France is more open to the idea of a woman becoming freer – and more sexual – as she ages than the US
Long Read'The US, France and me' (3/5). Pamela Druckerman, an American journalist who has lived in Paris for almost 20 years, envies French women's ability to blossom sexually as they age. Unlike her compatriots, who are more subject to the weight of social pressures.
When I moved to Paris in my early thirties, waiters called me "mademoiselle." It was "bonjour, mademoiselle" when I walked into a café and "voilà, mademoiselle" as they set down a coffee in front of me. As an American, I found this local custom charming. The English equivalent, "Miss," is old-fashioned and rarely used.
Around the time I turned 40, however, there was a collective code switch. Waiters began calling me "madame," though with exaggerated formality or a jokey wink.
Soon the occasional, jocular "mademoiselles" ceased, and my "madames" were no longer ironic. I also detected a disturbing new message in the gazes of men I passed on the street: I would sleep with her, but only if doing so required no effort whatsoever.
Reader, I'd never been Brigitte Bardot. I didn't turn heads or break hearts with my smile. And yet this new moniker sent me into an existential tailspin. Who was I now that – apparently by collective agreement – I'd become a "Madame"? How should I think about myself? Was I entering a new, matronly phase of life in which I would gradually become sexually irrelevant?
That would certainly fit with the declinist American narrative about aging. A Californian friend asked me, only half-jokingly: "Do you feel like you have five years left before no one wants to sleep with you anymore?" I'd heard from American girlfriends that menopause would kill my libido, anyway.
While this rankled my inner feminist, I had to admit that it made evolutionary sense. What good is a sex drive – or sex appeal – if you can no longer reproduce?
'Sexual expiration date'
And it seemed to be borne out by national sex statistics: American women in their forties still have sex on a fairly regular basis. But about a third of American women in their fifties haven't had sex in the past year, and nearly half of those in their sixties haven't. The seventies are practically celibate. Findings for British women are similarly grim. (Men claim to fare much better at all ages.) I resigned myself to having a sexual expiration date (cue Amy Schumer's sketch about an actress' "last fuckable day").
Except that I lived in France. Youth is celebrated here, too, of course. I see the taut 22-year-olds in fashion magazines and perfume advertisements. A Parisian professor in her sixties warned me, over soupe à l'oignon, that after age 50 "women in France are decapitated."
And yet I'd witnessed scenes in France that would be hard to envision in the US: Older couples perusing lingerie racks together, and plum movie roles for women d'une certain âge. At a French friend's 50th birthday party, several dozen people were in her living room drinking wine, flirting and dancing to the Village People (my generation's nostalgia music is similar in both countries).
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