T A B L E++T A L K

When does teaching turn into preaching? Weigh in on teachers who spread propaganda in the Mothers area of Table Talk

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R E C E N T L Y

The single-mom scam
By Douglas Cruickshank
"About a Boy" with a yen for single moms
(05/11/98)

Heedless Love
By Barbara Jones
Why parenting doesn't start at conception
(05/08/98)

Kidnapped
By Peter Kurth
My sister's little girls were stolen 19 years ago by her ex-husband. So why is the media putting her on trial?
(05/07/98)

Thinking of you
By Rose Stoll
On Mother's Day, I can't escape the memories I hide from the rest of the year
(05/06/98)

Missing Children
By Rob Spillman
Wanting a Child: When the desire to be parents comes easier than the children
(05/05/98)

ARCHIVES

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Mamafesto
By Camille Peri
Why it's time
for Mothers Who Think

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LES BIRDS ET LES BEES | PAGE 2 OF 2

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If dolls help kids make sense of their world, then books help mold their perception of it. And here, too, a Franco-American divide seems to cast our cultural differences in stone. Our living room is a fitting example: It's strewn with lavish French toddler books -- Rabelaisian tales, lush illustrations, fanciful foldouts and plastic overlays. At first glance you might think they look innocent enough. And you'd be wrong. "We've grown accustomed to Americans requesting incredible changes to our books before they're launched in the States," says an editor at French publishing giant Gallimard. "This has been going on forever." Her sentiments were echoed unanimously by those I spoke with in French children's publishing, all of whom had things to say about books that were tweaked, modified, ignored or flatly rejected because of material deemed inappropriate for children. While in a few cases it might seem evident that, for Americans in particular, the line between art and pornography is blurred -- take, for example, the elegant toddler Louvre museum book simply called "Breasts" that features memorable mammaries by masters like Goya, Gauguin and Botticelli and that begins with "When I grow up I'm going to have breasts just like Mommy" -- most of the changes described by publishers were indeed hard to fathom.

The latest case at Gallimard -- "a classic example," offers the Gallimard editor -- are two books in their famous "Mes Premières Découvertes" (My First Discoveries) series called "Before Birth" and "Birth" that use animals to explain the basics of reproduction. From snails to whales, a vast cross-section of the animal kingdom is depicted in small, graphically correct illustrations at (fore)play, mating, brooding and being born. The books were launched at last year's Frankfurt book fair and, says the Gallimard editor with a touch of tempered incredulity, "They were extremely well-received by all publishers except the Americans, who categorically refused them on the grounds that they were erotic."

One of the many Gallimard books that did make its way across the Atlantic, albeit with significant changes, is called "The Body." A sort of bio-anatomy lesson for toddlers, the book uses simple but lifelike illustrations of a boy, a girl and a baby, with plastic overlays describing everything from molecules to intestinal tracts. Before the book could be distributed in the U.S., Scholastic, American publisher of Gallimard books, required design changes that put clothes on the two toddlers and diapers on the baby (despite the fact that the baby's genitals are not apparent at all in the original French version). The book is distributed with no design modifications in roughly 10 countries, including South Korea and Taiwan, which makes America the only country in the world except for Islamic nations such as Iran (which banned the French 100-franc bill because it features Delacroix's bare-breasted Liberty) to censor material of this kind.

My inquiries at Scholastic were passed through two editors and wound up with the V.P. of Communications, who sent off a short, faceless corporate missive: "When adapting books, all books, for our market, we may make modifications as needed to avoid questions or protests ... Scholastic does not make moral decisions, nor do we consider ourselves the arbiters of what is or is not permissible in the American marketplace." Who, then, is doing the arbitrating? As one of the world's largest publishers and distributors of children's books, classroom magazines and educational products, is Scholastic not exercising a de facto moral decision by clothing children in a bio-anatomy book, even if its unilateral disclaimer is "meeting customer demand"?

The waters of book censorship are rocky and complex, and I leave it to others to tack their sails against the gale. Meanwhile, there's reason to believe that publishers may overestimate American readers' prudery. A case in point: Chronicle's surprisingly successful and visually forthright book "Mommy Laid an Egg: Or Where Do Babies Come From," which features kids' drawings of the crazy coital ways that mommy and daddy "fit together." And the French continue to rail against what they call "the terrible incorrectness of the politically correct." With a certain virulent strain in his voice, Arthur Hubschmed, an editorial director at École des Loisirs (publishers of some of the most artistically progressive children's books around), sums up what seems to be a general consensus not only in France, but in Europe as a whole: "Americans systematically censor anything that is vaguely scatological or sexual. [Anglo-Saxon] children's books live in a nursery ghetto where man is good and sex does not exist."

Back in 1957, Roland Barthes wrote: "The adult Frenchman sees the child as another self. All the toys (in France) one commonly sees are essentially a microcosm of the adult world; they are all reduced copies of human objects ... The fact that French toys literally [Barthes' italics] prefigure the world of adult functions obviously cannot but prepare the child to accept them all, by constituting for him even before he can think about it, the alibi of Nature."

Is Barthes right? Could it stand to reason that a toddler growing up in this context might be predisposed or primed to be more open-minded about sexuality as an adult than his or her Anglo-Saxon counterpart? Ever since the infamous Marquis de Sade put France on the world's sexual map, the country has been a refuge for Americans fleeing the Puritanism of their compatriots. As Victoria Rock at Chronicle points out, "The largest perspective gap on sex may be that between the French and the Americans." And as long as that's the case, the French will continue to boldly live up to their sexual stereotypes. Meanwhile, Americans will continue to do the same, while fixating on the genitals of dolls and presidents alike -- a preoccupation the French shrug off as a deeply strange and peculiarly American form of child's play.
SALON | May 12, 1998

Debra S. Ollivier's last story for Salon was I'll be home for Sushi.

Join the discussion on talking sex with kids in the Mothers area of Table Talk.