Debra Ollivier

All things being equal, the common ground here is an almost
libidinous pleasure in food. Could this pleasure principle, this unbridled
enjoyment in guilt-free, often ritual-bound eating, contribute to overall
health? American supermarkets are filled with fat-free, sugar-free, salt-free, cholesterol-free products, but we top the scales in obesity. We live in a land of breathtaking abundance, but we corner the market on eating disorders. Like an insatiable teenager, America stalks the refrigerators and check-out stands of the nation to satisfy a rapacious appetite. Europe leans back on its vintage sofa with cognac in hand, shaking its head in weary disbelief. In the end, good balanced health may all boil down to living and eating with what Diane Ackerman, in her book “A Natural History of the Senses” called “sensuous zest.”

In America, sensuous zest has been eaten away by worry. What’s good for
you one day is bad the next. Like the garrulous American who tells you his life story at a bus stop, the entire country seems to wear its chronic food and health pathologies — its clogged heart, its guilty bingeing — on its
shirtsleeves. Even Bob Dole smiles wryly at us from a Pfizer ad, talking
about his erectile dysfunction.

This type of public purging is both baffling and unthinkable in
Europe, where the relationship between eating and pleasure, including the
relationship between food and sex that goes back to orgiastic Roman dining, is deeply bound up in social mores.

All this, of course, is not to suggest that the French are the
picture of perfect health. They smoke too much. The few gyms that exist
have a theatrical or desultory air about them, and big spaces for athletic
activities, at least in Paris, are almost nonexistent. Their socialized
healthcare system grants women stunning maternity benefits and provides
low-cost medical check-ups for all, but it also is partly responsible for
creating the most avid consumers of pharmaceutical products in the world.

And the consumption of American-style fast, frozen and junk food is slowly changing the landscape here. But by and large the French in particular and Europeans in general enjoy a level of overall health that is free of fear and rooted not only in deep sensual pleasure, but also in a sense of common sense — something that, in the jungle of diet divas and “techno” foods, has
completely escaped Americans.

What’s “bad” in America is not only “good” in Europe, it’s usually a basic,
fundamental staple in the overall European diet, a part of the joie de
vivre that’s been the bedrock of Latin culture for centuries. Consider, for
example, what the Italian response might be to Dr. Barry Sears’ hugely popular
book “The Zone.” “BASTA WITH PASTA” the book jacket screams. “WARNING: EATING THESE CARBOHYDRATES COULD BE DANGEROUS TO YOUR HEALTH.” The blacklist that follows includes bananas, cranberries, apple juice, carrots and rice — foods whose virtues (Fiber! Potassium! Beta carotene!) have been vigorously endorsed by nutrition experts and health organizations worldwide. Curiously, while denouncing the humble carrot stick, Sears promotes snacking on instant corn muffin mix and ice
cream, and his obdurate claims underscore an almost burlesque relationship
to food: “Food may be the most powerful drug you will ever come in contact
with,” the book warns and (my personal favorite), “You can burn more fat
watching TV than exercising.” Follow “The Zone’s” advice and you’ll even
“reset your genetic code.”

Reset your genetic code? Most of us can’t even reset the timer on
our VCRs. With books like “The Zone” coming out every year, each one
contradicting the other and selling by the millions, and with diet doctors
gnawing on the excrescence of our ever-expanding insecurities and our
imperfect bodies, it’s no small wonder that for many Americans eating has
been entirely robbed of both pleasure and common sense. The stressful
mental workout required to “stay healthy” has become unhealthy, and it
is often an act of sheer courage to surrender to lascivious cravings for,
say, steamy artichokes stuffed with chopped sausage and bacon or an
oven-baked profiterole au chocolat.

In the land of plenty many are starving for a raw, more sensual experience of pleasure in food, which may explain why eating features so prominently in the Anglo-Saxon experience overseas. In his book “Toujours Provence,” Peter Mayle asks us: “It is impossible to live in France for any length of time and stay immune from the national enthusiasm for food, and who would want to? Why not make a daily pleasure out of a daily necessity?”

The journalist A.J. Liebling put it differently in his book “Between Meals”:
“If I had compared my life to a cake, the sojourns in Paris would have
presented the chocolate filling. The intervening layers were plain sponge.”
Indeed, nowhere has a culture of epicurism reached such celestial
heights as in France, where for centuries cuisine has bequeathed itself to
successive generations and defined an entire civilization, from its rural
heartland to its haute bourgeoisie. France may no longer be an empire, but
its food has survived war, famine and colonial ruin. Louis XVI and
Napoleon III invented, respectively, the foie gras and the camembert that
remain to this day subjects of almost rhapsodic enjoyment.

One might imagine where 20th century literature would be without Proust’s high-fat, butter-rich madeleine. Then again, Liebling lamented Proust’s prosaic “tea biscuit” and posited: “In light of what Proust wrote with so mild a stimulus, it is the world’s loss that he did not have a heartier appetite. On a dozen Gardiners Island oysters, a bowl of clam chowder, a peck of steamers, some bay scallops, three sautied soft-shelled crabs, a few ears of fresh-picked corn, a thin swordfish steak of generous area, a pair of lobsters, and a Long Island duck, he might have written a masterpiece.”

When in the lands of pasta and pbti we Americans are compelled to
enter the dolce vita, to experience, sometimes for the first time, what Ackerman refers to as the “textures” of life. “We need to return to feeling the textures of life,” she says. “Much of our experience in 20th century America is an effort to get away from those textures, to fade into a stark … puritanical, all-business routine that doesn’t have anything so unseemly as sensuous zest.”

Sensuous zest, in this context, does not come in a can. It is not
sugar-free. It is sometimes positively intoxicating. And it is rarely
to go. For Americans, it often means learning to appreciate (or, in some
cases, discover) the taste of the real over the artificial. And it
invariably means learning how to eat slowly and to savor. The American
way of putting everything on one plate and eating simultaneously is
overkill in France. Each food is eaten separately, and slowly.

