France. Sex. Problem?

Paris. THE posters displayed in Paris Métro stations show a slim woman in her 50s in a cocktail dress, reclining on a leather sofa. Her hair is natural, her makeup understated, her smile satisfied. In the foreground, a man, his torso nude, slips two 100-euro notes into his pocket.

The posters were advertising “Cliente,” a popular movie that revolves around clichés about prostitution and gigolos in France. Judith, the client, who is played by Nathalie Baye, one of France’s highest-paid actresses, is not a pathetic, lifted rich woman of a certain age and nothing to do. Rather, she is a hard-charging, 51-year-old television shopping-channel anchor and director who, after her marriage falls apart, wants good sex without strings and is willing to pay handsomely for it.

For Josiane Balasko, 58, the director, author and actress (she plays Judith’s sister), the goals were twofold: to shatter a long-held taboo in France and to send a positive message to middle-aged women who find themselves alone and wanting sexual fulfillment.

“Prostitution is the last sexual territory owned by men,” she said in an interview. “Men are in control of pleasure and have the right to buy it. Women do not. A lot of my friends are alone, lonely, divorced. They can’t always reinvent themselves with another man and a new family. So I decided to show a female client of a male escort. She’s not a victim. She is a woman who is in control of her life, her feelings, her sexual pleasure.”

Six years ago, Ms. Balasko could not sell the television screenplay. Its subject, she said, was considered “too raw, too hot.” After the book version became a best seller, it was easy to attract financial backing for a film.

“Cliente” comes at a moment when France is struggling with boundaries: the public portrayal of sex and sexuality, the limits of privacy for its public figures. This is the case, even though historically, the French are much less conflicted than Americans when it comes to sex.

France is, after all, a country where the very proper National Library recently mounted a 16-year-and-older-only exhibition of its vast collection of erotica that included a grainy six-minute film made in 1921 showing two women in lingerie servicing one man.

But even here, there are subtle changes that reflect both a willingness to be more open about sex and a determination to keep things secret, to be both more and less judgmental.

President Nicolas Sarkozy is partly responsible for the shifting terrain. For the first time in France’s 50-year-old Fifth Republic, Mr. Sarkozy and his new, third wife, the model-turned-pop-singer Carla Bruni-Sarkozy, have moved the personal lives of the president and first lady squarely into the public domain. The two have posed for photographers in the private quarters of the Élysée Palace, even sitting together on the presidential bed. Ms. Bruni-Sarkozy, who is 40, has told interviewers that she “would love” to have Mr. Sarkozy’s children.

In Mr. Sarkozy’s cabinet, meanwhile, Justice Minister Rachida Dati, 42, who is unmarried and was born a Muslim, has announced that she is pregnant, although she has not identified the father.

“A revolution comes when what was taboo becomes mainstream,” said Pascal Bruckner, the intellectual and novelist who has written extensively about sexuality. “When you have images in the Métro of a woman paying for sex who could be the middle-aged woman next door, and a single pregnant Muslim justice minister and no one seems to care, the certainties are in trouble. Perhaps we’re seeing a quiet revolution, one that is more subversive and silent that the Sixties.”

That revolution is evident in a new book about women’s desires by the gynecologist Sylvain Mimoun titled, “What Women Prefer,” based on a poll of 1,542 women. Its conclusion that 96 percent of French women have sexual fantasies may not, in itself, be surprising, but the willingness to talk on the record about those fantasies is.

The book became the subject of a 20-page spread in French Elle magazine, and inspired a recent interview column in the newspaper Le Parisien, which asked five women: “And you, what is your fantasy?”

“To practice Kama Sutra for three days without stopping,” answered one of the women, Carmen Biacchi, 40, from the Paris suburb of Pantin.

At midnight last Saturday, Canal-Plus, a satellite television channel, aired six soft-core pornographic films directed by women. Billed as pornography by women for women, the films are promoted as being “attentive to feminine pleasure by taking into account its aesthetic aspects.”

In one film, a woman dressed in a bed jacket and long colored necklaces masturbates. “I often find porn humiliating for women,” Caroline Loeb, the director of the film, said in an interview in Elle. “Since I am a feminist, it was the chance to portray another, more positive image of sexuality.”

The producer of the films, Sophie Bramly, last year founded a Web site that is a tribute to Simone de Beauvoir’s groundbreaking book on feminism, “The Second Sex.” It is devoted to women’s sexual pleasure — intellectual, sociological and practical — and sells, among other things, erotic films and sex toys that Ms. Bramly describes as “nicely designed and functional.”

“Women are still a little confused,” Ms. Bramly said. “They work incredibly hard and they wake up one day to find that the husband has run off with a younger woman who usually looks just like the one he married in the first place. We’re telling women, ‘Get some pleasure.’ ”

Contrary to popular images of French women who are liberated sex machines, the authors of a study on sexual habits published earlier this year concluded that the sexual practices of the French are fairly predictable.

For example, the study, based on interviews of 12,364 people age 18 to 69, said that 73 percent of women and 59 percent of men believe that a man’s sexual needs are biologically higher than those of women.

“The way in which French women live their lives is very different from what we see in the media,” said Nathalie Bajos, director of research at the French National Institute for Health and Medical Research and an author of the report. “Sure, women have fantasies, but in reality, they lead sexual lives much more constrained than men. This creates tensions — women are supposed to be liberated, but we still have inequality. A man who has five partners is considered normal. A woman who does the same is considered loose.”

Take the case of Catherine Millet, the 60-year-old art critic and author of the 2001 best-selling memoir, “The Sexual Life of Catherine M.” The book described Ms. Millet’s never-ending, loveless sexual encounters — in offices, swingers clubs, parking lots, cemeteries, trucks.

Her new memoir, “Jour de Souffrance” (“Day of Suffering”), is the classic tale of the wronged wife, a journey through the three-year “crisis of jealousy” that she suffered as her lover — who is now her husband — played around. She now says that sex is not the key to happiness.

Still, when the newsweekly Le Nouvel Observateur featured Ms. Millet and her new book on its cover, it ran a photograph of her, her left breast exposed, taken long ago.

Ms. Millet never paid for sex. And although there are ads for male escorts on the Internet, the concept of a woman paying for sex is still a taboo. “If a woman agrees to pay a man for sex, she’s a whore,” Mr. Bruckner said. “If a man pays a woman for sexual services in France, it’s accepted. It’s one of the strange flaws of feminism.”

Mr. Bruckner should know. Four years ago, he wrote a novel about a married male diplomat who led a secret life as a gigolo. The protagonist ended up losing his wife, his children and his job. Mr. Bruckner was not able to sell the screenplay.

“Cliente” is lighter. Marco, the 29-year-old handyman Judith hires for sex, becomes a gigolo to help his family make ends meet. He and Judith become attached to each other, although ultimately he goes back to his young wife.

But the subject remains so edgy, even for Mr. Bruckner, that when his 11-year-old daughter asked him about the poster showing Ms. Baye and her gigolo, he could not tell her the truth.

“I told her she was paying the plumber,” he said. “If I had told her the truth, she would have thought it was disgusting.”

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Author: Elaine Sciolino
Original Source: New York Times
Date Published: October 30, 2008
Web Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/30/fashion/30cliente.html
Date Accessed Online: 2008-11-03