Chapter 27

Why French Women Don’t Get Fat

HAILING AS I DO from the monoseasonal Antipodes—where the weather oscillates between mildly warm and stinking hot—living in France was a revelation. For the better part of my childhood and early adult life, I was blissfully unaware that such things as seasons actually existed. Certainly, there were times at school in Sydney when everyone would don long trousers and sport itchy woolen sweaters over their mint-green cotton short-sleeve shirts, but the mercury never dipped much below 68 degrees Fahrenheit. Yet here in Paris, in the upper latitudes of the northern hemisphere, there were suddenly four distinct seasons. Who knew?

Summer in Paris is month after glorious month of languid nights spent sipping Sancerre in outdoor cafés. It’s dramatic sunsets, daylight until eleven p.m., and Rollerblading at midnight in the court of the Louvre. When autumn comes, it transforms the city into a vivid palette of reds, yellows, and oranges. It’s a stroll along the Seine beside cypress trees shimmering yellow, a walk through the Jardin du Luxembourg with the fallen leaves of the plane tree crunching underfoot. Winter, by stark comparison, is one interminably long gray day. Only the occasional flurry of snow or flash of tepid sunshine breaks the cold monotony. Winter is the season that seems to have no end. In the run-up to Christmas and New Year’s the cold and rain and darkness are all a bit of a novelty, but thereafter the remaining winter months are a painful plod under a sky of perpetual gray.

And then, just when one more sunless day is going to send you over the edge, the miracle of spring arrives. Trees that have been skeletal all winter start to sprout leaves. The first daffodils push through the sodden earth like the advance guard of an army of flowers just waiting to bloom in their wake. As the weather warms, girls who have been buried in layers of clothing for months don sundresses. And the silent cue is given for the start of a most remarkable French tradition—the flirting season.

Responding to primal instincts that you only otherwise ever see displayed on the Discovery Channel, the French come out of their winter hibernation in a state of heightened arousal. If you are a woman in Paris, spring marks the start of six months of fending off horny French men, ignoring unsolicited declarations of undying love, and rejecting spontaneous offers of marriage. For French men, spring means tapping your inner caveman and comporting yourself like a dog in heat. To the untrained eye it may look like unsuspecting women are being set upon by a salivating pack of libido-crazed men, but it’s all part of a finely tuned choreography, honed over generations. In fact, contrary to appearances, there’s a wonderful sense of complicity when it comes to flirting in France. Men and women practice it with the same level of gusto. And rather than being the means to any particular end, it is a veritable pastime itself. People in Paris don’t flirt just because they want to end up in bed together. They flirt because it is a vital part of being Parisian. A sensual energy envelops the city in spring, a heady friction fed by countless stolen glances, coquettish smiles, and subtle acknowledgments of mutual attraction.

To make eye contact with a French woman in a bar, on the Métro, or on the street is not to say “I want to shag you senseless.” Rather, it is to say “You have made an effort to look good today, I acknowledge that effort, I find you attractive, I will now entertain naughty thoughts about what you look like naked, have a nice day.” If, for whatever reason, you do end up in bed, that is simply a fringe benefit.

Far from being offended at being checked out on the street, most French women enjoy it. After all, the alternative is to be ignored and unremarkable—a fate too horrible for any French woman to contemplate.

The reason that chairs in outdoor cafés in Paris all face outward is not because the French are too busy pouting to actually talk to each other; it is to facilitate the gentle art of flirting. Flirting can be as simple as holding a woman’s gaze across a crowded room or sending a glass of Champagne to her table with your compliments. It’s engaging her in witty chat or philosophical discussion, complimenting her on her clothes, hair, or eyes. It’s the gentle, accidental brush of two skins, and the frisson it invariably creates.

On trips home to Australia, armed with a new arsenal of European flirting techniques, I was able to chat easily with the ranks of attractive young things who were otherwise standing listlessly in bars, dressed to the nines, desperately trying to compete with the rugby league telecast in the corner. In Australia the closest a male comes to flirting is asking a woman to pass him his schooner of beer.