I admit I’m still struggling in this department. “Are you late for a plane?” my
French husband asks when I eat. “Slow down,” he intones. And I do. Today, after almost eight years of French living, the doors to my gastronomic perception have definitely swung wide open, if not been entirely unhinged. I have learned (but not mastered) the art of savoring meals with a certain
singular gourmandise and acuity. I have overcome certain cultural
prejudices and indulged in butter-drenched, garlic-roasted frog legs or
pesto-stuffed snails, pulling out the little wormlike sod-dwellers with
almost exasperating precision using a tiny silver escargot fork.

I have rediscovered familiar foods, their tastes and smells. Even my
relationship to the simple and exquisitely versatile tomato has changed. In
American supermarkets I am as deeply suspicious of the pristine, queerly
odorless, genetically-altered fruit as I am of the one picked, unripe and
immature, for our perennial and seasonless sating. In fact, the first
fresh-picked, farm-grown French tomato I ever ate was an ugly, misshapen
fruit, but its smell alone (not to mention its taste) was so intense it was
almost sentient, and it took me back to summer days spent in the rich, pungent soil of Trinity County nearly 30 years ago. “Smell,” said Helen Keller, “transports us across thousands of miles and all the years we have lived.”

Many of us have literally forgotten how to listen to our gut
feelings, and the road from our stomachs to our heads is a rocky one
reeling in the “revolutions” of free market fads and special interests. It
takes hundreds of reports, from the likes of the Food and Agriculture
Organization of the United Nations, the World Health Organization and the
Life Sciences Institute, to confirm for Americans what Europeans have known for centuries. We’re talking shamefully basic common sense: A daily glass of wine is actually good for you (and even OK when you’re pregnant). Natural fresh foods are better than processed foods. Carbohydrates don’t make you fat; overeating them does. So does snacking. Everything is OK in
moderation.

All this implies that there are limits to things, and limits, like taxes or
unprocessed cheese, are something most Americans are very uncomfortable
with. Choice is our birthright. We’d rather have, say, 20 varieties of
all-you-can-eat, nonfat, sugar-free, dairy-free ice cream and eat it
whenever we want, than the thick, creamy, luscious real thing for one
after-dinner pleasure.

“You Americans are too busy making a living to have a life,” a French
friend of mine once said. Gene Ford, author of “The French Paradox,”
laid out a different perspective: “Despite all our billions spent on
health care, and the sweat and self denial, and the bland health food
diets, we still die younger. And some would say that at the end of this
journey, we didn’t enjoy the scenery nearly as much as the average French
peasant.”

In other words, for those of us who choose to keep pumping the proverbial
treadmill, it may be too late to live with sensuous zest by the time we end up, lean and mean, on our deathbed. Then again, maybe not.

As Oliver Wendall Holmes once said, “Good Americans, when they die, go to
Paris.”

Here’s the deal about Kate Harding’s Broadsheet post and slap at my book “What French Women Know: About Love, Sex, and Other Matters of the Heart and Mind.” She clearly didn’t read my book. If she had, she might have reversed the question that concludes her piece. The sincere question is not why American women are buying so much “merde” about Frenchwomen, but why are they buying so much “merde” thrown at them by the American media, by women’s magazines, by hackers of packaged beauty who peddle the notion that we should all look the same (or that there’s Something Terribly Wrong with Us). The real question is why American women buy so much “merde” thrown at them by love gurus and moral pontificators like Dr. Phil. The more interesting question is why are we so obsessively goal-oriented and less experience-driven? Or why do we buy the “merde” about Frenchwomen not getting fat? (They do get fat, and those that don’t get fat stay slim because there’s a tremendous, mean-spirited, anti-fat bias in France, not to mention tremendous social pressure to stay thin, which might have surprised Harding had she actually read my book.)

Why is critiquing or comparing/contrasting cultures always perceived by Americans as taking “pot shots” or focusing on “damaging stereotypes”? Guess what? There are damaging cultural messages hard-wired into American brains that need to be challenged, and often the best way to challenge them is to step out of the very culture that nurtures them. Yes, as Harding herself suggests, “it can be fascinating, educational and humbling to explore the real differences between cultures.” Read the book, then rant. 

During those early French days I’d visit Los Angeles and marvel at the army of Latina nannies tending to this white-collar oasis: the Guatemalan with her long braid pushing a Dylan or an Ashley in an ergonomic stroller. The Salvadoran doing laundry; bringing order and shiny surfaces to the chaos of the patrona’s world. I was reminded of a peculiar antebellum era of landed gentry. Comfortably rooted in a French system that instead of paying lip service to family values actually underwrote them, it was easy for me to scoff at mothers who toted their nannies around like accessories. And then a curious thing happened: Shortly after my second child was born I inherited a house in California, moved back to the States, and became, for all intents and purposes, one of those mothers. Full disclosure: I grew up in Los Angeles with two latchkey siblings, a single working mother, and a live-in Mexican woman named Maria. But Maria was as much a “nanny” as she was Mary Poppins. Back then she was called a housekeeper. The only difference I could note in the decades since Maria was in our life is that the nanny has become a more pervasive fixture among American families. Even the at-home mom seems to need her these days, not necessarily to spend more time with her kids but, ironically, to spend more precious time away from them. As we outsource the chaos that comes with children, the nanny provides priceless relief, filling in the gaps cleaved out not only by our own parenting anxieties, but also by the black holes created where our public institutions have failed us.

These observations hit me with a particular vengeance when we moved into our house in a quiet suburban neighborhood. I found myself with a two-income family, a husband who worked overseas, and a paucity of child-care options, each as problematic as the next. Barely settled back in the States, with the social benefits of France far behind me, I realized that I needed, quite simply, a nanny.

But where to begin? I could transform a spare bedroom into a new living space, with cable TV and five Hispanic channels (TelemundoLA, Alegria y Movimiento) but I was still clueless: How much should you pay your nanny? What about vacation time? Or sick days? Does she eat dinner with the family every night? What constitutes a full working day? When does it begin? Or end? No clear-cut answers emerged — just a vast gray zone of conflicting views capped on one end by the mother who earnestly tried to bring the nanny into the family dynamic and, on the other end, by the mother who operated from a position of distrust. “Nannies talk among themselves,” said one neighbor. “If you pay more, you set a precedent. Word gets out. Then we all have to defend our pay scales. Start low, cut your losses. Those are the unspoken rules of the game.” Of course the rules of the game were not only unspoken; they also seemed largely unwritten. Because despite various books on the subject, no one seemed to have read the literature. In this frontier of domestic help there appeared to be no ultimate constitution, no code of ethics. It was every woman for herself. Which might explain why what seemed antebellum from the outside, suddenly seemed more Wild West from the inside.

