The Secret Life of France by Lucy Wadham Read Free Book Online Page A

them from male resentment. † It may be that it was simply England’s mercantile culture that shaped the special blend of chumminess and competition that seems to characterisemale–female relations in Britain and America. For feminism, when it came, sat far better in our two Protestant cultures than it ever could in France’s Catholic one.
    The cross-gender tension that permeates both British and American society is not easy to describe, precisely because it is everywhere. In England, at least, I can feel it at dinner parties, on the radio, on the street. An unspoken agenda seems to exist between men and women in Anglo-Saxon Protestant societies that produces a certain carefulness in men – or else an irritating defiance – and in women, a kind of guardedness, brittleness, even a sanctimoniousness. I have noticed that the tension is often camouflaged by that chumminess, which is not only unsexy but also slightly disingenuous. I’m not suggesting that men and women hate each other in Britain or America any more or less than they do in France, only that there is a lack of ease in their relations that is the direct result of having tried – and to some degree succeeded – in extending the rules of our contractual, mercantile society to the sexual playing field. In our otherwise laudable quest for transparency, we have managed to sabotage one of the greatest pleasures of life: the experience of enjoying being a woman in the company of a man or a man in the company of a woman. In Britain and America this pleasure has become shot through with a whole new kind of post-feministguilt, and no one, it seems – neither man nor woman – is entirely free of it.
    I’m also struck by the frequency with which public and private discourse in both Britain and America returns to the issue of gender, like an itch that has to be scratched. At least as a concept, to be endlessly discussed and scrutinised, gender doesn’t really exist in France. Indeed, the French word genre , meaning gender, is a purely grammatical or literary term. (It is, I think, significant that if you want to talk in French about gender politics you have to use the words ‘man’ and ‘woman’: les relations hommes–femmes .)
    Even though Simone de Beauvoir inaugurated a flourishing and highly intellectual feminist tradition in France, and even though many of the mothers of feminist theory are of French nationality or culture (Luce Irigaray, Hélène Cixous, Julia Kristeva ‡ ), anyone wishing to take a course in Women’s Studies would probably have to do so outside of France, as it exists in only one, small department of one university. In France, the representation of women in society can be studied as part of a course in literature or philosophy or history or psychoanalysis or sociology, but it cannot be cut off from a wider cultural and intellectual context. Although French intellectuals, men and women, were among the first to scrutinise cultural representations of gender, the practice of decoding the myriad powerstruggles that exist between men and women has not become the national pastime that it is in Britain. The French are too romantic for that, even the most seemingly hard-nosed of them. Perhaps the fixation with gender politics is simply puritan Britain’s way of taking the sex out of sexuality.
    I am convinced that the reason I notice this low-level hostility in Britain is because I do not encounter it in the place where I live. In France, the war between the sexes simply never got off the ground. Somehow, social evolution has brought about changes to the status of women without ever giving men the impression that they were losing something in the process. French women also happen to be very attached to the particular privileges that have always gone with being a woman – privileges the Catholic Church cleverly conferred upon them over the centuries in exchange for their submission. While they are just as eager to secure their social and