The Unsensuous Frenchman

...This ancient chestnut varies according to the prejudices of the person telling it...

...After describing the mechanics of sex in crude terms and asserting that "heterosexuality is richer in pleasure than homosexuality," it declared: "This leaflet is intended to encourage all sexual activities...

...In Lyon a few officers were accused of taking bribes from hotels harboring prostitutes...

...and the anticontra-ception lobby has persuaded a wide section of the public that la i>ilule may be cancerogenous...

...But the French student's interest in the elephant is always sex-linked-even though, by comparison with most other northwestern societies, France is not an outstandingly "sexy" country...

...all unrepresentative of their respective countries because of their huge throughput of tourists and other transients-there is less pornography on display in France than in the U.S...

...The editor of a British political weekly cited four new French books on subjects like homosexuality and birth control...

...During the last few months, sex has even gotten itself a bad name here...

...The bookstall in the railroad station of my (by English standards) staid hometown in Yorkshire displays more salacious book jackets than all four bookstores in the fairly typical provincial town where I am writing...

...practice what it teaches...

...nature is less remote-and less romantic-than in more rootless industrial communities...

...Following several days of protest meetings and petition-signing, for and against her, a judge decided there were no grounds for prosecuting her because her pupils had asked for the discussion and she had been hesitant...

...he was incredulous when I told him the reverse procedure was more likely...

...And today, sex is certainly less of a public obsession here than in the U.S., England, Denmark, or Sweden...

...The affair gave Left-wingers an opportunity to demand the inclusion of sexual education in lycee programs, and this the government has conceded...

...Few foreign correspondents would dissent from Le Monde's March 25 assertion that "the world center of pornography" is Richard Nixon's America...

...All high-school pupils must study philosophy in their final year (at the age of 1718), "arts" pupils for eight hours a week, "scientists" for four...

...In Britain, opponents of Common Market membership have tried to conjure up nightmares of lascivious continental truckdrivers wreaking death and worse among the innocent maidens of Kent and Sussex...

...Now the Church is split on the issue and the State has relaxed its prohibition...

...Some French policemen have also urged the legalization of prostitution, under government control, so as to deprive the milieu (underworld) of what is now known to be its major source of funds in the major cities...

...Except at nuclei of alienation like Paris and Marseille, sex is seen as a straightforward, even prosaic, matter, rarely perverse or lurid...

...All that matters is the desire one feels and the pleasure one can obtain...

...The press, pointing out that the men had been at sea for six months, blamed their conduct on the naval authorities responsible for treating them with such barbarous inconsidera-tion...

...The myth that everything south of the Isle of Wight is sex seems to have been invented by the Victorian middle classes, mainly to add spice to their travel anecdotes, but partly, perhaps, to persuade British workers that, if they did not get much fun out of life, they could at least be thankful for the superior moral fiber that preserved them from the vices of loose-living foreigners...

...he failed to note that they were additions to a reference series covering a wide range of subjects...

...sex is a hostage of hucksters, freaks and quacks, somewhere out in the wasteland between showbiz and psy-chopathology...

...There is only one danger: the frustration of desire...

...Show this leaflet to your friends...

...So the English student wrote about the elephant and sports, the German student about the military uses of the elephant, and the French student about the sex-life of the elephant...

...Even the port's tough prostitutes, accustomed to coping with sailors, were outraged...

...One obvious reason for this is that in the background of most French families there remains a country cottage and, perhaps, a peasant grandmother...

...The important thing is to act...

...Trotskyists and Maoists circulated an appropriately worded manifesto in many lycees (high schools...

...Then a controversy over abortion flared up in the press, its opponents depicting foetus-butchery on an industrial scale in the countries where it is permitted, its advocates highlighting the squalor and danger associated with most of the 200-300 thousand terminations performed illegally in this country every year...

...Leaving aside New York, London and Paris Ray Alan frequently reports in these pages on European affairs...

...Until recently, matrimonial relations were often complicated and strained by the joint Church-State ban on contraception...

...There isn't even a word in French for "sexy...

...above all...

...At his request a judicial inquiry was opened to determine whether Madame Mercier, an anarchist sympathizer, had outraged "public morals...

...discuss it...

...Even in the heyday of "gay Paree" (as circumscribed a phenomenon as "swinging London" )r provincial France was generally prudish...

...Nevertheless, sex in France is by no means all champagne and roses...

...One anti-Market crusader, eager to link Europhilia with porno-philia, assured me that crucial scenes in some recent French film& were shot "clothed for export, nude-for France...

...here it is still associated primarily with weddings and babies, the latter, it is true, often disconcertingly close behind the former...

...In Paris the police reported that "two American films" had inspired many young men to offer themselves as homosexual prostitutes...

...or Britain...

...More will be heard of this issue next September, when the new course is to be introduced...

...very many doctors are conservative Catholics and hostile to it...

...Little old ladies, nostalgic for the 1930s and Tino Rossi, flocked to Last Tango in Paris only to see Marlon Brando performing a pathetic autumnal pantomime...

...The center of this center," Le Monde added, "is Times Square, New York...

...Yet, at last, a new version of the elephant story is being told in Toulon: The sailors were British...

...There is less smut and petty sadism in schools, and less scabrous talk in mixed adult company...

...A few days later, the papers reported a shipload of sailors had behaved so badly on shore leave at Toulon that 15 women complained about them to the police...

...During the last 30-40 years, the myth has been sustained mainly by Anglo-American pop journalism...

...Sometimes the English student is an imperialist and the German a philosopher...

...Reading American papers, one has the impression that in the U.S...

...A nationwide storm broke when a Belfort philosophy teacher named Nicole Mercier discussed the leaflet with one of her classes...

...Morally, at least, the 20th century can have no surprises left," observed one commentator...

...Trotskyists, Maoists and "Muscovites" alike have woken up to the political potential of high-school pupils, both as demonstration fodder and future college activists (25 per cent of them go on to university), and sex is obviously juicier bait to offer them than gerontocratic dogma...

...At the same time, several extreme Left-wing propagandists have tried to spark a "sexual revolution" that would not only liberate the young from the tyranny of bourgeois morals but shock and demoralize the bourgeoisie...

...While the Ministry of Education is thinking in terms of a few extra biology lessons, however, extremists are urging that the course cover contraception and other aspects of the subject generally considered controversial here...

...As France's political importance diminished, and television ate into the revenues and standards of the best-selling American and British papers, the editorial test for dispatches from Paris became: Will it make our readers lick their chops or shake their heads...

...The notion seems to have appealed to many Americans-to stay-at-home puritans no less than hopeful travelers— and was taken up by the French bourgeoisie, too: It was mildly flattering, helped the tourist industy and boosted military morale...

...But in most regions public health services continue to be shy about offering advice on birth control...

...Though the program is broad— ranging from Socrates to Skinner— it should not be that broad, objected an infuriated father...