I decided to accord my future nanny the rights she’d have if the politics of exile weren’t working against her: Two weeks of vacation time, sick days, national holidays, and a Christmas bonus. It was wildly extravagant for us, but somehow the idea of striking a bargain with someone who would care for the most precious beings in my life seemed base to the point of repugnancy. Equally pressing was the notion that a well-paid nanny is a happy nanny — one who, presumably, will pass that happiness on to my children. I had only to put out a quick word. Within days, countless job-seeking Latina women were at my disposal. I met Marta and, one week later, she moved in with her blue gym bag and her Libro Catolico de Oraciones.

Marta’s first day: My kids clamored to the door to meet this person who would become a new presence in our lives. We’d already looked on a map, found the tiny slice of land tucked under Mexico called Belize. “Can you get there on a spaceship?” my son asked. When the bell rang we opened the door, and there was Marta: short dark hair, pink sweater, faded jeans. She stepped forward and opened her arms with a slightly awkward air. My kids stood close to me, a bit wary at first. There was a moment of curious anticipation — a breath held, a second of mutual scrutiny. Then, slowly, with all their big-hearted innocence, my children walked into Martas arms.

I showed Marta around the house, tried to elaborate on her duties. It was a colossal process in part because I hadn’t even articulated them myself. Where some mothers are consummate masters of their domestic universe, others, like myself, are bushwhackers living in a forest with a life of its own. So what kind of expectations to set up here? How many times should she vacuum the floor or clean out the fridge? But as Marta followed me through the wilderness of our home, it was the psychological landscape that loomed larger, the inarticulated world of this communal space we now shared. Because while I hadn’t decided how much Pine-Sol to use (in large measure because I simply didn’t care), I also hadn’t defined in explicit fashion the rules of parenting. Aside from a few basics, when it came to raising my kids I still vacillated between the more straightforward French approach and the onslaught of parenting dogma that assailed the American parent. So where, in this vast playing field, would my parenting end and hers pick up? Life together began with a tentative play at pretending that this forced intimacy was natural. Are we roommates? Family members? Employee/employer?

When my son Max began kindergarten, Marta lavished her attention on my daughter, Celeste, doing things I’d never had the time or skill to do: She spent fifteen minutes working Celeste’s hair into complex braids or multitiered ponytails that stayed remarkably in place. She sorted through piles of clothes to find things that were frilly and feminine. “Why do you dress her like a boy?” she asked when I’d throw a generic T-shirt on Celeste. “You must dress her pretty.” Every morning, as I bid farewell to my well-dressed, well-coiffed daughter, I was a mother divided: part of me had already mentally departed, my mind focused on the pressures and distractions of my job. Meanwhile, Marta seemed unfettered in this way. She was free to focus all of her energies exclusively on my daughter, because my daughter was her job. I tried to ignore a certain inchoate emotion that I couldn’t quite place. It was a vague emotion, fuzzy but not warm. Later I would realize: that emotion was jealousy.

In this sisterhood of mothers with nannies that I had unwittingly joined, mutual grievances were shared and a sort of homespun, do-it-yourself legislation was constantly in flux. “Why should I pay my nanny when I go on vacation?” asked one. “My nanny needs back surgery and has no health insurance. What happens if I don’t pay for it?” asked another. Among the talk, one horror story inevitably emerged that set off a tsunami of paranoia. A child drowned in a pool while his nanny looked on. It was her fault because, as one woman put it, “the nanny didn’t know how to swim.” I found out that Marta didn’t know how to swim either and, wondering what else she might not know how to do, I immediately enrolled her in a Spanish CPR course. It was an ironic gesture because I’d never taken one myself, and God forbid I should have to, say, perform the Heimlich maneuver. But Marta was now spending more time with my daughter than I did (a sobering reality), so what if Celeste plummeted down a cliff? Or got burned? Or needed mouth-to-mouth?

However, CPR was the least of my worries. Because while a surface wound could always be dressed — a skinned knee, a broken bone — an emotional one lasts forever. And it was here that the NannyCam asserted itself — that wireless hidden camera with 2.4-Ghz video transmitter and receiver stuffed inside a fluffy teddy bear. Never mind the suspicions that a nanny might steal, lift, or somehow lick the frosting off our hard-won cakes. “I caught my nanny screaming at Cindy. I fired her on the spot and got a NannyCam,” said a neighbor. “What’s more important, your nanny’s privacy or your child’s well-being?” Familiar prime-time horror stories of abuse and abductions floated in the ether here. But when does simple discipline — a stern voice, a time-out — turn into actual abuse? (In France, a little slap on the rump will raise eyebrows only if those brows belong to Americans.) And what mother left to care for toddlers and clean house for eight hours a day (or more) wouldn’t scream from time to time, let alone pull her own hair out?

Oblivious to the irony, we shuttle to parenting workshops to figure it all out while the nanny stays home with the kids. And perched in a crib there is the NannyCam, a mechanical eye patrolling a static corner of the nanny’s world. Meanwhile, the nannies get the big picture of our lives. Marta, who’d joined a sisterhood of her own in our neighborhood, came home with stories from the front: tales from the nanny who worked in the messy “piggy house.” There were the hair-raising fights, the piles of dirty underwear, an unlocked gun found in a dresser. I was intrigued by the dirty little world behind the closed doors in this preternaturally calm suburb where we lived. And then I wondered: what does Marta tell other nannies about us?

But what unsettled me most was not that Marta was witness to the private inner life of our home — it was the growing intimacy that she shared with my daughter. One night I returned late and tiptoed into my daughter’s room, where a mobile of bright fish slowly turned. But when I pulled down the sheet for a silent good-night kiss, there was Marta, her face nestled against my daughter’s as they curled into one another, both asleep. Though I’d fallen asleep countless times putting Celeste to bed, I was vexed by the image. For Marta and Celeste were clearly a duo now, partaking in their daily routine — moments of joy and disgruntlement, the stuff of life. Here was a web of emotional exchanges that the NannyCam could not pick up: invisible bonds that for many mothers are the hidden source of deeply charged and complex emotions. For to see these growing bonds between nanny and child is to experience the silent confirmation that a mother’s role has potentially been usurped: her role as the child’s one and only mother, the one who should be tucking the kids into bed at night, the one who should be doing the disciplining. Perhaps that’s why the nanny exercising normal discipline becomes unacceptable to a mother.

