Of creepy men and mosquitoes

I am suffering from acute moving angst. I'm supposed to start my new job in the UK in ten days, and as of now I maybe have an apartment (they're having trouble getting a reference from my French landlord - well duh), I maybe have a moving company, I have an idea of when I want to fly out, but I am very worried that my work visa won't be ready in time. The visa folks have my passport, too, so no chance that I could go to UK, set up house and come back to France to pick it up. Nope. Sorry.

I'm also dreading going back to the visa processing centre to pick it up, since it's in a scummy suburban neighbourhood and I felt really uncomfortable going there before and taking abuse from the men who hang around the bus station. And this, dear readers, is one of my two major frustrations of France in the summer: creepy men. (I promise I will deal with the summery joys of Paris in a later post. Right now I'm cranky).

Creepy men were one of the reasons I was so unhappy when I first moved here. It's a seasonal issue: once the clocks change in October I can go about my business unharassed. But in the summer months I get catcalls, nasty comments, and vulgar gestures nearly every time I leave the house. It's humiliating and it makes me angry, and it touches on a much broader, very sensitive issue. Most of these men are not 'francais de souche,' or French in ethnic origin: they, or their parents or grandparents, are from the former French colonies in North Africa. As a colonial historian I understand all too well the issues facing this community: the way they fueled the economic growth of post-war France, but feel they reaped none of the benefits; the discrimination they face in hiring; the traumatic memories of the Algerian war; the way suburbs were poorly constructed and badly maintained, leading to ghettoisation. I'm also horrified by the language and arguments of the anti-immigration extreme right in France.

A few years ago French law was clarified to state that the 1905 law on secularisation (laicite) means that religious symbols should be banned in public institutions, like schools. This means, for example, that a teacher should not be wearing a crucifix. But the main reason it was controversial was that it also means that women and girls cannot wear the hijab, or Muslim veil.

Before moving to France I felt quite uncomfortable with this law. I felt that it was a violation of religious freedom, an unwarranted (racist?) attack on the Muslim community, a knee-jerk reaction to 9/11, and an infantilizing and neocolonial move: you, Muslim women, are oppressed and do not know it - you need our help to progress. We know what's best for you.

Living in a Parisian suburb has changed my feelings about this law, in ways that I'm not fully at ease with. Last summer I saw one of the nasty creeps who had made a vulgar comment in the morning, strolling around with his veiled wife later in the afternoon. I'll never truly understand the complex reasons why some women choose to wear a hijab, but I knew there was a problem when my first instinct in responding to the harassment was to change the way I dress. Maybe I was showing too much skin - maybe I was provocative? Ridiculous, MCM replied. It's summer. You should be able to show your arms without being harassed. We debated whether these men were trying to embarrass or intimidate me into covering up - acting as morality police - or whether they were getting off on Western women while expecting their own to cover up. Either way, it sickens me.

I feel extremely uncomfortable with some of the conclusions you could draw from this. But I do believe strongly in gender equality, and I've come to the conclusion that you don't have equality when women are expected to cover all their skin and face harassment when they don't. What I still don't know is how to deal with the issue when I'm faced with it on the street.

The other serious frustration in summertime in Paris is much more straightforward. Mosquitoes, biting, buzzing and waking me up in the night. Honestly, French people: screens! In the windows! How can you not have screens? Dr Mmm, who is visiting Paris, commiserates with me - she also has that mosquito delicacy, pale Irish skin, and gets enormous welts from the bites. It's awful and if anyone else tells me to just get a citronella candle, I'll lose it.

Summertime rant over. Thank you.

Myths about La Francaise in the Summer

I need to blog faster, as soon as the urge hits me. I keep coming up with post ideas and then being beaten to it by someone else. Case in point: I've been meaning to write about topless bathing for a while now*, and then MCM noticed that The Guardian published this article just two days ago.

That's okay. I have lots more to say!

Most anglophone women seem to view La Francaise as an emaciated, effortless, elegant style icon, who brazenly bares all on the beach, in spite of a rather lackadaisacal attitude towards personal hygiene and grooming.

Wrong. Wrong again. Here, the Accidental Parisian debunks and updates some summertime myths about La Francaise:

1. French women all go topless on the beach: I was talking to two of my students recently about this - both of them women my age - and was surprised when they told me that their mothers always went topless when they were kids in the 80s, but neither of them would now. Why not? They shrugged. "I guess we're more conservative now," said one; "I just don't feel the need to," said the other. Hmm. Intriguing!

