French Style Sex

French Style Sex
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When Americans move to France, they frequently find the French have different attitudes towards dating, love, romance, fidelity and sex.
Director, Paris Writers Group; Author, 'Henry Miller Is Under My Bed.' Publisher Paris Writers Press .
Oct 25, 2013, 08:39 AM EDT | Updated Jan 23, 2014
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Director, Paris Writers Group; Author, 'Henry Miller Is Under My Bed.' Publisher Paris Writers Press .
When Americans move to France, they frequently find the French have different attitudes towards dating, love, romance, fidelity and sex. Marilyn Yalom, the author of How the French Invented Love: 900 Years of Passion and Romance , answered questions and responded to the following conversation between two lovers.
After a French man and an American woman had finished making love, she quietly said, "We've been seeing one another for over a year now." Shocked, he replied, "That's impossible, I'm fidele with my girlfriend." Confused, the American woman, who knew about his French girlfriend, asked, "How can you say you're faithful when you're in bed with me?"
Harking back to the days of Maupassant, he replied, "I'm emotionally fidele . This is cinq a sept ." How would you explain cinq a sept to an American? From 5 to 7 p.m. is the traditional time that French people consecrate to having an extramarital affair. Un cinq à sept -- literally "a five to seven" -- is when a man or woman slips out of work or home and squeezes in a sexual escapade. This can be one-time sex or a long-term relationship, and if a husband or wife is frequently late getting home from the office, or if the wife is regularly absent from the house between 5 and 7, you can be sure that the other spouse will have his or her suspicions. I wrote in my book, How the French Invented Love, about a wife who negotiated with her husband that she be out of the house from 4 to 7, with no questions asked. Your book includes the story of Abelard, a Catholic monk and scholar, who literally lost his manhood because of impregnating Heloise, a 17-year-old girl, who was half his age and the niece of a powerful church bishop. Your last chapter deals with Dominique Strauss-Kahn, who allegedly raped a hotel maid. As a result he lost his prestigious job and the opportunity to be the president of France. We can add Eliot Spitzer, Arnold Schwarzenegger, John Edwards and others. Why do these prominent and powerful men risk all for erotic love? Or is it just for good sex? Do the French distinguish between the two? The French do distinguish between sex and love. The former is exclusively physical; whereas the latter can also be sensual and erotic, but must involve the "heart," which stands for the tender emotions one feels for the beloved. Just what Strauss-Kahn felt for his former wife, Anne Sinclair, is unknown, but he does seem to have been driven less by his heart than by another body part. She seems to have loved and supported him for a very long time -- over 20 years -- and put up with his extramarital affairs, but in the end, she had had enough and left him. But all of these high-testosterone men have major problems remaining monogamous.
You've discussed how many French women, unlike most American women, will tolerate her husband's mistress or affairs. A French woman said, "It is better to eat dirt with someone you love, than to eat chocolate cake alone." Does the fear of being alone and lonely override a French woman's attitudes toward sexual infidelity?
The French attitude toward marital infidelity has been colored by a very long history reaching back into the Middle Ages, when marriage was not an affair of the heart, but a matter of family alliances and property. In fact, the "invention of romantic love" in the 12th century was predicated upon the belief that love was not to be expected in marriage -- for a variety of reasons -- and could be found only in non-marital relations. Though French men have been known to indulge themselves more frequently than women in extra-marital affairs, French women, too, are no strangers to adultery. In fact, in literature the great myths of adultery -- from Tristan and Iseut to Madame Bovary -- are centered on women. In your preface, you wrote:
"...the French accept the premise that sexual passion has its own justification. Love simply doesn't have the same moral overlay that we Americans expect it to have.... Morality proves to be a weak opponent when confronted with erotic love." Where do the French draw the line between erotic love and irresponsible behavior?
This is a very good question, and probably unanswerable. If you truly care for another person, you try not to harm that person, which sometimes means foregoing your own pleasure. But morality and even deep affection often falters when one is in the grip of un amour passion.
Is it true that women are more emotionally involved in their relationships than men?
Statistically speaking, it is probably true that erotic relationships for women involve their emotions as well as their sexual appetites to a greater extent than is the case for men. Just read the letters of Héloïse to Abélard where she accuses him of having experienced lust rather than love. It does seem that men are more able to become sexually aroused than women without an emotional component, which is not to say that men are incapable of loving.