I had implicitly asked Marta to love my child as she would love her own. And she rose to the task with an almost swooning attachment to my daughter. So why shouldn’t my daughter love her back? Let her exercise her own heart muscle, I thought. Let her learn to spread her love around. Still, there was lingering discomfort. Possessive mother, guilty conscience. I roused Marta awake. “Sorry, Marta. It’s late.” She woke, bleary eyed, and shuffled into her room.

By now Marta was fully entrenched in our lives. I’d grown used to the luxuries of a nanny as well: the conflagration of messes that were instantly cleaned up, the beds made, countless gestures and chores that I was spared, that would have weighed me down immeasurably. One day, nearly a year into her job, I stumbled on a photo of Marta from her early days and was shocked to see how much younger she looked. She had clearly aged while taking care of my kids — new lines on her face that were meant for my face, the toll of this life. Meanwhile, we continued to live together, waking up and falling asleep at the same hour.

Every night after her bath, Marta spoke with her husband, whom she saw on weekends. She sometimes talked for hours, and I wondered what on earth she could possibly have to say after a long, repetitious day of caretaking. And then I’d feel shame. Because, of course, beyond the walls of my home, this woman had a life. They all had lives. Like kids who are surprised to discover their teachers outside the classroom (“What are you doing here?” my son asked when we bumped into his kindergarten teacher at a supermarket one day), we’re surprised to see our nannies in their own personal habitat. In fact, we rarely do. But my daughter was now supremely interested in doing so. “Can I go to Marta’s apartment?” she asked. “Please?” I am loath to admit that my first response was conflicted. If I let my daughter spend time with Marta at her home on weekends, would I shift the emotional barometer in Marta’s favor, give her too much power, too much latitude? But the implications of not letting Celeste see Marta’s world were just as inglorious: my daughter, growing up in a lily-white world, with private patrol cars, suburban values, and no clue as to how the “other half” lives.

“Mommy, Marta lives far away,” my daughter said. “She lives very, very, very far away.” This was true. I had dropped Marta off at her place on weekends but had never met her entire family. On her dresser in our home the faces of her two children were framed: her son standing in a colorful but shabby living room, her daughter in a blue satin dress posing for her Sweet Sixteen. They were both being brought up by sisters or aunts thousands of miles away, and Marta had not seen them in six years. I could not imagine the economic hardships that had compelled her to leave them, never mind the emotional ones she now had to shoulder. I probed only tentatively, protected by our language barrier, because I was certain that the truth would be too painful.

Could I blame her if there was a transference of love from her children to mine? For she had become like a second mother to Celeste, responded to her with effusive affection, indulged her with candies and tortillas despite my protestations. “It is good when little girls become gordita,” she said. But I didn’t want my daughter to become a little fatty. I was aware of a contemptible sentiment, but there it was: I adored Marta for her effusive love, but I was wary of our worlds overlapping.

“Can I go to Marta’s house? Can I?” my daughter continued to ask. “One day,” I said. But one day we traveled to a different place. It was the dinner hour, and Celeste was having a tantrum, with all the fiery histrionics of a two-year-old on a rampage. She threw her food across the kitchen. I spoke to her in a sharp voice; Mommy was clearly not happy. She ran out of the kitchen and headed for Marta’s room. Before I could grab her, Marta had scooped her up. “Chickie-tita,” she said. “Mama-linda.” She stroked her hair. “What is wrong with my baby?” Celeste hung onto Marta with a defiant look as if to say, Come and get me. And that is precisely what I did. “Marta,” I said. “Give Celeste to me.” Celeste wrapped her legs harder around Marta, then strained past her at the lure of the TV. Marta held Celeste and did not move. “Marta,” I repeated. “Give me Celeste.” And in that fleeting moment Marta did the one thing she should never have done: She did not give my child back to me.

And so we were finally at this place: a pinnacle where the slippery slope of love and power divided us, the ground zero of our true distrust and suspicion. All of the sociocultural complexities behind our relationship fell away, and what was left was a weighted sense of loss and displaced motherhood. I had implicitly asked Marta to love my child like her own but never to cross that invisible line. But she did. Could I reproach her for that as well? Later we spoke at length and found a truce, but something had definitively shifted. There was distrust on both sides now: not only mine of Marta, but Marta’s of me. For what mother makes her child cry like that? Perhaps, underneath it all, there was also the unconscious questioning of our mutual predicament, in all its cruel and relentless irony. For what mother lets her children be raised by other people? And the answer is: mothers just like us.

The ensuing days were strained. I felt like I’d ripped out a little piece of Marta’s heart, and this sadness moved me to do something I’m loath to admit: One day I went into her room and rummaged through her affairs. Why was I here? Was I trying to understand Marta in some way? Or get closer to her? There was her faded blue purse. A half-used tube of Ben-Gay (a reminder that caretaking is backbreaking work). I pulled open the drawer of her bedside table, and there was her Libro Catolico de Oraciones. I don’t read Spanish well, but I got the drift: the prayers, the yearning for salvation and God-like intervention. I imagined Marta at night, exhausted after a long day cleaning house and watching Celeste. With her Bible and her Ben-Gay, she was praying for a better life.

I didn’t know if she would get this better life. But inevitably the time came: Celeste was rapidly approaching preschool age and soon, I would no longer need Marta’s services. I dreaded the moment, for I’d grown to care deeply for this woman — even the confrontations and the strain had become a source of connection between us. But now there was the queer sensation that she was already fading into memory even as she stood in front of me; that she was already moving into that oneiric place where all Martas and Marias and Anas went — dark-skinned women and mothers who shepherd our children through some of the most pristine moments of their lives. I had my own memory of our housekeeper, Maria — a strange but faded confluence of images from the sixties: there was Gilligan’s Island, Black Panthers, flower power … and Maria, ironing, chasing us through a messy house. What would happen to Marta? What would Celeste remember of her as she slowly dissipated from the urgency of the moment?

