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My girlfriend Natalie is not classically pretty, but that's never been a problem. She has a little belly, but she flaunts it. She has a little bit of extra butt. She flaunts that too. She's had her share of romantic encounters, but she's still single, over 35, and has lots of baggage, including a 5-year-old from a previous marriage who's earned the nickname of Rasputin. In many respects Natalie is the perfect candidate for Rachel Greenwald's new book "Find a Husband After 35 Using What I Learned at Harvard Business School." She's perfect except for one thing: Natalie is French.

"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.

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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.

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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.

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"My vagina had that 'flippy-floppy' feeling. I could barely feel anything. Sex was just not the same." Then a friend of hers saw an ad for Dr. David Matlock and his Laser Vaginal Rejuvenation clinic in Los Angeles. "My friend said, 'Hey Jill, you could do this!' It was meant as a joke. I found Matlock's number on the Net and was in his office within a week."

Jill, a Manhattan lawyer, had two of Matlock's trademark surgeries: Laser Vaginal Rejuvenation (LVR) to tighten her vagina and "enhance sexual gratification" and Designer Laser Vaginoplasty (DLV) to "aesthetically modify" her labia.

She calls her transformation "a miracle," and she is not alone in her enthusiasm. High above Sunset Boulevard, in Matlock's plush, 5,000-square-foot office, vaginas are being redesigned, labia modified, vulvae reconfigured. The women spreading their legs, exposing their personal secrets to the antiseptic trimmings and surgical prunings of a trusty laser are ad hoc pioneers in a rapidly growing industry. But is LVR truly a way of enhancing sexual gratification or simply a way of selling gynecological surgery while pushing the perfect vagina? With the reasons for LVR and DLV as diverse as the vaginas themselves, the answers are not so cut-and-dried.

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Think Columbine. Think pot. Think mouthing off, broken curfews, lousy grades, pierced tongues.

Then think again.

Are we in the grips of a teen crisis, a developmental emergency that requires expensive intervention? Not exactly, say experts in adolescent psychology. Statistics show that teenagers aren't really acting up or out more than they have in the past. Instead we are more likely in a crisis of parenthood that has created a lucrative new market for specialty schools and educational consultants. If there is a serious problem here, it may be one of parenting and perception, not bad kids.

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This is no small task in the booming market of specialty schools. The proliferation of programs, their high costs (tuitions as high as $58,000 a year) and the potential damage to a child from poorly run programs have made finding the right school a high-risk endeavor in and of itself. "Selecting a specialty school without an educational consultant is like picking a random name out of a public phone directory," says Lynn Hamilton, an educational consultant in Santa Barbara, Calif.

Hamilton, like many educational consultants, spends several months a year visiting schools, interviewing students and administrators, and separating wheat from chaff. In fact it's part of the job. In order to become -- and remain -- a member of the Independent Educational Consultants Association (IECA), educational consultants must maintain certain professional standards, including visiting an initial 100 school programs, and 20 to 30 new ones every year thereafter.

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It is hard not to be charmed by Toscani, though it is easy to see why many people are not. Labeled by many the "bad boy of advertising," he is opinionated, irreverent, sometimes bombastic and often contradictory. I, for one, was never particularly moved by Toscani's work for Benetton -- the multicolored condoms, the horses mating, the newborn babies -- until the early '90s, when a campaign featured dying AIDS patient David Kirby.

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French politicians and social pundits resoundingly went on record to denounce Casta's move as a way of avoiding the country's astronomically high taxes. (The debate around the virtues of socialism -- or how to strike a balance between too many taxes and not enough social protection -- is an old one here.) The minister of the interior publicly declared that once settled in London, Casta would be dismayed to find higher rents, an unreliable subway system and substandard hospital care, while another politician went so far as to suggest that Casta's potential departure is a sign of the imminent failure of socialism.

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Says Buot: "He had what was essentially a messy mucus plug in his ear. It can be very painful and, when not treated, dangerous. I took my son to a conventional doctor who was adamant about treating him with antibiotics. I took the prescription but never filled it. Instead I used a combination of ferrum phosphoricum, aviaire and arsenicum album. When I went back to the same doctor to check on my son's ear, the doctor was overjoyed. 'Your son's ear is perfect,' he said. I never told him that I'd actually used homeopathy."

Buot is among the roughly 40 percent of the French population who use homeopathic medicine to treat everything from colds, flu and measles to depression, anxiety and insomnia. The same percentage of clinical physicians regularly use homeopathy in their practices, and the French government reimburses the cost of homeopathic medicines. Indeed, collections of substances in thin tubes and vials with curious Latin names -- belladonna, bryonia and pulsatilla -- are as common in French homes as spice racks.