Le monokini is banned at my public pool, so I had to wait for my vacation on the Cote d'Azur to find out if there were true. My unscientific test results: going topless won't shock anyone, but very few under-35s do it. I quizzed MCM. What did he think? He shrugged. "I think women don't feel they need to. They know that they can, but they don't feel they have to in order to be noticed and to be sexy. Or maybe there are just lots of nice bathing suits available now." Would he mind if I did? "Of course not. It is your body and you are free." Yeah, but would he be a little bit embarrassed? "No, you're the most beautiful woman on the beach." (Awwww.)

I still haven't found a satisfactory answer to this cultural shift, but I'm quite sure that there has been a shift. Thoughts, comments and theories welcome!

2. French women are all really thin, even though they eat tons of cheese. French women come in all shapes and sizes, and many of them worry about, and struggle with, their weight, just like women in the rest of the developed world. They go about it quite differently, though. Pharmacies are stocked with dozens of weight loss tinctures, drinks and creams. French women's magazines recommend detoxing with asparagus and green tea and paying big money for spa treatments that claim to suck inches off thighs. Exercise? Whah dat? These magazine articles seem even funnier to me because French is written in the first person, present simple: "My first day, I eliminate. I eat asparagus and drink green tea. I offer myself an institute of beauty. Day 2. I prepare a tisane with three teaspoons of diuretic, purchased at my pharmacy. Day 3. I sweat. My hammam removes the toxins."

At one of the offices where I teach I ran into the snippy receptionist in the lunchroom. I was getting my coffee, she was decanting a brown liquid into an empty 1-liter bottle of Contrex. (Contrex is an appalling salted bottled water that is wildly popular, marketed as "ma partenaire minceur" - my slimming partner. Apparently the salt kills your appetite. Bring on the bloat). "Ooh, that's not something to drink, is it?" I asked. "Of course. It's for losing weight. It eliminates and cleanses," she replied, shocked, like I was a complete moron. Here's me thinking it was plant food. Now I know why she's always in a foul mood.

3. French women dress so well, all the time! Let me set the record straight. La Francaise is the queen of winter: black wool is her secret weapon, and she has no competition. But summer? Good gawd, it's awful. I was recently in London and the London summer uniform is: fitted, solid-coloured jersey, knee-length cotton print skirt, bead necklace, cute flats. Perfect! In Paris, women are either wearing their winter clothes (just less of them), or things that are better suited for a beach or nightclub.

I was recently wondering if I could get away with bare legs in an office (with brown cotton sleeveless shirtdress and wedge shoes). In some North American offices, you'd need hose. Well, any concerns vanished when I saw that the sales manager, a woman my age, was wearing a slinky halter minidress with glitzy sandals and a regular bra (with shoulder straps). A black lacy one. How do I know? Half of it was showing. I thought this was an aberration but I saw 2 other women sporting the same look while I was taking the bus home. Eek!

I am fascinated, in talking to French women my age, that they consider the right to dress sexily to be a fundamental one. In an office, I feel like I couldn't dress like that and be taken seriously - I also wouldn't feel comfortable. Talking to my students, they consider it their right to dress how they like in the workplace.


4. French women don't shave their armpits! This is just outdated: I haven't seen a single female hairy underarm in France in the last five years. Not one. If anything, French women are a bit obsessed with above-mentioned instituts de beaute and epilation. Waxing is fairly cheap here, too - a bikini wax costs about 10 euro.



*I never in my life thought I would write a sentence like that.

More learning experiences

Some things that I have learned recently:

1). I can buy episodes of What Not to Wear on Itunes and watch them on my computer here. That probably sounds pathetic - move to France to watch American cable TV! - but MCM has had a lot of work events in the evening, and it's nice to have a little break. If we owned a TV I would watch something in French.

2). One of my students, a manager in his late twenties, believes that hiring discrimination is only right and natural. After all, he wouldn't want to hire someone who was different from him - in particular, it would be "impossible" for him to manage someone who was older than him. And he wouldn't want to hire a woman who might get pregnant. (This came up in the course of a discussion of French vs UK/USA resumes and CVs, and I explained that in the English-speaking world you should not list your date of birth, marital status, gender or nationality on your CV as you do in France). I am not suggesting that this is necessarily a widespread attitude in France, but it was a shocker nonetheless.

