Rue Rude

Too old to be a maman?

A friend of mine has three daughters and still wanted one more child. She told me she went to the doctor to get approval (very French to ask for approval from your doctor) and told him, then said, "But I'm probably too old?"

"Nonsense!" the doctor said. "How old are you?"

"39." 

"Ah oui, effectivement."

High heels all day

It's almost the end of the sales (they go till Tuesday 12 February I believe) and I trawled through the grands magasin looking for the perfect pair of shoes. To my astonishment, I did find them! The perfect pair of black high heels, not too expensive, in my size, and remarkably comfortable for a pair of high heels. And they even stayed on my feet! I can't tell you how long I'd been looking for such a pair-- more than a year, at least. I felt comblée and started babbling to the pretty salesgirl. 

"I have the same shoes," she said, pulling up her trouser legs, "and I wear them all day long. I can tell you that I run around in them pas mal, even going up and down the stairs, and they're quite comfortable."

"All the same," I said doubtfully, "it can't be good for your feet to wear high heels all day."

"On est obligée," she said. "We have to be fashionable. You should see the shoes the supervisors wear! Heels like that!" And she held her fingers five inches apart. "It's a wonder they can walk after an hour or two!"

Anomalies of French life: the cigarette voice

 
Journalists Isaure du Fretay and Jean-Pierre Gaillard. J-P  starts talking at about 0:12

It took me a while to figure out why French radio authority figures sounded so different from American ones. The Americans, no matter their age, just sounded... younger somehow. One day I was listening to Radio France Info, as usual, and Jean-Pierre Gaillard came on with his emblématique "Jean-Pierre Gaillard: La Bourse" [the stock exchange]. His voice was deep and strong, somehow reassuring. Suddenly it hit me. 

Smoking is the reason these people's voices sound different.* 

Of course, there are still plenty of smokers in the U.S.A.  But on the whole, the upper and media classes (what the Brits call "the chattering classes") are non-smoking, and the broadcast scratchy voice disappeared years ago when they quit. 

 

*I have no idea if J-P smokes. My guess is he used to smoke a lot and has given up in the past few years-- he's not as scratchy as he used to be.

Anomalies of French life: reverence for psychoanalysis; or Le Mur, autism, and the shrinks

In the past few days and weeks, a French documentary about the use of psychoanalysis to treat autism, Le Mur, has been raising hackles and consciousness all over France. I was surprised to learn that psychoanalysis is still overwhelmingly the method used to treat autistic children in France. To put it mildly, it is old-fashioned, like phrenology, and not known for impressive results. You could call it the French exception.

In psychoanalytical treatment of autism, the mother is blamed for the child's autism: she was too cold, or possibly too warm (emotionally "incestuous"), and this terrible behavior made her child psychotic. The nicer shrinks say that the mothers didn't severely damage their child on purpose. 

Le Mur is a Michael-Moore-style documentary in which well known French psychoanalysts who treat autistic children find themselves hoist by their own petard and are made to look arrogant idiots, or at times well-meaning ones, in their very own words. To be fair, some of them seem like kind people; but the things they are saying do not come off as sensible. Furious at the movie, three of the psychoanalysts who had agreed to be interviewed sued the documentary maker, saying their words were taken out of context. Yesterday the tribunal in Lille agreed and ordered the documentary maker, Sophie Robert, to pay them €30,000 and to remove the incriminating passages from the 52-minute-long film, which as she points out means no movie. She plans to appeal. She also plans to reveal all the footage, including some she said was worse than what she put in the movie.

Crocodile representing the mother. The psychoanalyst says she is happy when the child hits it.

However, it was a Pyrrhic victory for the shrinks, because the lawsuit itself made the film far better known. Le Mur is making headlines in all the media this week, and is being shown to people involved with autism around the globe (making France look ridiculous). It has now become a cause célèbre, with journalists calling the Lille judgment a dangerous precedent for censorship, and a French lawmaker sponsoring a bill to make psychoanalysis illegal in treating autism. As it should be. 

In the meantime, the film will be banned from the sites where it is still available in France, so if you are in France when you read this, and want to see it, check it out now. (There are subtitles, although not by an English speaker.) 

If you don't have time, you can get a bit of the flavor of it by these little tidbits. I'm going on and on a bit because the film made me angry. I'm sure you, too, know people with autistic children. Do they strike you as so cold and evil so that they could turn a child psychotic? That is what these shrinks believe. They have forgotten their Hippocratic oath: first, do no harm. Think how many divorces and how much misery they have caused in the families of these children. Psychoanalysis is basically a set of unprovable and undisprovable beliefs: the trademark of a religion, not a science.

The pregnant mother does not think of her child as a person

The child is treated coldly and becomes autistic

The mother does not want the child, and this causes autism

 

or she wants the child too much, and has an incestuous relationship with him 

This shrink declares that all mothers have an incestuous relationship with their child, "whether they are aware of it or not"  (well, that's that then, isn't it?)