What can French and American women learn from one another about love?
We can learn from French women to maintain a certain mystery in a relationship and to pay more attention to the aesthetics of one's personal appearance and lovemaking. They can learn from us to be more direct in expressing our needs, whether they be in the kitchen, the bedroom, or the board room.
Director, Paris Writers Group; Author, 'Henry Miller Is Under My Bed.' Publisher Paris Writers Press .

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We’ve enlisted the help of the entertaining sex columnist for France’s GQ Magazine, Maïa Mazaurette, to help clear up a few myths, answer a few important questions, and offer some advice when it comes to sex with the French.
How do the French really view sex?: There's no moral hangs up about sex in France, she says. "Having sex on the first night is not going to affect anything, you can still marry each other. There’s no link to morality," says Mazaurette. "In the US they are good at inventing terms like “marriage material” or “hook ups”. Here we have sex because it’s a cool activity. If something physical is happening, just enjoy it". Basically it's pretty straightforward, she says.Photo: Shutterstock
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Sex. Celebrity. Politics. With Teeth
Sex. Celebrity. Politics. With Teeth
Blowjobs: Why Can't Americans Be More Like the French?
"What is it about Americans and la pipe?" asked my Parisian friend Anne* in between puffs of Marlboro. I stopped and looked at her, perplexed. La pipe is French slang for "fellatio."
"You're going to have to be a little more specific," I said.
Anne, who was born and raised in Paris, went on to ask why it is that so many young Americans don't consider oral sex to be "real" sex. "It's like a stop gap measure on the way to intercourse," she observed, "and people in America don't think it's intimate the way we do in France. But it's so intimate! Parce que c'est" -– and here she switched from French to English so she could use an utterly apt turn of English phrase –- "in your face!"
Anne, who observed this phenomenon during her study abroad at a large Midwestern university a few years ago, was right, of course. In American culture, we don't count oral sex as "real" sex. The "base" system, which was also the dominant framework when I was a teenager in Australia, privileges vaginal intercourse (I have never understood why Australians use the base system when they don't even play baseball. Why wouldn't we come up with our own cricket-based analogy?). In the bases framework, oral sex happens before intercourse, and it's simply a stop on the way to the main event. It's foreplay, not sex. And it's good, but it's not as good as "stealing home."
Among young people in France, on the other hand, oral sex counts as real sex. While every individual is different –- and that applies in the US as much as in France -– the sense I get when I talk to French people about sex is that to them, oral sex and intercourse are by and large equal. "For us, it's really the same thing, which is to say, it's a sexual act of the same seriousness as penetration. Maybe even more intimate," says Johanna Luyssen, assistant editor of the French feminist magazine Causette . "When you go to bed with a guy for the first time, you don't necessarily give him a blow job. That can even often come later, after intercourse." Another young French woman agreed with Johanna, saying that this order of sexual behaviour makes sense because of the French perception that oral sex is far more intimate than intercourse. "I'll have sex with someone I don't know very well," one young woman told me. "But [oral sex] I only do with people I really like. But if I did it, I would still say that we had sex."
I'll be the first to say that in many respects, the French attitude to sex is far from perfect. But in this regard, I think Americans could benefit by taking a page out of the French book. If America could work toward a new sexual framework, a way of thinking about sex that doesn't treat intercourse as the be all and end all, we'd be a healthier, more equitable, and I dare say more sexually satisfied people.
It's crucial to note that in a country of 66 million people, there will of course be great diversity of attitudes and behaviours around sex. It will vary widely by age, ethnicity, religion, and by many other factors. Some of the French people I spoke to were of two different minds even over the course of one meal, so really we're talking about more than 66 million attitudes. The same goes for the US, too, which has a larger population and greater racial and ethnic diversity than France does.
Generally speaking, though, among young people in the US, the base system reigns. The details of the sexual diamond vary from place to place, but the general framework is consistent: first mouths on mouths, then hands on genitals, then mouths on genitals, then vaginal intercourse. And only this last one is "real" sex. Debra Herbenick, a sex researcher and a sexual health educator at the Indiana University's Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender and Reproduction, believes that the separation of oral and vaginal sex is the prevailing attitude among people under forty in the US. But the base system leaves an awful lot to be desired.