3). One of my other students discovered that the song Total Eclipse of the Heart has a number of phrasal verbs in it. (A phrasal verb is a two-part verb - usually verb+preposition - which has a distinct meaning from the verb on its own. Examples: throw vs. throw out, drop vs. drop off). He then performed the song for me, complete with hand motions.

4). We probably won't go out to celebrate the end of Book 1. MCM has been feeling weird for a number of days: it's probably nothing, but there's a chance he may have gallstones so he is having some x-rays done tomorrow.

5). There is a great service in France for home visits from doctors. When MCM got home after midnight last night with nausea, a sudden pain in his neck and a headache, I decided we should call the "SOS Medecin" hotline. The doctor arrived in under 10 minutes and decided that MCM did not have meningitis. (No, I didn't believe that he really had meningitis, but it's serious enough that you should rule it out. I was perhaps conditioned to react this way by Nurse Siobhan, the nurse at my high school, who was hypervigilant and routinely screened for meningitis and tropical diseases). The doctor's callout cost 77 euro, nearly all of which will be reimbursed by the Securite Sociale. The rest should be covered by our new mutuelle.

5). There will be serious delays on my bus line over the next few months due to construction. I may have to start cycling to work, as it just seems ridiculous to spend nearly an hour travelling 5 kilometers (3.1 miles).

Keep the Change

Yesterday MCM and I finally went to open a joint bank account. We had been in a bizarre Catch-22 situation for most of the autumn: I couldn't open an account without my residence permit, but without a bank account I couldn't go through a number of other administrative processes. Anyway...

We selected a major international bank that has a branch in our neighbourhood and scheduled an appointment. We decided in advance that MCM would do most of the talking. The bank employee was a woman in her thirties; she was brisk but seemed competent, and quickly began typing our personal details into the computer and running off photocopies of our passports and pay stubs. Throughout the meeting she addressed all of her questions to MCM - not surprisingly, since I wasn't speaking much anyway and I wasn't at my most coherent in answering the one question she directed at me. She occasionally referred to "Madame", jerking her head in my direction.

When she had finished setting up the account and gave us the documents to read and sign, I realised that she had given me the wrong name. When MCM and I got married last summer, we decided to hyphenate our names together: my "maiden" name followed by his "master" name. I have changed mine on my passport; MCM has not yet because it would have meant waiting ages for a new passport at a time when he was stuck in much bureaucracy and had upcoming travel.

This has been a source of confusion in France. Legally speaking, French women do not change their names when they marry. Their married names become common usage but it's not a legal change the way it is in the US or the UK. Although many French people have hyphenated names, I have difficulty explaining to people that my name was legally changed in the United States, and that the French cannot simply call me something else because my name falls outside their social conventions.

Thus, the following conversation with Bank Lady:
AP: Actually, my last name is not Mari. It is Smith-Mari.
BL: But Smith is your maiden name. You are Madame Mari, no?
AP: Yes, it's my maiden name, but my legal name is Smith-Mari. Not Mari. I don't have any kind of ID that has just Mari on it.
BL: But, you are married to Monsieur Mari.
AP: Yes, but I'm not French. I changed my name in the US.
BL: But we can't put Smith-Mari on the account. For a joint account it must be Monsieur's name on the account.
AP: But Monsieur is also changing his name to Smith-Mari.
MCM: Yes, this is true.
BL: What? Are you kidding? [Stares at MCM with her mouth hanging open]
MCM: No, I'm serious.
AP: [attempting humour] You see, we believe in equality for men.
BL: Well, I can put Smith-Mari down for Madame, but you probably can't get a card. It's too long. It won't fit. I'll have to speak to my colleagues. But the account must be in Monsieur's name.
AP: Okay, well, uhh, thank you. We appreciate that.
BL: Right, if you'll just sign here, at the bottom of the page.
AP: Of course... wait, don't I sign here, at the top of the page?
BL: Well... yes, actually! Sorry, my mistake. I always put the man's name first, but there I didn't.

Although I'll admit that I enjoy the status that comes with "Madame" - I'm certainly treated better than when I spent time in France as a "Mademoiselle" - it's very frustrating to feel that my public identity has been reduced entirely to "Wife of Monsieur." I fumed on the way home from the bank, blamed my clumsy French, blamed myself; MCM comforted me and blamed ingrained sexism in French society.

Was I too sensitive? Fully realising that I cannot change French society, I don't know how to get my head around this situation.