Six months after she stopped working for us as a live-in nanny, Marta still comes by to clean our house. When she crosses paths with Celeste en route to preschool they are overjoyed to see each other. Paradoxically, a new closeness has developed between the two of us in the absence of our live-in relationship, with all its emotional gray zones. Marta has still not found a new full-time job and she worries. She needs the money: Her son in Belize has health problems. Her daughter, who was accepted to medical school in Juarez, is pregnant. Now Marta wonders — and the irony does not escape her: Who will take care of my daughter’s child? Marta sighed. “It’s a lot of work.” “Yes,” I said, “but at least you know exactly what you’re getting yourself into.” She smiled as if it were consolation, though we both knew that it was not.

Excerpted from “Because I Said So: 33 Mothers Write About Children, Sex, Men, Aging, Faith, Race & Themselves,” edited by Kate Moses and Camille Peri, former editors of Salon’s Mothers Who Think. Copyright (c) 2005 by HarperCollins. Published by arrangement with HarperCollins Publishers.

“I feel sorry for American women,” she says over the phone. Natalie is in Paris; I’m in Los Angeles. We’re talking on the phone about love, lust, girlhood, womanhood. Somehow we touch on Greenwald’s new book, which exhorts women to use the same marketing techniques to find a mate as they would to, say, launch a new brand of tennis shoes. “You, the reader, are the ‘product,’” Greenwald writes.

I hear Natalie sigh over 6,000 miles of fiber optic cable. “Only in America could you get away with this type of lunacy. There is so much pressure on American women to be happy. To sweep away all traces of loneliness, to forget who you are in your search for a lover or a spouse. In France young girls learn that happiness is elusive; we learn that happiness is less important than passion.”

Natalie’s comments remind me of a salient little metaphor: As girls we Americans sit in our field of daisies and pull off petals with, “He loves me, he loves me not, he loves me, he loves me not.” Meanwhile French girls sit in their meadows with their marguerites and pull off petals with: “He loves me a little. A lot. Passionately. Madly. Not at all.” Why does the little French girl innately think in nuances and increasing levels of passion while we’re mired in the black-and-white of total love or utter rejection?

According to Christophe, a French journalist with a seriously lush history of romance on both sides of the Atlantic: “Everything in your culture is defined like a contract, even the business of love. That’s precisely the opposite in France. I’ve dated French women for months before I ever really knew who they were or what they wanted from me. After the first or second date, the American woman wants everything spelled out: ‘Are we dating? Are you my boyfriend or just a friend?’ A French woman doesn’t do that. She doesn’t give much away. She’s comfortable letting things evolve naturally, but the ball’s almost always in her court.”

Natalie concurs with this assessment. “There is a culture in France of the ‘non-dit,’ the not-spoken. What you don’t say in France is as important as what is said. There are boundaries in language that create tensions. Even sexual tensions. The simple act of saying “tu” or “vous” is a boundary that invites intimacy or precludes it. We learn that we have more power when we keep things to ourselves than when we give things away. We learn that the art of seduction is based on innuendo and silences.”

Innuendo and silences? This sort of quiet, coded game of love is entirely baffling to us buffoonishly direct Anglos, and it’s partly what’s kept French women in the sexiness hall of fame for centuries. Never mind haute couture or racy lingerie. French women are a bundle of alluring contradictions that seem to perfectly coexist, like the unlikely mélange of sweet and sour. They’re often annoyingly coy and darkly wanton. Many of them are not great beauties and yet are gorgeously compelling in the way they reconcile their imperfections. They tend to be more concerned with experiencing pleasure than with being liked and far more passionate about having a life than making a living. (Multitasking does not rank high on their list of positive attributes in a woman.) Plus they all seem able to walk gracefully in high heels on cobblestones the size of grapefruits. Talk about poise.

This amalgam of qualities has given French femmes a singular sophistication that makes the dictates of Rachel Greenwald seem almost bizarrely childlike. In her classic “The French and Their Ways,” Edith Wharton had already singled out this sophistication back in 1919. The French woman “is in nearly all respects, as different as possible from the average American woman,” Wharton wrote. “Is it because she dresses better, or knows more about cooking, or is more ‘coquettish,’ or more ‘feminine,’ or more emotional, or more ‘immoral’? The real reason is not nearly as flattering to our national vanity. It is simply that the French woman is more grown-up. [Wharton's italics.] Compared with the women of France the average American woman is still in kindergarten.”

Excusez-moi: Did you say kindergarten? I suppose if Wharton were comparing French and American women over the long course of history, then we Americans would be the innocent toddlers. When I was a girl I used to marvel at French women in history books precisely for this reason. They led armies of querulous men. They were burned at stakes. They got their heads chopped off for being petulant little queens. They were sexy and bellicose and bare-breasted. Even the symbol of the French Republic, the fair-haired Marianne, stormed Paris with (if we take Delacroix’s depiction of her as our reference) her impudent and perfectly pulpy breasts exposed. French girls grow up with this legacy of women who were utterly feminine and totally kick-ass; a legacy of bare breasts, revolutions, royal courts, sex, death, blood, guts and great hair. Meanwhile, my generation of American girls grew up with Betty Crocker, Girl Scouts and training bras — and Julia Child was as French as it got. How unfair is that?

Perhaps American women are ahead of the French when it comes to liberation. “You Americans were grown-up feminists,” Natalie says when I bring up Wharton’s comments. “We took all of our cues from you. We were incredibly old-fashioned and repressed compared to American women when it came to feminism. But we never confused the power of feminism with the power of femininity, the power of the femme. Being a grown-up to a French woman means being complete, with or without a man, but still being in love with love.”

Christophe looks at the question differently. “We’re a grown-up culture. America is a super power but historically you’re barely adolescent. We were dismissing the Church because of its corruption hundreds of years ago while you Anglos were naively embracing it. History has taught us that you can’t rely on dogma or doctrine. Relationships burn brightly, then die. We have our passions, our human tragedies, our loves and our losses. We have a couple of centuries of living and dying over you Americans.”

