultivate the voice. Living in France, I have come to understand that the French speak more softly than Americans (one reason Americans sometimes attract attention in public places). Private coaches can be hired in Paris to teach professional women how to rid their voices of chirpiness and men how to cultivate lower tones.

Several years back, the French writer Alice Ferney wrote a novel about infidelity called
La conversation amoureuse
. It tells the love story of Pauline and Gilles. Pauline is a beautiful, happily married, twenty-six-year-old mother who is expecting her second child. Gilles is a worldly, successful, forty-nine-year-old writer of made-for-TV movies whose marriage is ending.

The most sensual passages in the novel are the phone conversations between them. “A voice can hold things just as a body can,” Pauline says to herself. “It can enter deeper inside you than a man’s sex. A voice can inhabit you, lodge in the pit of your stomach, in your chest, right by your ear, and nag away at that part of you that so badly needs love, stoke it, whip it up as the wind whips up the sea. Am I in love with a voice?”

If I were to fall in love with a voice, it would be the voice of Jean-Luc Hees, the chief executive of Radio France. When a profile is written about Hees, more often than not it refers to him as a
grand séducteur
. I asked him once what that meant, and at first he played coy and pretended not to know. Then he talked about the voice. “When I listen to the radio, I know who has the power of
séduction
,” he said. “It’s the first thing I hear. I can feel that someone wants to be desired, wants to be listened to.”

Hees’s voice is deep and soft, like too many velvet cushions on a sunken sofa. When he arrived years ago as a young radio correspondent in Washington, which is where we first met, he knew only the most rudimentary English. His voice compensated. At a dinner one evening, he chatted with a beautiful American woman sitting next to him. When they said good-bye, she said to him, “It was like opera. I understood nothing. But the music, the music was wonderful.”

The kiss, the next natural weapon in seduction, is subject to its own rules of engagement. The most social kiss is the
bise
, the kiss on each cheek. I always have considered the
bise
a straightforward ritual that the French feel compelled to use when saying hello and good-bye. It’s so routine that children are required to give it when meeting the adult friends of their parents, even when they are perfect strangers. It drove my young daughters nuts.

But then Florence Coupry and Sanae Lemoine, my researchers, ganged up on me and explained how cheek kissing could come with extraordinary power. “Okay, you can give
la bise
to say ‘hi’ to people you know, and there would be nothing special about it,” said Florence, trying to be deferential. “But what a potentially wonderful ground for a game! Let’s say that one day, kissing a dozen friends hello, I also kiss someone I’ve been dreaming about. I feel my heart beating weirdly and I’m so close to him for a second and I think I’m going to faint, and it will be absolutely delicious and maybe troubling. Maybe only I know what’s happening, or maybe I let him know. Or maybe he guesses it and then what could happen?”

Sanae chimed in: “Sometimes his lips will touch your cheek, or he’ll try to come as close as he can to your lips and touch your waist lightly with his hand.
La bise
allows you to get intimate. It allows you to come close to someone you don’t know at all, so close that you can smell the other.”

Beyond the social
bise
, the French take their kissing seriously. In the Forum des Halles mall in central Paris one Saturday morning, shoppers were offered a lesson in cross-cultural kissing. Two actors, Lise and Gaëtan, were led through the demonstration by Sophie Kerbellec, their acting teacher. A crowd stood and watched.

“So now we are going to try the ‘French kiss,’ where you really put your lips together, one mouth on the other,” Kerbellec said. “You’ve got to throw yourselves into this kiss.” She told the couple to think of Jean Gabin and Michèle Morgan in Marcel Carné’s 1938 classic,
Le quai des brumes
.

The couple kissed. Their lips locked and then explored, softly.

“Think about moving your heads! Voilà!
Très bien
!” Kerbellec continued. “See, hold her head. That’s very good! The back of her neck!”

Their heads swayed. Their lips pressed. They seemed to be enjoying themselves.

