Free Sample: "Avoiding Sex with Frenchmen"

           So, why didn't any of us ever have sex with a Frenchman? (Spoiler alert! Damn. I should have saved that one for the end. I should've been like, "Will Shoshanah give birth to a French love child? Find out next time...")

The offers for sexual intercourse in Paris just kept pouring in. By the third day there, we were keeping a tally. We were lingering at Champs-Elysée, and some confident young guy sauntered up and said some romantic nonsense. Before Zgjenyue even let him down, she turned to me and said,

"That's twenty-seven."

"Wait, you're counting now?"

"Yeah, I've been thinking about it. I'm pretty sure that's twenty-seven."

And so it went. We were American girls, and we were young. And they were men. French men.

American boys would never ask to have sex with us- at least, not directly. An American boy might say, "You're beautiful," or maybe, "You have a nice ass," or possibly, "Those ivory tower Communists need to get down here and kick it with the people, you know?" And then you knew. He wanted to have sex with you.

France was clearly a different country. For some reason, Frenchmen were just very intent on closing the deal, like, right away. This was jarring, at first, to us genteel American girls.

And it wasn't just that. It was just everything.

There's this American movie called The Breakfast Club. In The Breakfast Club, five American teenagers from different social circles are forced to endure a Saturday detention with one another. At one point the Jud Nelson character (so hot) is hassling the Molly Ringwald character, asking her if she's ever "done it." He says, (I'm paraphrasing from memory here,)

"It's a double edged sword. If you say you have done it, you're a slut, and if you say you haven't done it, then you're a tease." Everyone starts yelling at Molly Ringwald to answer his question,

"Have you done it?"

"Have you done it?"

"Just answer the question, Claire!"

"Answer the question!"

"Answer the question!" and she finally starts screaming,

"NO! I HAVEN'T DONE IT, OKAY?! I NEVER DID IT!"

Or something like that. That was how it was, in the late eighties, in high school in America. But I left and went to my last year of high school in Sweden. And I always thought that, if The Breakfast Club were a Swedish teen movie, Den Frukosta Klubben, it would have gone like this:

Entire "Have you done it?" conversation deleted. (Nobody would care.) Extensive sex scene between Jud Nelson and Molly Ringwald doing it, full on nudity, with lots of giggling in the broom closet. Students ride bicycles home afterwards. (In real life, Molly Ringwald would later move to France.)

After several months in Sweden, I realized that Swedish teens had about the same amount of sex as American teens, it's just that the Swedish teens had no shame about it. I had been warned before going to Sweden,

"Watch out! Sex is like a handshake to them in Sweden!"

Which was not true at all. Sex is like a normal part of human development in Sweden. Mothers say things about their children like,

"Can you believe Kristin is already having boys spend the night? They grow up so fast!"

I, however, never had sex in Sweden, because nobody liked me there. I figured it must have been because I was hideously ugly and generally deformed, in a non-specific way. Looking at pictures of me from the time, you can see that it's true.

 (I'm the redhead. [Yes, I know it's a black and white photo, but you just know who the redhead is, don't you? It's like knowing Ralph Fiennes's eyes were blue in Schindler's List. It was a black and white film, but you remember his eyes in color, don't you?])

Also, in Sweden they had this movie they showed in school that said to never have sex with foreigners, because we all had AIDS. It was much ridiculed among the students, but nevertheless adhered to strictly. AIDS had not yet come to Sweden in 1991, and they were intent on keeping it that way- and there I was from the San Francisco Bay Area, den of vice, where we practically invented AIDS. Of course, all of the foreigners in the Swedish Sexual Instruction Video were French. Those Swedish sex educators knew something that I didn't (that French men were horn dogs who loved foreigners).

So, assuming as I did that I was hideously ugly, it was especially surprising and a little bit scary to have so many men interested in me in Paris. Zgjenyue and I started discussing what it might be that was attracting all of these men to us. Ludmilla just kind of stood by and listened, not offering much. She didn't talk much in general.

This is the first time we ever talked about attracting men. Ever. One of the things I really liked about Zgjenyue and about Ludmilla is that they never talked about hair, cosmetics, sex, whom they thought was attractive, what clothes they wore, or really anything like that. They didn't listen to love songs. They didn't read romance novels. They didn't care. Ludmilla read sci fi and listened to movie soundtracks, but only instrumental movie soundtracks. When asked about music, she would go on at length about how annoying it was that they were actually putting songs into movies, now, songs with words, and it was harder and harder to find a good instrumental track. Zgjenyue listened to Nine Inch Nails and read the same book, Mommy Dearest, over and over again, every weekend. Also, she deeply enjoyed the writings of the Marquis de Sade- which made it especially exciting for her to come to Paris. I'm not even going to try and explain that. The point is: they were not romantic girly girls.

