As you might expect, living in France, I’ve had to compromise on a certain number of California luxuries. No late night runs to the market when I realize I need milk for the next morning, no driving down the coast with the top down blasting British pop and no ubiquitous portable caffeine (I refuse to go into Starbucks here when coffee is half the price and twice as good at any café down the street). But when I first got here two and a half years ago, I had no idea I’d have to compromise my ideas of personal space and women’s rights at the same time.
Of course, France is a modern country with laws and statutes that guard against inequality, but that doesn’t stop employers from discriminating against minorities. And it also doesn’t stop French culture and people from being generally sexist on a day-to-day basis. I remember not being too shocked by the fact that my host mother was expected to have dinner ready and waiting for her husband when he got home (or waiting in the fridge for when he worked late), or that she did all of the shopping and that her husband didn’t know a frying pan from a strainer. I did, however, bat an eyelash or two when, after failing to solve a little wooden puzzle, she said that women’s brains weren’t really made for that sort of thing.
Who knows if there’s any truth to that, or if it’s just social conditioning that puts those thoughts into people’s minds, but I can’t help but notice that here, the gender roles that women fought so hard to break in the 60s and 70s still remain, in large part, true for a considerable part of the population.
The same goes for sexuality. I can’t tell you how many times I (or a group of girls) have been whistled at, leered at, or followed on the street, not to mention groped on the metro (at 8:30 in the morning, no less!), without so much as a disapproving glance from onlookers. But what clenched it for me – that is, what confirmed my belief that France is a few steps behind in the women’s rights area – was when I went out to a club with some friends a couple of months ago and had quite an interesting experience.
I made a lot of observations that night, but the main problem was that I forgot the cardinal rule of male-female relations in France: any sort of kindness shown to a male stranger or any sign showing interest whatsoever (even down to a simple smile), is basically equivalent to a sexual invite (which is such a problem, in and of itself). So, when, while trying to escape from a clearly drunk sketchball, and in a characteristically spur-of-the-moment act of boldness, I asked a guy I’d noticed hanging around if he wanted to dance, I forgot that that was basically asking him if he wanted to go into the bathroom and screw me up against the stainless steel doors. After realizing the dancing was not going as well as I thought it would, I returned back to my friends, who were all shocked and thought I was seriously interested in the guy, since girls never ask a guy to dance unless they want to hook up with him. And the best part: right before I left, the guy came back up and asked me if I wanted him to “devour me.”
I really couldn’t believe that it was socially acceptable to ask me that, and of course I still can’t stop wondering why a girl can’t ask a guy to dance without it being taken as foreplay. Or why all of the female cops I see are always on parking duty. I know it’s a loaded question, but is France really that sexist? All I know is that I can’t stand not being able to go up to a guy I don’t know – just for conversation or for other reasons – for fear that I’ll look desperate and/or easy. I don’t remember it being like that in the States. Do you?
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Now that surprises me considering the liberalistic ideologies that has sprung from that country….
This country, the USA is the only country where they focus on the individual, which is why women’s liberation is so important to us, while other countries conform to the already existing society