I suppose you have to call a historical spade a spade. We Americans are big, hormonally super-charged 13-year-olds raiding the fridge in quick-fix binges. The French are wizened denizens sipping Bordeaux and plumbing the depths of passion and pathos. To their credit the French, who can be exasperatingly pig-headed and irascible, do have a certain ripened maturity and an insatiable appetite for the harsh realities and curious lusts that characterize matters of the heart. This is partly why the myths of the French mistress and the Latin lover have endured over the centuries. It might also explain why the French are so iconoclastic, even quixotic, in their interpretations of love.

I’m reminded of this sexy, baffling quality about the French time and time again. Most recently, it was while watching the Claire Denis film “Friday Night”: Two strangers meet in a car in a traffic jam. They spend nearly the entire film in silence, end up in a hotel, make love rhapsodically, exchange a few words (barely) over pizza, make love again, then say goodbye. What just happened? Our leading lady — who’s not a great beauty but still lovely in an ordinary, je ne sais quoi way — runs through the streets of Paris at night after her affair. All we know about her is that she’s going to move in with her boyfriend. She’s just left her mysterious lover in the hotel. Who is he? Will she see him again? Was it a one-night stand or the beginning of a long-term relationship? Our heroine runs down the street toward an unknown future, a liberating and strangely happy glow on her face. She doesn’t seem to care. Clearly, Rachel Greenwald would not approve.

But the land of oo-la-la and voulez-vous coucher avec moi is not exactly what you think it is. In 2001, the Journal of Sex Research published the results of a Franco-American research project titled “A Comparative Study of the Couple in the Social Organization of Sexuality in France and the United States.” The study both reaffirms and busts open many of our long-standing myths about the French with compelling sociocultural data that, in light of the current chilling of Franco-American relations, merits a double take.

The study reveals that the French have fewer partners overall than Americans, maintain more long-term committed relationships, are more likely to be monogamous (surprise!), and enjoy more frequent sex. (Sixty-nine percent of single Frenchmen and 85 percent of single Frenchwomen report fidelity to one single sexual partner, compared to 48 percent of American men and 66 percent of American women.) But one of the most striking differences was between older French- and American women. The study reports that after the age of 50, American women are 10 percent less likely than Frenchwomen to be living in a couple.

These differences are even more dramatic with age. “While 79 percent of the 50 to 54 year olds (in France) are living in a couple, only 60 percent of the 55 to 59 year olds (in the U.S.) are in the same situation.” (The study was based on 3,432 American adults ages 18 to 59 surveyed in the National Health and Social Life Survey, and 4,580 French adults between the ages of 18 and 59 from the Analysis of Sexual Behavior in France survey.)

What’s this all about — and are there implicit lessons here from the land that brought us the French lover? We caught up with Alain Giami, director of research at the French National Institute of Health and Medical Research (and co-director of the study with John Gagnon, at the State University of New York, Stony Brook), to help us out.

You’ve referred to “the eroticization of social relations in France.” Could you comment on what you mean by this?

The eroticization of social relations has to do with the fact that it seems that the French do not consider “flirtation” and seduction and romance as a direct sexual approach, and that flirtation does not lead necessarily to sexual intercourse. The notion of “complicité” [complicity] is very important both for Frenchmen and -women. The language of seduction is not an explicit language of sex. In fact, the eroticization is grounded on nonsexual attributes and more on classical gender roles.

Can you elaborate on these “nonsexual attributes”?

Eroticization has more to do with the double meaning in words and situations. Most French words, and especially most verbs such as “to make” [faire], “to take” [prendre] and “to put” [mettre], are all metaphors for the genital act - which is now called the “penile-vaginal act” in the States. So you can imagine the possible range of understatements and “malentendus” [misunderstandings] which can create “complicité” between potential partners in France.

By “classical gender roles” are you suggesting that in France, men are men and women are women — that they fully assume their sexuality (and “traditional gender identities”) without apology, without fear of being politically incorrect or sexist?

Yes. There is also less contradiction between being sexy and being a professional. Moreover, the Antioch code of negotiation [a student code of sexual conduct on the Antioch college campus intended to "prevent sexual offenses" and legislate "specific verbal consent ... obtained with each new level of physical and/or sexual conduct/contact in any given interaction"] is almost unthinkable in France. People are more able to negotiate by eye contact — but to explicitly negotiate the acts of sex is perceived as being a kind of pornography when you don’t know the other person.

Your study suggests that the French are actually more monogamous than us. But that flies in the face of a very long-standing image we Americans have of French people as promiscuous, as all having mistresses and lovers. Mitterrand did a lot to perpetuate that notion. So is it mostly a myth?

Yes. Of course there is adultery in France, but the difference between France and the States is that in France, the extramarital partner lasts a long time, whereas in the States it’s often a one-night stand. In France, when you have an extramarital affair you often have it for a long time. We’ve noticed that Americans, men and women, have more of them, in shorter duration (one-night stands, for example), than the French. Fidelity is a strong value in France, but it has more to do with love than sex. The major difference between Frenchwomen and American women can be summarized as follows: The French are marathoners and the Americans are sprinters.

To what do you attribute this difference?

I think it comes from the roots of Puritanism. When it exploded, like it did in the ’60s in the States, the result was a greater diversity of sexual lifestyles. What’s striking is that in the U.S. there’s a much greater diversity of sex lifestyles, and in more extreme forms, than in France. Take S/M, for example, which seems much more present and visible in the States, with more of a community.

Our culture is much more Balkanized than France’s.

Yes, and different kinds of sexual groups want public expression in America. Whereas in France, the French would never want that. It’s a totally private thing. Why make sex a public thing?

We’re a very confessional culture. The French are very private. What are your views of the American obsession with the Clinton affair in this light?

Roosevelt, Kennedy and Clinton all gave the same impression of “the most powerful man in the world.” You should read Philip Roth’s “The Human Stain” for views on American common sense.

What do you think about the current interest in the “mysterious” Clinton marriage?

I don’t want to comment on American politics since I am not an expert in political science. But the Clinton marriage has nothing mysterious: It is a political alliance.

You mention that love and sex are not necessarily the same thing.

For centuries marriage had nothing to do with love and sex. It was about economics and procreation. Those who had nothing — no houses, no money — did not marry. It’s only since the 19th century that the Catholic Church indulged love between partners as part of a marriage.