For one thing, it all but ignores gay and lesbian sex. Under the current framework, it's impossible for a lesbian, no matter how many same-sex hook ups she has, to really truly lose her virginity. The same goes for gay men: if the only real way to have sex in America is to stick your penis in a vagina, then there are lots of very sexually active gay men out there who are still technically virgins. The privileging of heterosexuality, and of vaginal intercourse above all other kinds of sex, shuts them out and invalidates the sex that they have. Which, you know, seems pretty damn unfair, and like the kind of arrangement that equality-minded folk should be interested in fixing.
A majority of women –- something like 75% -– don't orgasm during intercourse. They come instead from the kind stimulation that, in the current framework, isn't considered "real sex," like oral or digital stimulation. The privileging of vaginal intercourse as the sexual be all and end all, the "home run" of sex, means that for a lot of women, orgasm happens outside of "real" sex. Intercourse is still pleasurable for them, of course, but in a less extreme and discriminatory way than gays and lesbians, they too are shut out of "real" sex.
It's true that oral sex, and gay and lesbian sex, can't result in a baby. For some people, the possibility of procreation might be reason enough to hold intercourse up above all other forms of sex. But most of the time, intercourse doesn't result in a baby, and a lot of the time, that is deliberate: straight people have a lot of intercourse purely for pleasure. If the possibility of procreation is what makes sex real, does that disqualify intercourse that's had using the IUD, which has a failure rate that is statistically minuscule?
Finally, there's the public health argument. You can catch STIs from oral sex. Chlamydia and herpes can all be transmitted through cunnilingus and fellatio. But it becomes awfully hard to prevent sexually transmitted diseases if lots of Americans don't classify some of their sexual behaviour as "sex." You can catch gonorrhea by having sex with someone who has it? That's fine, says the young American who got little to no sex education in high school, I'll just do oral. Except, yikes, you can absolutely catch gonorrhea from oral sex. A new sexual framework, one in which oral sex "counts," would make it easier to prevent the spread of STIs in America.
However, when it comes to public health, the case for that new framework is a complicated. Herbenick warns that given the shoddy quality of sex education in this country, and the comparatively poor availability of contraception, the oral sex-real sex distinction might serve a purpose. "We're just not equipped," she says, to re-classify oral sex as real sex, because we don't yet have the education or healthcare policies that would have to accompany it to prevent further spread of STIs and unwanted pregnancies. "I think it's healthy to think about all of these things as being on the table," she says. "At the same time, when people think, ‘well, I don't know this person very well, so I'll have oral sex with them but not intercourse,' that probably does prevent an awful lot of pregnancies and infections." So if we want a more inclusive and egalitarian vision of sex –- and why wouldn't we? –- it'll have to come with more inclusive and egalitarian education and healthcare policies.
In other words, we're looking at a huge overhaul here. We're looking at a radical re-thinking of sex, not just a re-classification of the blow job. But I think the French have got this one right. Oral sex is real sex, and here in America it ought to be thought of as such. We need to do away with the base system, or at least with the idea that intercourse is the most superior form of sex, the "home run," the ultimate way to score. Done right, it's the kind of shift that could make America a healthier place. It would certainly make it a more equitable place. We already French kiss: why shouldn't the rest of our sex lives be à la française?
*not her real name. She's named for a different Brontë sister.
Chloe Angyal is an editor at Feministing . She is working on her doctoral thesis on romantic comedies, and on a book on the same topic.

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Oral stimulation of the clitoris or vulva.
[New Latin, from Latin, he who licks the vulva : cunnus , vulva ; see (s)keu- in Indo-European roots + lingere , to lick ; see leigh- in Indo-European roots .]
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. Copyright © 2016 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.
a sexual activity in which the female genitalia are stimulated by the partner's lips and tongue. Compare fellatio
[C19: from New Latin, from Latin cunnus vulva + lingere to lick]
Collins English Dictionary – Complete and Unabridged, 12th Edition 2014 © HarperCollins Publishers 1991, 1994, 1998, 2000, 2003, 2006, 2007, 2009, 2011, 2014
the act or practice of orally stimulating the female genitals.
[1885–90; < New Latin, Latin: one who licks the vulva = cunni-, comb. form of cunnus vulva + -lingus, derivative of lingere to lick ]
Random House Kernerman Webster's College Dictionary, © 2010
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