Then came an American kiss. “Now, what we are going to do are kisses that are a little more technically welcoming to the camera. They are going to simply move their jaws. It’s called ‘mouth eating.’ You have to have the sensation of eating the mouth….”

As the couple opened their mouths and started chewing each other’s lips, I couldn’t help reflecting that in a mall in America on a Saturday morning, you would be more likely to find a demonstration of a device to cut potatoes in ten ways.

Finally, the deal must be clinched. There are no fixed rules for making it happen. Christophe, a French man in his midtwenties who is both clever and handsome, devised a strategy he shares with male friends when they ask for advice. “I always play by the rule of the three Cs—
climat, calembour, contact
,” he confessed to a young friend of mine.

Climat
is context. “You want to establish a specific atmosphere, which can be somehow magical,” he said. “You should not be too friendly. This ruins your chance to have her in the end. What’s important is to create a special ambiance. You can transform a random situation into an atmosphere where you feel you are going to kiss each other.
Climat donc
.”

Calembour
, which literally means “pun,” comes next. “You need to make her laugh,” he said. “But it has to be subtle.”

The clincher comes with
contact
. “At the fateful moment, you manage to establish physical contact,” he said. “Not a big slap on the back. But when you’re saying something—a joke for example—you touch her arm. Or crossing the street, you take her arm. This is a very strong signal. And if she does not reject it, you can almost be sure you can at least kiss her.”

He told the story of an encounter at a pharmacy where he was buying a medication late one afternoon. “The pharmacist was a beautiful young woman, alone in her pharmacy,” he said. “It was late. So there was
climat
! I asked her if I could see her again. ‘Tomorrow?’ She said no. I insisted. ‘The day after tomorrow?’ I insisted, then insisted again. By now she was laughing. So there was
calembour.
But she said no. I left. Then I called information, to get the number of the pharmacy. I called and she answered.” He went straight to the point: “And tonight?”

They had dinner that evening.
Contact
came a bit later.

French magazines—news magazines as well as those aimed at women—regularly run articles decoding the mysteries of seduction, presumably with consummation as the ultimate goal. It is usually a multi-step process, not unlike Christophe’s with his three Cs. In a 130-page special issue on amorous encounters, the monthly
Psychologies
magazine revealed five “master cards of seduction” in the “great game.” First, “detachment vis-à-vis the gaze of the other,” or feigning indifference; second, “authenticity,” or being audacious, sincere, and vulnerable all at the same time; third, “coherence,” or inner harmony that rules out trickery; fourth, “self-confidence,” which starts with self-seduction; and fifth, “openness,” or giving of oneself with “abandon” so that others fall under one’s charm.

For a more learned opinion, I turned to the sociologist Alain Giami, a French coauthor of a scholarly work from 2001 entitled “A Comparative Study of the Couple in the Social Organization of Sexuality in France and the United States.” He told me it often takes only a kiss to move straight to the act. “The kiss is a very intimate act,” he said. “Do not underestimate its power.”

So what does this say about the sexual habits of the French?

Even today, in the American mind, it’s a given that Paris is the city of love and the French are great lovers. That assumption is perpetuated in novels, memoirs, and films about American women who go off to Paris to discover their inner French selves. The French men who inhabit their lives may turn out to be cads in the end, but they never completely disappoint. In one typical novel,
Paris Hangover
, the thirty-four-year-old heroine abandons a glamorous job as a fashion consultant in New York to live in Paris. “What’s with this city?” she asks. “I swear it’s making me into a sexual predator. It’s
not
my fault. If you’ve ever been to Paris you
so
know what I’m talking about. The second you get off the plane, you just get swept into this maelstrom of mad, wanton desire: for croissants, for shoes, for men.”

There is anecdotal evidence to support the notion that France is an exceptionally good sexual hunting ground, especially for deprived Americans, male as well as female. A French friend told me about an American man she knew who was obsessed with sleeping with a lot of French women. “He was charming, and quite handsome and a bit lost,” she said. “He would go walking by the Trocadéro Métro station at three o’clock in the afternoon. When he saw a pretty woman who looked married, he would ask, ‘Madame, could you tell me where Balzac’s house is?’ He had great success. Two out of three of the women would end up in bed with him.”