My Paris sojourn had taught me a great deal about relations between the sexes. Living with French women had been a wonderful experience. More than anything else, it was a joy to live in a city surrounded by them. Always elegant and always stylish, it wasn’t so much what they wore or how they wore it that was appealing, but more the way they carried themselves. Their poise was alluring. It spoke of a deep understanding of what it is to be feminine, and what it takes to catch the eye of the opposite sex. And yet there was still so much about the French woman that I found unfathomable. And apparently I wasn’t the only one.

Several years into my Paris experience, bookstores and bedside tables the world over were heaving under the weight of a nonfiction best-seller titled French Women Don’t Get Fat. Penned by a French matron whose breadth of experience appeared to have been confined to the haughty salons of Paris’s exclusive sixteenth arrondissement—populated as they are by minted dowagers with too much hair spray, too much time on their finely manicured hands, and complexions like preserved fruit—the book purported to account for the mystery as to why there are very few obese women in France. The author advanced all manner of fanciful theories: they never snack, they have three square meals a day, they eat good-quality produce, and—my personal favorite—they don’t rush their food at mealtimes but savor every mouthful. Certainly these theories go some way to accounting for the fact that unlike many of its Western city counterparts, Paris is home to very few obese women (or for that matter men). During my stay in the City of Light, I had certainly seen my fair share of the city’s women and had come to appreciate the effort they made to keep themselves trim.

But rather than attributing this national slimness to particular eating habits or the relative quality of French foodstuffs, my own theory about why French women don’t get fat can be explained in two simple words: nervous energy. More than in any other country in the world, French women are forced to spend their lives in a state of almost permanent angst, worrying about whether their husbands are cheating on them. So ingrained is the concept of infidelity in the French popular consciousness, I used to wonder if it was taught as a mandatory course at school. Watch any French film, examine the lives of any of the country’s public figures, and you will see infidelity celebrated as a national sport. From former presidents to pop stars, heads of companies to market vendors. French men even have a widely used term for the mistress they meet between leaving work and returning home for dinner with the family: the cinq à sept, or “five to seven.” It is even quite common for many richer Lotharios to have secret studio apartments in Paris, bought especially for the purpose of conducting these early evening affairs.

You would also be forgiven for thinking that the French film industry exists solely to eulogize infidelity—and invariably that variation that involves older men copping off with nubile young Lolitas. Predominantly made by men in their fifties, French cinema offers up an endless parade of paunchy Pierres being lustily pursued by pert teens just dying to be ravished by men old enough to be their grandfathers. Midlife crisis, anyone? It’s certainly no accident that Woody Allen films are perennially popular in France.

And so it is, in this pressure-cooker environment, that French women’s waistlines remain stubbornly slim. Never mind three square meals a day. A packet of Marlboro Lights and a couple of Xanax are more like it.

As a direct result, French women, especially those in their mid-to late twenties, can never be close friends. They are either in constant competition to steal one another’s partners or are locked in fierce battles with their sisters to snare an eligible member of the opposite sex. Unlike in Anglo-Saxon cultures, where bands of females can regularly be seen out on the town engaging in such admirable sisterhood activities as whooping it up in a restaurant or drinking themselves into a stupor at a bar, you never see large groups of French women out together. They’re too busy at home plotting to steal their girlfriend’s husband or imagining the affairs being pursued by their partners.

All of which makes for a dream scenario for the average French male. Women on tap, emaciated from the nervous energy required to be a femme française, and constantly struggling to win your affection. On balance, it’s a pretty good deal. Consequently, the French man doesn’t need to try very hard to make himself attractive to the fairer sex. Which could go some way to explaining why most of them are about as sexy as a garden gnome and laid-back to the point of being horizontal. They are awful dressers for whom the height of fashion is a pair of boat shoes and a pastel sweater tied around the neck. And their hair seems to be kept according to the Samson principle of more equals virile.