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A multifarious figure unique to France (the only country in the industrialized world to revere a woman as its national effigy), Marianne originally emerged as an image representing France's liberation from the shackles of monarchic dynasties and of its transformation into a republic. She has since come to represent justice, honor, patrimony, democracy, universal suffrage, religious piety, industry, agriculture, prosperity and patriotism, as well as various other virtues and ideals that have little if anything to do with Laetitia Casta.

Casta's selection as the Marianne of the 21st century was the result of the country's first official nationwide vote, sponsored by the Association of Mayors of France. According to AMF spokeswoman Catherine Doumas, "We didn't know what to expect when we initiated this campaign for a 21st century Marianne. The overwhelming response we got is a sign of how impassioned French citizens and officials are about the Republic and its representations."

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Called a "potential bomb," the unprecedented ruling underscores fears among many that the Americanization of France has reached epic proportions. Even Americans concur, depending on which side of the fence they're on. Says Michael York, a lawyer representing Philip Morris, "Tobacco-style lawsuits are probably the most shameful export of the American economy."

It's impossible to overlook the French love affair with the cigarette, which as an icon fits neatly alongside the baguette and glass of Bordeaux. The Gourlain ruling threatens to tarnish this image as clouds of jurisprudence slowly pile up on the French horizon. Several other individual lawsuits are pending, including one case involving the regional social security branch of Saint Nazaire, which is suing Seita for reimbursement of the millions spent treating smoking-related illness -- illnesses that cost the French government roughly $15 billion in social security health payments this year and took an estimated 60,000 lives.

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It was in the Tea Garden that I discovered deer antler velvet. Coveted, revered and used in Asia for more than 2,000 years, it remains the second most important ingredient in Asian medicine after ginseng. Its active ingredient, pantocrine, can be "of considerable help both to those who are potent but sexually exhausted, and to those who are impotent and wish they could be sexually exhausted," according to pharmacologist Stephen Fulder.

I'm exhausted, but it's not from too much sex. The approach of 40, hardcore parenthood, multiple workloads, urban living and long-term serial monogamy have done little to improve my overall energy level, let alone make me feel particularly sexual (or remotely sexually exhausted). In this no-zone of post-boomer weariness I am not alone. Deer velvet interests me and a growing number of strained, health-conscious, alternative-minded consumers. But its reputation as an aphrodisiac, which wrongly puts it in the same queerly zoological and folkloric pen as rhino horn, only touches on its vast therapeutic value.

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The idea of having my face slathered with a layer of opalescent, nutty
black eggs from the belly of a mature, bottom-feeding beluga sturgeon
leaves me feeling both slightly euphoric and a tad queasy. An indulgence
of almost wanton proportions, caviar has always been reserved for very
special, extravagant occasions -- a bacchanalian wedding feast, a lavish
business affair. In short, I will not buy caviar for myself but will
happily, with great piggish gusto, consume it from others. I'm therefore
slightly disappointed to find out that Elyzabeth does not use actual caviar
in her facials ("You would only end up eating it off your face," she
explains) but rather a form of highly concentrated caviar extract. Still,
the alleged miracles of the shiny aquatic eggs, in raw or distilled form,
are taken seriously here, and before I am introduced to caviar with all its
epidermal merits I am given a primer on basic skin care.

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Long before modern medicine cleaved mind from body, people went to hammams to heal body and soul. For Muslims and Jews, Romans and Byzantines, hammams were community spaces for purification rites before marriage, puberty or worship. They were sanctums of repose and womb-like serenity, as well as centers for exchange and conversation. In the "Iliad," Ulysses performs ablutions in a hammam. In "A Thousand and One Nights" they are described as paradise on earth. Throughout the Middle East and the Mediterranean, the body was purged of its impurities in hammams to better shine with the divine emanations of the Light. The hammam was, in short, a place where cleanliness really was close to godliness.

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Several years later, when I asked for her longevity secret,
98-year-old sculptress Beatrice Wood replied: "Everyday: meditation,
chocolate, a glass of port wine and flirting with young men." This
luxurious acknowledgment of the relationship between gastronomy, pleasure
and health is not new. Famous French centenarian Jeanne Calment was a chocoholic. People on the island of Crete outlive
their Western neighbors thanks, in part, to a lustful appetite for olive
oil, goat cheese and wine. Instead of perishing in their prime, people in
the Pirigord region of France push the age envelope with a diet that
includes goose pbti, cheese and Armagnac. The French in general, for that
matter, outlive Americans by about two and a half years and suffer 40 percent
fewer heart attacks.

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