But you’ve also had a culture of courtly love, with codes of seduction, that has existed for centuries. That changes the playing field a lot.

That’s true. In the 18th century, we had a culture of literary salons that was cultivated and maintained by Frenchwomen. Frenchwomen weren’t excluded from intellectual commerce with men. This wasn’t the case in England, where men and women were separated socially. That’s a very important historical element that distinguishes Anglo-Saxon culture and French culture. You have much more “homo-sociality” in your culture. That’s changing now, of course, with your culture of absolute equality for all: You have American women who are soldiers, policemen, etc. That’s not as developed in France. Men and women generally can’t coexist in your culture unless the differences between the sexes are strongly diminished.

Historically again: There is the prevailing notion in the States that American GIs went to France and picked up, in part, the seeds of a sexual revolution from their experiences with Frenchwomen. In his book “The Century of Sex,” author James R. Petersen writes about how American officers were also very vocal about Frenchwomen and their “degenerate idea lessening powers of moral restraint” among GIs. The contemporary myth of the wanton and sexy Frenchwoman is tied up in this historical image.

We have the opposite perception. Your American GIs came to France and brought your nylon hose, your lipstick, your chewing gum, your cigarettes, your jazz, your chocolate, your condoms. They had all this to offer Frenchwomen. You brought it to us. In our collective imagination, it was the America GI who made the Frenchwoman feel sexy again after so many years of deprivation of these goods.

Getting back to your study, what are the key social forces that underscore your findings?

Globally we found that the French have a more deeply grounded conception and value of the couple. The French are also less attached than Americans to marriage as the unique option for living together. The French have more “premarital cohabitation,” “nonmarital cohabitation” and even “noncohabiting long-term relations.” This seems to make it easier for men and women age 40 or older to have companionship after having experienced the burden of marriage and cohabitation.

Moreover, one of the major aspects of the “sexual liberation” between the ’70s and the ’90s is that in 1970 in France about 36 percent of men and 66 percent of women over the age of 50 did not have sexual intercourse during the last year. In 1990, only 11 percent of men and 28 percent of women over 50 did not have sexual intercourse during the last year. The sexual life of the people beyond 50 is something new in Western history.

I think we tend to forget that sex after age 40 or 50 is a fairly recent phenomenon, historically speaking.

Up until the 1960s, contraception was done via coitus interruptus. Contraception as we know it was used in extramarital relationships and with prostitutes. In the mid-’60s, two things changed that: the pill, and the orgasm documented by Masters and Johnson — two American inventions. The two go hand in hand. When contraception was legitimized in the context of marriage, the erotic life entered the conjugal bed. Or, as the saying goes, the bordello entered the bedroom. We see that with the practice of fellatio, for example, which was considered a “specialty” of prostitutes and something a “reasonable” woman would not do. So that’s the big change: the legitimacy of pleasure and erotic life in the context of marriage. Before the ’60s, there was a lot of guilt associated with that, at least in Catholic cultures. You had pleasure with a prostitute and babies with your wife.

And of course now we’re living longer. Along with our libidos.

Of course. So now post-menopausal women can have sex. That’s a major change. When nonreproductive sex was legitimized, it was OK for post-menopausal women to have sex. But paradoxically, that’s mostly the case in France. In the States, women are excluded from the sexual market after a certain age.

Why is that?

We don’t really know. Our study shows that the possibility of having sex after 50 is strongly dependent on the capacity to be in a relationship. If one is not in a relationship, there is no sex. Again, the fact that in the States marriage is the exclusive option for couples makes it difficult for men and women of this [older] age - especially if they have already built a family in a previous relationship - to get so strongly involved again. Men of this age get married again with younger women, to build a new family. And older women who are not willing or biologically able to procreate again remain excluded from this process. In France, the diversity of options for living in a couple seems to facilitate the bonding of older men and women.

What might we Americans learn from the French in this regard?

Marriage is not the only honest and responsible way of bonding.

Do Frenchmen appreciate older women more than their American counterparts?

We can look at that in two ways: We could say that Frenchmen are attracted to older women and to women of their same age. But we could also ask the question: Do American women remove themselves from the sexual market because they’re not interested in sex anymore? They may continue to be sexy, with cosmetic surgery and so forth, but to look sexy is not enough to sustain a sexual relationship. So perhaps they don’t want to have as much sex.

Is that quantified?

No. But we do know that the consumption of cosmetic surgery is much more prevalent in the States than in France.

I can vouch for that. I lived in France for 10 years. Now I live in Los Angeles, in a place where an extraordinary number of older women have been completely reengineered.

Yes, but do they have men in their lives? Are they having sex?

I don’t know. That’s a very good question.

The more than 300 works in the show map the erotic landscapes that made up Picasso’s world, and half of them have never before been publicly shown. (They come from private collections.) Largely inspired by the bordello, the young Picasso sucked on the teat of his own sexual imagination and, one assumes, interests. More than just garden-variety sex is depicted here. There are orgies, oral sex, masturbation and lesbian love. The works are at once obscene and tender, vulnerable and bawdy. Not only is the sex heterosexual and homosexual, in some cases it’s zoomorphic.

The naturalism in Picasso’s early work quickly gave way to an extraordinarily diverse range of erotic symbolism. Bulls and centaurs came on the scene, along with his trademark polymorphously sexual Minotaur. The dualities of love and death loomed large on his canvas with the advance of age, as did a consistent theatrical strain of voyeurism, which reached an apex when Picasso was well into his 80s.

Sadly, this vast exhibition has been ignored by the American curatorial world, suggesting to its curator and others a certain consensual Puritanism about the role of public art. Says art historian Jean Clair, “You have to be American to believe that art must educate children and purify adults, that it is necessary for the welfare of an enlightened society … the artist is a criminal, an outlaw, a pervert.” Picasso put it differently. “Art is not chaste,” he once said. “Yes, art is dangerous. If it is chaste, it is not art.”

To get the inside out on priapic Picasso, Salon spoke recently with Gérard Régnier, director of the Picasso Museum in Paris and curator of “Erotic Picasso.”

How did the exhibition come to pass?

