BY DEBRA S. OLLIVIER | Every country has its cultural stereotypes, and none is woven more deeply into the fabric of its society than the association of the French with sex. Few would disagree that the French are more laissez-faire than Americans in this department. And indeed, while tales of Latin braggadocio and sexual virtuosity are often more mythic than factual, the daily reality in which French kids grow up (and presumably become those virtuoso Latin lovers) is decidedly different. In other words, the playing fields for French kids and their American counterparts are far from level. A sloppy French kiss at elementary school solicits laughs, not expulsion. Naked toddlers, who run bare-assed on public beaches long after American kids are required to don suits, are rarely reprimanded for touching one another at day-care potty central; rather, they're frequently left to explore the terrain. Later in life, instead of being singled out as a special subject, sex education is part of standard junior high school biology in France (in my preteen days, it was presented with the solemnity of a slightly alarming liturgical rite in gender-specific auditoriums). This is right around when American girls fret over training bras, which don't exist in France because, well, what's there to train?

Even language reveals sexual mores: In Victorian times, France was considered so libidinous that even the English language couldn't cope, which explains in great measure our abundance of French sex words -- from French kissing and ménage-à-trois to the vulgarities we excuse with "pardon my French." And the French language continues to bloom with cutely flamboyant diminutives for toddler genitals -- "foufounette," "zezette," "zizi" -- in stark contrast to English, which offers little beyond the generic "bottom," "pee-pee" or "wee-wee."

But nowhere do children's sexual landscapes diverge more flagrantly than when it comes to toys. Consider this: In recent years Mattel has fitted Barbie's body with unremovable flowered white panties. Meanwhile, the French doll company Corolle (owned by Mattel) has been successfully selling a very different kind of doll on the mass European market for decades. Recently, my friend's French toddler introduced me to one of these dolls; its name is Fanfan, and with the fierce pride of someone who'd just discovered a new phylum of animal life, my friend's daughter lifted up its tiny pants and declared, "Look! It pees!" What took me by surprise, however, was not the little drops of phony pee. It was the doll's little uncircumcised plastic penis. I found out later that these dolls and other French children's products are players in a bull pit of cultural commerce, where claims of French promiscuity and American Puritanism relentlessly butt heads.

For starters, anatomically correct dolls do exist in the States. You just have to look long and hard for them. You'll find American dolls that burp, pee, snort and eat, but, as Joanne Oppenheim, president of the Oppenheim Toy Portfolio (an independent guide to kids' toys and books) explains, "Most anatomically correct dolls available in the U.S. are for the school market. The few that we've seen here have been especially unattractive -- with belly button bandages and baby faces only a mother could love."

As for the lifelike, anatomically correct Corolle dolls, you won't find them in any mainstream toy stores because, according to Beau James, director of North American Operations for Corolle, "The mass market is reticent to sell sexed dolls ... The U.S. is still a Puritanical society. Sex is something that Americans don't want out in the open." This statement is laced with contradiction, of course, because while shielding children from the prurient influences of the outside world may be high on the national agenda, kids live in a culture where sex sells everything from mufflers to freeze-dried coffee. And when it comes to dolls, every day millions of American children play with bombshell, mass-market Barbie, who's far more sexual -- panties or no panties -- than a pudgy, anatomically correct Corolle doll. Then again, as far as genitals are concerned, we're in the realm of meta-sexuality here. As M.C. Lord points out in her book "Forever Barbie," Barbie is a "space-age fertility archetype," a "template of 'femininity' imposed on [a] sexless effigy -- which underscores the irrelevance of actual genitalia to perceptions of gender. What nature can only approximate, plastic makes perfect."

So while "fertility archetype" Barbie is made over to look more like "real life," you can forget the genitals in America and, by extension, the messy business of having sex and babies. As for those functional dolls that purport to teach kids about the proverbial birds and bees, Oppenheim isn't very effusive. "We had a rash of pregnancy dolls, all of which gave children misconceptions about how babies were born. There was one with a pop-off belly and a baby inside -- it also came with a flat tummy and no stretch marks -- and another doll that moved inside a sack; when the sack was opened the child discovered if it was a girl or a boy from the blue or pink ribbon on the doll. Talk about misinformation!"

Clearly, giving American children more of the real thing (and less "misinformation") could alleviate a certain amount of infantile embarrassment about the body that may continue to spore in an air of Puritanism. If nothing else, it would certainly prevent some basic confusion. I'm reminded of a friend's American husband who was around 8 years old when he first saw an uncircumcised penis. "I was in a ballpark urinal when I saw this guy peeing," he said. "I looked down at him and was horrified. I thought the guy had lost part of his dick in an industrial accident or a war." (Imagine his surprise when he realized that he was the one who'd actually lost part of his penis.)

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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.