Stephanie Theobald
Body Language
The French have always been good at sex as art. Like the best food, carnality is invested with intimations of the “au-del…” or the transcendental. Buggery, for instance, isn’t just buggery. Done in the correct poetic framework it becomes Faur”s requiem, Renoir’s umbrellas, the Versailles Hall of Mirrors, Last Tango in Paris.
A friend of mine once got picked up by a man in Paris on Beaujolais Nouveau night and was taken back to his studio where they engaged in anal sex. Afterwards, she said, he climbed down from the mezzanine bed, put on Dvorak and made leek soup, which they ate cross-legged on his wooden floor by the light of a candle.
For someone used to the English interpretation of joie de vivre – a package involving alcohol, swearing a lot, vomiting, then falling asleep on the job – living life like it is an endless new wave- film both fascinates me and makes me feel like kicking everyone hard. It’s not that you want to go around acting like Saturday night in Pizza Hut all the time but after five years in Paris, I felt compelled to write a novel called Biche as a reaction to a city steeped in male myths of Hemingway and Miller taking “whores” to buggy hotel rooms, the Marquis de Sade and Georges Bataille churning out “intellectual eroticism” and singers like Serge Gainsbourg drooling through their Gauloises.
Looking for female vulgarity in Paris is like waiting for Godot: Juliette Greco was the plaything of the existentialists, Colette was basically in the pocket of husband Willy and although Simone de Beauvoir put it about a bit for a woman of her time, it was nothing compared with what Sartre got up to. Even French actresses have never really gone in for the casting couch system. If you are a French starlet, the deal is you remain faithful to a French “auteur”.
Even when action does take place, it is done in such a goddam refined way. Take the American Natalie Clifford Barney, one of the most famous lesbians of the 1930s. Her literary salon welcomed guests such as TS Eliot, James Joyce, Djuna Barnes, Gertrude Stein and Dolly Wilde, the niece of Oscar. According to a new biography of Wilde, the women’s extracurricular activities were as rampant as their literary ones, with Wilde having to perform “emergency seductions” when she got bored and Barney keeping lists of her conquests under the categories liaison, demi-liaison and aventure. This sounds promising until you read on and find out that Barney had a habit of delivering herself to potential partners wrapped up in a large box of white lilies and riding her glass carriage though the streets in the early hours to sing opera tunes under the balconies of other lucky lovers.
Ann-Marie Harper, a 33-year-old English woman who has lived in Paris for the past eight years with Pierre, says her partner is often scandalised when he overhears her conversations with girlfriends. “He says: ‘But why are you so vulgaire? You talk about cocks and things, you are very indiscrSte.’
“Frenchmen seem to think it weird if you want to have a good time with other girls without them,” Harper adds. “And they are shocked that Englishwomen drink so much.” Alcohol, she adds, is probably at the heart of British joie de vivre.
Marie Darrieussecq, the first Frenchwoman novelist of recent years to write about sex as something dirty and unaesthetic, in her bestseller Pig Tales, agrees with the alcohol theory. She says she first noticed the difference between French and British versions of joie de vivre when, aged 14, she went to visit a penfriend in the north of England. “We went to the pub and there was this group of men having a stag party. The English get a little crazy when they drink. Suddenly a female stripper entered the room and began to do her act. Everyone thought this was very funny. In France this would never happen. Strippers in public are considered vulgaire.”
The difference in approach to sex she pins down to the political climate of the 18th century. “In France, salon culture developed during a time of peace and leisure. There was time for refined flirtation and intellectual intrigue. England at the same time was more interested in fighting wars.”
But it looks as though Godot might be around the corner after all. Darrieussecq mentions the recent kerfuffle caused by Baise-Moi, a film by her friend Virginie Despentes about two sexually predatory girls. It became a succSs de scandale this summer when the far-right organisation Promouvoir banned it from cinemas in France, calling it obscene and anti-male.
Another film-maker, Catherine Breillat, has become known for her film Romance, about a woman who goes around Paris compulsively having sex to try to get over the love she feels for her boyfriend. Poetic sex is anathema to Breillat. “Even when sex is sordid,” she recently told Liberation, “there is a beauty in the sordid. The so- called erotic is about humiliation of women. It is seen as acceptable because it is ‘pretty’. Pornography is ugly. I prefer the ugly.”
This autumn saw the release of a film Breillat made in 1975 (it was considered too risqu’ to show at the time). Called Une Vraie Jeune Fille (A Real Young Girl), it is about a teenager who can’t stop thinking about sex. It opens at her bourgeois parents’ house where the teenager is trying to masturbate under the dinner table with a spoon.
There are further signs that the French are becoming more brave about being vulgaire. The other contemporary author making a splash is Michel Houellebecq, a French Bret Easton Ellis. The French love their existential crises and this is what Houellebecq writes about – people having weird sex because their lives are so meaningless that that is all they can do (and even that they don’t do very well).
Darrieussecq concludes that the trouble with the British is that they are too obsessed with sex per se. The true French lover, she insists, is an all-round sensualist. “I am just as interested in describing what a piece of chocolate tastes like as I am in evoking how a great orgasm feels.”