There’s nothing original in the idea. I think everyone has always wanted to do an exhibition on erotic Picasso. All of Picasso’s oeuvre is erotic, the most erotic that exists in the world. Doing a show on this subject is compelling, interesting and most exciting, in every sense of the word. When I became the director of the museum I realized that there had never been a show on the erotic Picasso. It was a totally virgin subject, so to speak.

And why?

It’s interesting. Maybe a sociologist could understand why. Perhaps for two reasons. First, in the austere and serious museum world, approaching art through the angle of eroticism is always a bit provocative. You have to find accomplices to do this. You have to find a team with whom you share a certain spiritual complicity for the subject. And that’s not always easy to find. I found that [accomplice] when Jean-Jacques Lebel (a French artist and culture maven) came to me and asked, “Why not?” I replied, “OK. Let’s do it.”

And there’s another deeper reason for this. The history of art, particularly of modern art, has always been controlled by a formalist approach and not an existential or erotic approach. We’re more interested in little squares than we are in meaning, in particular in Picasso’s case. We’ve been hypnotized and fascinated by his little squares — the cubism — without realizing that essentially all of Picasso’s work is about curves. If you look at Picasso’s work in its totality, he spent his life drawing voluptuous curves and very little time making squares. In fact, Picasso’s cubist period was very, very brief.

The French speak about a certain moral terrorism in the U.S. What was the reaction in the American art community to the exhibition?

There’s an enormous cultural and intellectual difference between the U.S. and Europe. I say that in all friendliness. I’ve lived in the U.S. and studied at Harvard; I know the country well. But the fact remains that our exhibition has been requested by six important museums around the world, and not one of them is American.

Do you attribute that to the same old American Puritanism?

There’s certainly a puritanical context that prevents an important exhibition like ours from being seen in New York or, let’s say, Texas [laughs], or in other American cities. In Europe, Madrid wants the exhibition, Valencia wants it, Munich wants it, Rome wants it.

Did you have any feedback from your American counterparts? Any comments at all from, say, the people at the Guggenheim or the Museum of Modern Art?

No feedback. No feedback whatsoever. And I’m in contact with them every day. [Both New York MOMA director Kirk Varnedoe and San Francisco MOMA director David Ross told Salon that they weren't offered the show.]

That’s remarkable!

Indeed. There’s another reason besides Puritanism. There’s a certain moral reflex that has to do with the formalist tradition in America. For Americans the historical tradition that is associated with Picasso is cubism, the decomposition of the object through the cubist perspective, and it’s not at all about eroticism and related iconography. So we’re in an entirely different perspective here. It shocks Americans. It’s very interesting that the only hostile piece in the press was published in the American press. [In a short review Time magazine called the show a "ragbag" that "falls victim to the same law of diminishing returns as a dirty movie."]

The Time article suggests that there’s still a politically correct context with respect to sexuality in America. The reaction of the Time journalist reflects other things as well — for example, the fact that books published on Picasso’s life in the States invariably represent him as a sort of male chauvinist pig who didn’t love women. It’s interesting that this misconception persists in America. There’s tremendous freedom in America, but also tremendous rigidity and closed-mindedness, particularly in the intellectual realm.

When I put together the Vienna exhibition at Beaubourg in 1985-86, I showed work of [Gustav] Klimt and [Egon] Schiele that was openly erotic. When MOMA took the exhibition, it became — how shall I say? — very clean.

You mean they removed certain paintings that were erotic?

Of course. And the show became soft, mild, polished.

Lebel has said that it is always the essential that is censored. Do you agree?

That’s true, yes.

How would you situate Picasso’s work in his own time? Was his erotic work considered shocking back then?

I don’t think so. In fact in every era artists create a tremendous amount of erotic work. [Jean Baptiste Camille] Corot, who was so sweet and kind and mild, produced erotic work that would shock people if they knew about it. The same is doubly true with respect to [Gustave] Courbet. And [Eugène] Delacroix — don’t get me started. All great painters have produced erotic work because it is — how do I say it? — making objects with clay is in and of itself a very erotic act.

In other words, there is something essential here, even primal on some level?

In the Lascaux caves in France, in the deepest, most inaccessible and least visible part of the caves (which proves that sex has always been taboo and sacred), you have the first figurative representations, which date back to around 20,000 B.C. There’s an image of a man lying down with a lance. Next to him is a bull with his guts exposed, who was probably killed by the man. And the man was probably killed by the bull. The man is dead, lying down, with an erection. This was the expression by cavemen of a fascination with sexual strength, the strength of life.

How would you define the difference between eroticism and sex?

I think that etymologically sex has to do with the fact that men and women are not the same. Sex is about division, separation. It’s a biological fact, physiological. It’s true that today everyone, everywhere, talks about sex, sex for its zoological nudity, so to speak. And that creates a certain permissiveness that manifests in, say, the explosion of pornography, the X-rated, after-midnight culture. Sex is everywhere. There’s a sex invasion. If you talk about eroticism, you’re talking about a cultural tradition that is related to antiquity, to the god Eros — and a cultural practice that has been refined into a sort of etiquette code for men and women.

How much of Picasso’s work is about imagination and how much is personal anecdote?

Picasso was actually a very modest and chaste person. His erotic iconography is rarely blatant, crude, immediate. There’s always a disguise of sorts, via mythology, for example, and fable. It’s rarely just a man and a woman making love. It’s usually a god or a goddess.

Or a Minotaur.

Yes, the Minotaur is one of the acceptable mythological forms that Picasso used like a costume. But the Minotaur is ambiguous. Sometimes he’s aggressive, but he’s also tender, he’s also the victim.

That being said, there is a fair amount of explicit sexual representation in his work.

Most of it was done when he was a teenager.

One has the impression that as he aged, the expression of his erotic self became more complex, more voyeuristic.

There is more complexity as he aged, as coitus became more problematic. But that was during the last years of his life, when he was in his 80s.

This is not an exhibition likely to be seen again, since so much of it is from private collections.

Who knows? Maybe it will set a trend in the United States. [Laughs] In any case, when people leave the Jeu de Paume they are happy, lively. There’s nothing unhealthy, scabrous or disgusting in the show. It’s so strong, so full of life.

What do you think Picasso would have said to the idea of an “Erotic Picasso” show?

I think he would have said, “Why not?”