{"id":66246,"date":"2014-02-06T13:45:13","date_gmt":"2014-02-06T18:45:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=66246"},"modified":"2014-02-16T15:55:13","modified_gmt":"2014-02-16T20:55:13","slug":"the-habits-of-highly-erotic-people","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2014\/02\/06\/the-habits-of-highly-erotic-people\/","title":{"rendered":"The Habits of Highly Erotic People"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em>What can the French teach Americans about sex?<\/em><\/p>\n<div id=\"attachment_66250\" style=\"width: 610px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/02\/vintage-french-ad.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-66250\" class=\" wp-image-66250\" alt=\"vintage french ad\" src=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/02\/vintage-french-ad.jpg\" width=\"600\" height=\"380\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/02\/vintage-french-ad.jpg 590w, https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/02\/vintage-french-ad-300x189.jpg 300w\" sizes=\"auto, (min-width: 62.5em) 67vw, 100vw\" \/><\/a><p id=\"caption-attachment-66250\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">From a 1923 French advertisement<em><\/em><\/p><\/div>\n<p>Last month, as the <i>New York Post<\/i> went into paroxysms over <a href=\"http:\/\/nypost.com\/tag\/francois-hollande\/\" target=\"_blank\">the latest French presidential love triangle<\/a>, we found a more academic comment on French habits of the heart, thanks to our attendance at a panel on \u201cThe Art of Sex and Seduction,\u201d sponsored by the Alliance Fran\u00e7aise. On the first of its three nights, entitled \u201cDid the French invent love?\u201d, Catherine Cusset, a former professor of French literature at Yale, told a story:<\/p>\n<p>A countess invites a young man to her house after running into him at the opera. After a stiff meal with her husband, who retires to his private apartments, the countess leads her guest down a secret passageway into a bedroom. The walls and ceiling are covered with gilded mirrors. Sexual frenzy ensues. At daybreak, the giddy, exhausted young man emerges from the den and runs into a marquis who has just arrived. The marquis thanks him profusely. The young man realizes that he has served merely as a decoy to distract the count from his wife\u2019s true lover. The husband appears for breakfast and greets the marquis cordially. The last line of this story\u2014Vivant Denon\u2019s <em>No Tomorrow<\/em>, first published in 1777\u2014reads, \u201cI looked for some moral to this adventure and \u2026 I could find none.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThere is no moral lesson,\u201d Cusset said pointedly, and a communal gasp could be heard in Florence Gould Hall. Throughout the series, the audience was susceptible to gasps, audible stirring, and sudden eruptions of laughter. The French and American panelists, who included historians, scientists, sex therapists, and journalists, spoke about vaginas and orgasms in that purposefully blunt way one always expects and yet can seldom prepare for. Here\u2019s what we learned about the difference between French and American sexual customs and attitudes, with a few startling facts about tout le monde. <!--more--><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>\u201cLove, for the French, is tied up with adultery,\u201d explained Marilyn Yalom, a\u00a0feminist scholar at Stanford. Marriage in the Middle Ages, as least in the upper classes, was a contract related to the exchange of rank and property. Love was, therefore, to be found outside the marriage, leading to the mythic French threesome: the husband, the wife, the mistress.\u00a0<\/li>\n<li>Studies show that Americans and French have similar rates of infidelity, but the French, \u201cmarathoners,\u201d have longer, and therefore fewer, affairs. Americans are \u201csprinters,\u201d with more frequent but shorter trysts.<\/li>\n<li>Older French women are considered sexual beings. A nonagenarian is to be respected as a repository of sexual history.\u00a0When Colette was nearing fifty, pointed out her biographer Judith Thurman, she had an affair with her sixteen-year-old stepson, among other men-children.<\/li>\n<li>Cusset once assigned <i>Woman Destroyed<\/i>, the novella by Simone de Beauvoir, in a class at Yale. The diary of a woman who discovers her husband of twenty years has been unfaithful, it records a gradual nervous breakdown. Cusset was surprised by her American students\u2019 reaction. \u201cThey thought she whined too much. They didn\u2019t understand that you can be broken by love.\u201d Love as the loss of control\u2014whether it brings ecstasy or devastation, within or without marriage\u2014is a French ideal. Total surrender is too much for an American. We prefer to check boxes for the ideal mate.<\/li>\n<li>More casually accepted notions in France: When a woman has married and produced the heir and a spare, she is free to live her own sexual life. A lover outside the marriage can save a marriage.\u00a0<\/li>\n<li>Marie de Bonaparte, a great-niece of the emperor and a student of Freud\u2019s, was convinced that her frigidity was the result of an anatomical defect. After measuring the distance from the clitoris to the vagina in a group of women, she found that those with a shorter distance were more orgasmic. She had surgery to shorten hers. It didn\u2019t work. She did it again, with no better luck.<\/li>\n<li>Forty million Americans describe themselves as sex-starved. According to Helen Fisher, a biological anthropologist at Rutgers and chief scientific consultant to the dating site chemistry.com, it is often a question of mismatched libidos\u2014an adventurer paired with a traditionalist, for example.<\/li>\n<li>Studies show single Americans are having sex especially rarely. An audience member blamed Internet porn; the American sex therapist Ian Kerner theorized that everyone was too tired.