Free La Seduction: How the French Play the Game of Life by Elaine Sciolino Page B

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