How the French Make Love:

FITCH, ROBERT E.

How the French Make Love Patterns of Sex and Love. By the French Institute of Public Opinion. Crown. 234 pp. $4.00. Reviewed by Robert E. Fitch Professor of Christian Ethics, Pacific School of...

...She thinks of security, comfort and the future...
...There is the wistful look backward of a frustrated older woman: "I wanted to get married...
...Each of the seven subjects receives a free-wheeling commentary written by some French literary figure...
...and that in the love relationship a heightened sensitivity is more creative than a memorized routine...
...A majority of these women are convinced that men want their brides to be virgins, but the percentage of women who believe this increases as their ages increase, reaching 71 per cent for women above 45...
...The facts set forward in this study help to prove that one is a person before being a statistic...
...But I'm inedible...
...We learn that 75 per cent of the women interviewed regard it as unfortunate (49 per cent) or reprehensible (26 per cent) to "go astray" before marriage...
...This book poses all the questions that Kinsey would not ask...
...It is concerned not so much with what one does as with how one feels about it...
...The Steel Prince marries the Ball-bearing Princess...
...that a "female" is first of all a "woman...
...The discussion is built around seven topics: childhood, adolescence, virginity, marriage, adultery, divorce and the single woman...
...The primary interest is not in physiological details, but in the mental, moral, emotional and psychological aspects of s/b the most intimate of personal relations...
...there's something that has to succeed...
...I'd have married a cannibal...
...only 50 per cent of the older women say yes...
...Reviewed by Robert E. Fitch Professor of Christian Ethics, Pacific School of Religion Perhaps the French just don't know how to prepare a Kinsey Report...
...And the wife who couldn't find the answer: "My old aunt used to say to me, 'There's no quarrel that can't be settled on a pillow.' There must have been something wrong with my pillow...
...And then another woman who knew the real meaning of fatigue: "With my fourteen children, I was very, very tired...
...She is interested above all in the concrete qualities of her future husband: character and personality...
...The introductory section provides a summary (unsigned) of the classic common sense of the Frenchwoman: "Love plays only a minor part...
...He was a kind of God in pants...
...Marriage and love have nothing to do with each other...
...Of course there are plenty of statistics, drawn up in formal tables that sometimes occupy a whole page...
...In a series of individualized case studies we have the record of some very personal responses...
...There is the girl who, right after her first kiss, rushed for her toothbrush and toothpaste...
...I was ready to be gobbled up...
...France Roche explains ironically why a divorce may unite a woman more closely to her first husband than to her current spouse...
...Seventythree per cent of the young women say yes...
...There is the ecstasy of adolescence: "I placed him on about the same level as Jesus Christ...
...Michel Audiard distinguishes caustically between the adultery of the wife—"a deliberate transgression devoid of extenuating circumstances"—and the adultery of the husband—"the excusable consequence of a celestial curse...
...Anyway, it says here that women are people, that sex is an affair between human beings and that love is something more than the felicitous concourse of the genitalia in an animal orgasm...
...less than one woman out of 10 is willing to "live on love...
...Christiane Rochefort extols the "marriage of self-interest, reason and reproduction...
...Does love bring disappointment...
...What is wanted most of all out of marriage is a "good husband...
...But this section concludes with the worldly wisdom of a woman who is a high school principal: "Nowadays there is more thirst for life than joy in living...
...that love is an art more than a technique...
...She is rarely impassioned or naive...
...Here the proportion that says yes is doubled from the young to the old...
...There is the grateful response to thoughtfulness and considerateness in a lover: "At last I met someone who asked me if I was tired...
...Does love bring satisfaction...

Vol. 44 • May 1961 • No. 19


 
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