\u00a0<\/li>\n<li>Women who had their cervixes wired for signs of stimulation were shown images of heterosexual, gay, and lesbian porn, and one image of bonobo chimpanzees having sex. The women claimed not to be excited by anything but \u201cappropriate\u201d images, but the instruments showed otherwise. The women were turned on by all the images, including the monkeys. Men, subjected to the same study, were excited by the predictable, and mostly said so. None of them reacted to the monkeys.<\/li>\n<li>In a survey of five thousand Americans, 70 percent said they experienced sexual boredom in their relationship, but eighty percent of married couples said they would remarry the same person.\u00a0<\/li>\n<li>Women get bored sexually with the same partner much sooner than men. According to one study, women experience \u201ca catastrophic decline of interest\u201d after three years whereas men show a much more gradual erosion.<\/li>\n<li>Studies and anecdotal accounts show rape fantasies to be ubiquitous among women.\u00a0<\/li>\n<li>In France, \u201cflirting is a civic duty.\u201d Flirting is playing with <em>le fleuret<\/em>, the tip of the sword.<\/li>\n<li>There is a point of no return in the process of seduction, wrote the French eighteenth-century erotic writer Crebillon Fils, which is when the woman signals that she won\u2019t say no.<\/li>\n<li>As human animals, we have our own observable sexual cues. Females tend to tip their buttocks up during courting. There is also the \u201ccopulatory gaze,\u201d during which the pupils dilate.<\/li>\n<li><i>Manon Lescaut<\/i> and <i>Dangerous Liaisons<\/i> were named the sexiest works of literature. Also, <i>The Story of O<\/i> still stands as a minor erotic masterpiece.<\/li>\n<li>Why the French are not as morally conflicted about sex as Americans: \u201cThe French are keenly aware of the brevity of time and the immediacy of pleasure.\u201d<\/li>\n<li>For the French, love is \u201cembedded in the flesh.\u201d Americans \u201cprefer to imagine love without the body.\u201d<\/li>\n<li>According to a French audience member in her twenties, there is no French translation for a date, as in the official dinner\/movie outing, which she clearly thought sounded deadly.<\/li>\n<li>A French therapist would not necessarily encourage, as would an American one, more \u201ccommunication in bed.\u201d Mystery, or what the French call <i>le non-dit<\/i> (\u201cthe unspoken\u201d), is a better aphrodisiac.<\/li>\n<li>An eager young woman had a question \u201cfrom some friends.\u201d Her \u201cfriends,\u201d a new couple, were in love and very attracted to each other, but the man wouldn\u2019t \u201crelease his inner wild man.\u201d \u201cWhat should she do?\u201d the woman inquired, almost desperately. \u201cShe is ready for anything!\u201d \u201cWhen a man gets to know a woman, \u201c said the expert, \u201csometimes he becomes self-conscious about objectifying her that way. He thinks it\u2019s wrong.\u201d\u00a0There was a silence as we considered the sensitivity of this hypothetical male. Then the American science writer suggested talking dirty to break the ice.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>On all three nights, the audience was about fifty percent male, which surprised us. The third night, entitled \u201cBehind the Boudoir: The Secrets of Sex Appeal,\u201d attracted an especially attentive group, most of whom appeared in their seventies. The French audience members, whom we might assume to be appealingly jaded, were just as riveted as everyone else. Throughout the series, the ubiquitous French affirmation <i>c\u2019est normal<\/i> (\u201cthat\u2019s normal,\u201d or \u201cwe are only human\u201d) hung in the air as we delved into the often bizarre complexities of sex, and for a moment, we felt a uniquely Gallic pleasure: exulting in the complexity of a problem rather than searching for its solution.<\/p>\n<p>Someone asked what Americans could teach the French about sex and seduction. There was a puzzled silence. Finally,\u00a0the cultural historian suggested that French men could be encouraged to help out more with household tasks, with an important caveat: \u201cEgalitarianism is wonderful in the kitchen but boring in the bedroom.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Reading List:<\/p>\n<p><i>No Tomorrow<\/i> by Vivant Denon, translated by Lydia Davis<br \/><i>Secrets of The Flesh: A Life of Colette<\/i> by Judith Thurman<br \/><i>Claudine at School<\/i> by Colette<br \/><i>How the French Invented Love: Nine Hundred Years of Passion and Romance<\/i> by Marilyn Yalom<br \/><i>The Story of O<\/i> by Pauline R\u00e9age<br \/><i>Manon Lescaut<\/i> by the Abb\u00e9 Pr\u00e9vost<br \/><i>Dangerous Liaisons<\/i> by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos<br \/><i>Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence<\/i> by Esther Perel<br \/><i>What French Women Know: About Love and Sex and Other Matters of the Heart and Mind<\/i> by Debra Ollivier<br \/><i>What Do Women Want?: Adventures in the Science of Sexual Desire<\/i> by Daniel Bergner<br \/><i>She Comes First: The Thinking Man\u2019s Guide to Pleasuring a Woman<\/i> by Ian Kerner<\/p>\n<p><em>Susannah Hunnewell is the magazine\u2019s Paris editor.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>What can the French teach Americans about sex? Last month, as the New York Post went into paroxysms over the latest French presidential love triangle, we found a more academic comment on French habits of the heart, thanks to our attendance at a panel on \u201cThe Art of Sex and Seduction,\u201d sponsored by the Alliance [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":614,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[47],"tags":[12793,865,12789,12790,270,179,12792,12791],"class_list":["post-66246","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-department-of-sex-ed","tag-bedroom","tag-france","tag-fun-facts","tag-menage-a-trois","tag-paris","tag-sex","tag-the-art-of-sex-and-seduction","tag-vivant-denon"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO Premium plugin v25.4 (Yoast SEO v25.4) - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>The Habits of Highly Erotic People by Susannah Hunnewell<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"February 6, 2014 \u2013 What can the French teach Americans about sex? 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