Free French Toast by Harriet Welty Rochefort

Frenchmen are not afraid of body contact. It’s not unusual to see grown men giving each other kisses and bear hugs. They’re not afraid to go into a lingerie shop and choose underwear for their partner. (You can see them in the shops, earnestly studying the different colors and shapes.) An Englishman who wanted to get a pretty slip or bra for his wife said he finally couldn’t bring himself to do it because his sister, who ran a lingerie shop in England, had confided to him that the men who came in the boutique to look at the underwear were trying it on for themselves! He ended up buying his wife a painting.
    What about the myth of the French lover? One American woman who lived with a Frenchman for twelve years puts it bluntly: “The French don’t wash enough to be sexy. For me,” she explains, “cleanliness is next to sexiness. Americans like to take a shower before they get started and the French just like to dive into it without having had a shower in three days.” This, of course, is a generalization, and I’ve heard stories of very clean (by American standards) Frenchmen. But it is perhapstrue to say that for a Frenchman, squeaky-clean leaves nothing much to desire. Not for himself, nor for his mistress. Wasn’t it Napoléon who on his way back from battle wrote to Josephine, “Don’t wash; I’m on my way”?
    â€œI think Frenchmen are much more charming and gentlemanly,” a young American who is engaged to a Frenchman told me. “On the other hand, since they are more gentlemanly, they want you to be more womanly. And that’s hard. You can be a knockout California girl in a T-shirt and jeans, but in general that won’t be enough. They notice everything. In a way, it’s nice, and in another way, it’s scrutinizing and an extra pressure on the woman.” And she added, “Another big difference here is that everything is out in the open. Sex magazines are right out on the shelves and the men leaf through them and buy them without sneaking around about it. In the States, if a guy is looking at one of those magazines, it means he’s got some hang-up. His interest is not natural or shared. It is much more suppressed.”
    As far as intimacy is concerned, another American woman married to a Frenchman told me that in her opinion Frenchmen are “better at intimacy and not embarrassed about sex; it’s not a hang-up for them. When they experiment with sex, it’s because they want to try something new, but not at all in a prurient way.”
    On the other hand, one American woman told me, “Frenchmen have enormous egos. For example, if theywant to take you to bed and you don’t want to go right away and are thinking it over, they make you feel like you are abnormal, or unnatural. That way, the burden is all on you and they retain their ego.”
    Another opinion about Frenchmen comes from an American therapist who works with French-American couples. “Frenchmen tend to build walls around themselves,” she says. “They try not to let people know what they are really like. It is difficult for them to question themselves, because of their upbringing, so they are constantly on the defensive. I feel that it is very threatening for them not to be like other people, even though they can be iconoclastic in intellectual arguments. But as for the rest, their humor evaporates the moment you swing from the norm. They are very self-protective.” She says that when she works with Frenchmen in a therapy situation, she is careful to show them that she respects this “self-defense.” Her words clearly come from close observation. Can anyone imagine a group of Frenchmen in one of those male-bonding groups that have cropped up in the States? No way. Touchy-feely hasn’t hit the French male yet.
    In spite of their sometimes monstrous egos and their “self-protection,” Frenchmen often entice foreign