     Although, I should mention that Zgjenyue, about ten minutes before we left San Francisco, had suddenly lost her awkward teenage persona and become really attractive and mysterious looking. She had this interesting combination of olive skin and red hair. (By some strange coincidence, we all three of us had red hair: I was a strawberry blond, Ludmilla had reddish brown hair, and Zgjenyue’s hair was a deep auburn.)

 She wore her black heart on her sleeve, which I think made her all the more attractive. Or, at least, that was what I would've thought, but according to the French men, no. She was the least pursued. The number of sexual propositions went like this:

1. Ludmilla got the most attention.

2. I got the second most attention.

3. Zgjenyue got the least attention (which was still a huge amount of attention).

So, we set about trying to figure out what it was about us that attracted these men. Looking around us, it didn't look like the women of Paris were constantly harassed.

"What's different about us?" I asked.

"Whatever it is, Ludmilla has it in Spades," said Zgjenyue. Sitting on the train, Ludmilla blushed and still had that slight smile on her face. We were on our way to the Musée de Rodin, because Rodin was one of my favorite artists of all time. We exited the subway car and started up the escalator. "Look at the women, while we go up. What's different about them?"

Beside us was a full escalator going down, as we ascended. I openly stared at all of the women. I didn't comment until street level.

"They don't smile!" said Zgjenyue.

"They all wear black!" I said.

"They look mean," said Ludmilla.

"I think it's the smiling," said Zgjenyue. "Ludmilla smiles the most. I think that's it!"

"I think you're right!"

"Let's practice not smiling."

Have you ever stood on a busy street in Paris, on a rainy Spring day, with your two best friends, on a grand adventure, and tried not to smile? Yeah, so, it didn't work. Ludmilla was especially comical because she thought she was not smiling but she actually still was.

The security at the Musée de Rodin took my umbrella but not my Swedish hunting knife, which would prove to be the norm throughout the week. They always returned the umbrella when you left. There must be something I'm really missing about umbrellas and their detrimental effects on art.

Rodin's work was strangely disappointing in person. It was commonplace. The Thinker was there, forever thinking. It was too solid. I wanted something gravity defying, but there it was, grounded to the earth, when I wanted to fly away.

We ate dinner at some cheap American burger place, where you could get a disgusting burger called, "Le Big." A man was drinking a beer and smoking at the table next to us. Pigeons were eating fries off the sidewalk. Ludmilla ate Zgjenyue's fries. They were truly disgusting fries. Mostly, it was the ketchup. The ketchup in France is not ketchup. Just not. We walked over to the Seine and looked at all of the bridges crossing over it. The air was misty. It was beautiful in the way that only Paris is beautiful. But the men would not leave us alone.

"Such a beautiful day, such a beautiful river, perhaps you would like to make love here?"

"No."

We walked away, quickly, with nowhere to go.

"Maybe if we go down to that walkway down by the river, that might be nice."

So we went down, and by the river were droves of couples kissing, petting, making out in ways that Jud Nelson in The Breakfast Club never even dreamed of. Also, three guys (Number 36, 37, and 38) had followed Ludmilla down to the riverbank with us.

"Jesus! What is wrong with these people?" said Zgjenyue. "You can't go anywhere without seeing it or being asked to do it."

"Let's go back up," I said. "It was better up there."

"Let's just walk a little ways. Maybe it won't be as bad a little ways up."

It was totally as bad a little ways up.

     We went to a park and started watching some young guys putting on a play. They seemed to be having a dress rehearsal. It was a comedy. We were laughing and then they just stopped the play and asked if we wanted to go back and party with them. But we didn't want to go back and party somewhere with them. We just wanted to watch their little play.

We went over to a bench and bemoaned that we could not just watch their play.

There was a man with a baby in a baby stroller nearby. Zgjenyue started talking with him, and I had a bad feeling about it. She was saying what a cute baby he had and pretty soon he was asking her to sleep with him at naptime. We got up and left.

"I thought it was safe! He had a baby!" she said.

"I know. I know," I said.

Ludmilla walked a little ways behind us, enjoying the milieu.

On the way home to our hotel that evening, there was one truly nice man. We met this man, a black man who spoke perfect English, who told us all about his family heritage. He was kind in a way we had taken for granted in America.

"You might think, looking at me, that I am a new immigrant to this country, but my family goes back eight generations here." And he told us about islands and uprisings and marriages and all sorts of wonders of another world totally different from ours. He gave us some advice about places to see in Paris. It was a long and pleasant ride on the train. All of this, he said in English. He was lovely.

"What brings you to France?" asked the kind man.

"Frankly," said Ludmilla, "I'd rather be in Germany."

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Thank you for reading this excerpt from, Avoiding Sex with Frenchmen: A Picture Book for Adults, by Shoshanah Lee Marohn. If you enjoyed this, you may also enjoy reading the rest of Avoiding Sex with Frenchmen, which is available at amazon.com.