In a book that has attracted a great deal of publicity five months ahead of publication, Jamie Cat Callan eulogises about French women and makes a devastating comparison with their Anglo-Saxon counterparts. However, the informed few to have already read it say unkindly that, often like sex, the anticipation may prove better than the actual event.
According to Ms Callan, in “French Women Don’t Sleep Alone”, to be published by Kensington Press, their success in the male companionship stakes is due to their firm refusal to feed or nurse their boyfriends. She accuses her compatriots of “trying too hard, with grim results.” The female of the French species, on the other hand, has an “effortless gift for attracting men…French women’s love lives are romantic, sensual, playful, complicated, intense and positively epic.”
You might expect some extravagant, even exotic vocabulary from Ms Callan, a highly regarded creative-writing teacher whose own romantic adventures alas have proved a little more prosaic. Aged 40, newly-divorced with a daughter of ten, she found renewed love with one of her own students, a slightly older, also divorced, climate change scientist by the name of Bill Thompson. The author of another advice book, "Hooking Up or Holding Out," Ms Callan hooked up with Bill amidst the kitchen pots and pans and has never looked back.
With a female friend acting as interpreter, Ms Callan interviewed women for her latest book in Paris and Besançon, plus Flanders thrown in for good measure. Her unscientific conclusions have been supported, though in rather less romantic terms, by a new French study based on more than 12,000 interviews. It concludes that French women are "sexual predators," becoming "more and more assertive in their sexual habits." with more than twice as many partners over their lifetime than they would have 40 years ago. This statistic seems somewhat less surprising when an examination of the small print shows an increase from about two partners then to a still modest five today.
From our November 2008 e-newsletter