And it certainly doesn’t help matters that to complement their monopoly on local women, a ready supply of gullible female sex tourists passes through Paris determined to nab themselves a little famed French loving. Susceptibility to a thick French accent and a litany of insincere declarations of love is not, it seems, restricted to one nationality. American, British, Australian—you name it. They come, they hear, they swoon. Perfectly sensible female friends of mine, rational in all other facets of their lives, melt in the face of a few strategically uttered platitudes. “I have never felt this way before” and “you are the most beautiful woman I have ever seen” might sound to most rational mortals like the cheesiest lines ever invented. But deliver them in a French accent, with bad breath, wearing a shockingly awful outfit, and standing five-foot nothing—and you are guaranteed to get lucky.

Perhaps unsurpisingly, relations between the sexes in France border on the Neanderthal. You would be hard-pressed to find a French man who believed he could be “just friends” with a woman without at some point wanting to jump her bones.

 

SO IF THE FRENCH WOMAN appears always distant, aloof, and mysterious, it’s because she believes the only way to keep a man interested is to create—and doggedly maintain—a sense of mystery. Working on the principle that men want only what they cannot have, French women work hard to keep their men constantly guessing—eternally on edge, always off-kilter, forever on their toes. All of which makes for a minefield for the expatriate who innocently decides to delve into the French dating world.

On the few occasions when I decided to throw caution to the wind and “go French,” I stumbled at the first hurdle, confounded by a set of rules I didn’t know and confused by behavior I didn’t recognize.

Asking a French woman out on a simple date was an exercise in strategic mind games. Any initial overture from me, whether it was an invitation to dinner or a suggestion of a Sunday stroll in the park, would be met by a carefully cultivated coolness on her part. If finally she relented and deigned to let me take her for dinner, I would invariably find myself seated opposite a shadow of the vibrant, interesting woman who had initially caught my eye. All monosyllabic responses and moodiness, it made for an excruciating couple of hours.

My experience with Angélique had taught me that when it came to French women, no often meant maybe, yes could mean no, and maybe sometimes meant yes—and there was no way of telling which was which. And thanks largely to this sliding scale of consent, perfected by French women over generations and practiced to widespread effect, the male of the French species is invariably left disoriented, uncertain, and very, very tetchy.

As far as I could fathom, French dating lore required the man to doggedly pursue the woman, no matter how many knock-backs and obstacles were thrown his way. Not to do so indicated a lack of proper intent—and, in my case at least, complete ignorance of the established rituals of Gallic male-female interaction refined over thousands of years. It certainly went some way to explaining an experience I had had, post Angélique, when I foolishly decided to dip my toe back into the French dating world and invited a lovely young French woman out on a dinner date.

While I tap-danced my way through the three courses of one-sided conversation, she sat there silently, appearing bored and smothering any chance of real human interaction with her studied aloofness. Yes, it is entirely possible she simply wasn’t interested in me, but why come out on the date in the first place? And why subsequently tell a mutual friend that she was mystified when I never called her again?

Later, I would reflect on the confused fumblings that passed for my repeated attempts at dating the locals and wonder if I shouldn’t have played them at their own game. Would it really have killed me to undertake a bit of role-playing, profess undying love for women I barely knew, and then prove that love by submitting myself to a series of humiliating putdowns and faux rejections? I decided that yes, it most definitely would have killed me. And I was determined not to do it. It would have felt contrived. Basic dignity dictated that there were depths to which I refused to sink to take a lover. A simple reluctance to profess sentiments I did not possess did not, in my eyes, make me unromantic, but rather honest and practical—surely two more enduring traits in a potential partner.

Nope. The French could keep their complicated courting customs. That it appeared to work for them was great, but I needed something simpler, more straightforward. In short, I needed the comfort of something familiar. But where to find it?