I told her I didn’t believe it. I asked typically American questions: Did the women have children, and where were they? (The children were still in school.) Where did the couple have the liaisons? (In small hotels in the upscale neighborhood.)

“I believe the story,” she told me. “Even if it was only one out of two.”

Scientific polls suggest a more complicated picture. Durex, the best-selling condom manufacturer in France—and in the world—regularly publishes statistics about sexual habits. One of its polls questioned twenty-six thousand people in twenty-six countries and concluded that the French have sex about 120 times a year. That makes them only the eleventh most sexually active country, behind Greeks at 164 and Brazilians at 145, but way ahead of Americans at 85.

Strange as it may seem, the French can be more sexually conservative than Americans. According to the study that Giami coauthored, single French men and women under the age of thirty-nine are significantly more monogamous than Americans of the same age. Young single unattached French women are likely to be less sexually active than their American sisters. French men and women tend to have fewer sexual partners in their lifetimes. There are proportionally more long-term, committed, monogamous couples—both married and not—in France than in the United States. The French even seem to be more faithful to their extramarital lovers: their affairs last longer than those of Americans. “The metaphor I like to use is that Americans are sprinters,” Giami told me. “The French run marathons.”

There are two dramatic differences: the frequency of sex is “markedly higher” in France than in the United States. And French women over fifty are much more likely to be sexually active than their American counterparts. The study blames the victim: “It appears as if older women in the U.S. are less desirable sexually or are themselves less interested in sexual activity than French women of a comparable age.”

On issues of who and when, the French seem to be a lot less invested in moralistic codes than Americans. “Dating” with its rules and rituals does not exist. The ground rule my generation grew up with (sleep with a guy on the first date and be branded a slut) was shattered by the 1968 cultural revolution and the pill. That code seems to be back with a  vengeance, tormenting many young American women today. The French women I know just don’t get it. They say that if they want to have sex, they just do it and enjoy it, but perhaps they are more discriminating and private about it.

The French seem to place greater importance on romance—the prelude—than Americans do. Books and the popular media in France blame Americans for the focus on performance and for “hygienic” and “scientific” improvements in sex. Viagra, sexual surgery,
Sex and the City
performance are all American imports. So are psychological problems like “hypoactive sexual desire disorder” and “persistent genital arousal disorder.”

Pascal Bruckner, in his 2009 book,
Le paradoxe amoureux
(The Love Paradox), uses the subject of sex as emblematic of French cultural superiority over the United States. “While Americans in their movies and television shows say, ‘Let’s have sex,’ the French say, ‘
Faisons l’amour
,’” he wrote. “The difference is not only semantic. It reflects two visions of the world…. Bestiality on the one hand, ceremony on the other.”

Bruckner was short on evidence, long on theory, and I thought he might be exaggerating or stuck in a time warp. Then one of my researchers decided to survey her French friends who had spent time in the United States. The young men and young women agreed overwhelmingly that American women can be more guilt-ridden and confessional and American men more brutal and less romantic than the French. One young woman replied, “Americans are more direct about sex: They say ‘Do you want to have sex?’ or send a text at two a.m. saying, ‘Let’s see each other now,’” she said. “A French guy will be much more romantic. First he will start the foreplay at a restaurant—by looking at the girl. Some American guys I’ve met have trouble looking me in the eye, while for me it can increase sexual excitement. Then a French guy will spend much more time kissing the girl—smoothly, slowly, and then kissing her all over her body. Most French guys know the erogenous zones (neck, smooth kiss in the ears, sides of the back, behind the knee…) and know how to drive a girl crazy by playing with that. Americans don’t enjoy the experience of driving the girl crazy first, and they go straight to the point! And the girl is not aroused enough.”