As Marie-Antoinette famously said when she was accused of incest toward her son, "La nature se refuse à répondre à une pareille inculpation faite à une mère. J'en appelle à toutes celles qui peuvent se trouver ici." [Nature itself refuses to answer to such an accusation against a mother. I call on all the mothers who might be here."] And the women in the room were furious, and for once supported her; the claim of incest was withdrawn from the accusation.

Note that this shrink is talking about emotional incest by the mother, versus actual incest by the father.

They come clean if they talk long enough.

Literally admitting that a shrink can't actually educate or treat a child with autism.

Progress is not expected from the child. According to psychoanalysis, this liberates the child. Or... just leaves it incontinent and speechless as an adult.

Psychoanalysts try to make you happy with your humdrum little lives; it would be unrealistic to have big hopes for a child with autism.

O.M.G.

Toussaint blues

Today is the beginning of the Toussaint school holidays. From this afternoon around 3 o'clock, my part of Paris will empty out for ten days as everyone brings their children to the grandparents' for the duration. It's a good time for tourists to go to the Puces de Saint-Ouen. Last year there was a good deal of anti-Halloween sentiment, but this year it seems to be more accepted-- I think people realize that the children love it. Even Parc Asterix (which by the way is really fun for a foreigner to visit) is getting in on the act with a Fête des Druides and Celtic magic.

Waiting at the doctor's office (left) this morning, I read an editorial in l'Express about the new civic sense in France. It is true that suddenly it has become uncool to smoke here (although all the young girls still do it to stay thin). Not only that, but twice in the last month I have seen a Parisian clean up after their dog-- after seeing someone do that only once before in all my years in Paris, and that was on the rue de Rivoli. People have slowed down on the highways, too. And one day as I was telling an American visitor how the taxi and post office queues used to be wild here, with people stealing your cab or your place in line, a Frenchwoman leaned over to interrupt, "Ça se fait beaucoup moins maintenant."

Personally, I think the explanation that as they travel more outside their own country, French people realize the ways in which France looks bad, and want to change. I wish more Americans could travel abroad.

The article's tone struck me as so French/unAmerican that I decided to translate it in toto:

Tobacco: Leave My Body Alone!

Will smoking in public soon be forbidden? When the ordinary behavior of yesterday becomes taboo....

"Thirty percent of the active population smokes: are we going to make them stand in the corner?" snapped a tobacco industry lobbyist in L'Express in 1997. It was good vision: we are going to make them stand in the corner, if the law proposed the 2nd of November by Yves Bur (UMP), vice-president of the National Assembly, is voted in. Its text aims to forbid tobacco in all public places, as in Ireland, including cafes, restaurants and businesses. History is going in that direction: already, Italy, Sweden, Norway and Malta have taken the step. According to a IFOP poll published by the Journal du dimanche, 88% of nonsmokers and 56% of smokers in France are in favor of the ban. And in a poll by Ipsos for Pfizer, three-quarters of the employees wanted an unpolluted environment, 21% of them forgetting-- like many employers-- that the loi Evin has forbidden smoking on the job since 1991. In a further turn of the screw, the Cour de Cassation [the Supreme Court of France] ruled in favor of an exasperated employee on the 29th of June this year.

In the book L'avènement du corps [The Advent of the Body] (Gallimard), Hervé Juvin explains that "physical capital" is now the object of a cult and even of a territorial and patrimonial combat. Because the body is sacred, one day soon smoking will be considered as vulgar and disgusting as tobacco-chewing or spitting on the ground. Nevertheless, the proportion of smokers is still large: 30% of people from 12-75 years old (from 40% fifteen years ago). The reasons that an ordinary behavior becomes old-fashioned and stigmatized are still a bit mysterious. Thus, it is now considered low-class to litter and rather classy to pick up after one's dog. The strength of the ban? No law was needed for men to stop urinating at every street-corner. The way of life simply evolves, with its puritanisms: today, you don't have the right to scold other people's children, even for them to give their seat to an old person-- nor to exercise authority in the name of the collective interest [not sure at all what is meant by this-- it looks like one of those euphemisms]. Tomorrow, SUVs will be on the scrap heap, along with plastic bags, and girls will no longer let hands wander to their behinds [!!! this is what made me decide to translate the article]. Everyone will do what they like with their body.
But...leave my body alone!

--Jacqueline Remy

 

Going to the doctor is different here

I went to the doctor's office for a checkup. This is the waiting room, typical for this part of Paris except that it was just renovated. There are cherubs in the cut-out above the fireplace. This was probably once someone's living room.

My doctor is a friend of mine and gave me a gown to wear when I took off my clothes. The first time I went to a doctor in France was a big shock. The doctor's office looked like an elegant private library in someone's house, and the doctor told me to take off my clothes. I looked around for a place to change, or a gown to put on, but there was nothing. You were supposed to strip in front of the doctor and then sit there naked answering questions about your medical history, comme si de rien n'était. The doctor laughed at me. "Here in France, we are not afraid of women's bodies!" he said.

French take on volunteerism

The first week after Katrina, a Frenchwoman in New Orleans was  interviewed on Radio France Info. She emphasized that even though the destruction was terrible and some of the behavior was bad, on the whole most people in the affected areas were reacting well and that there had been an outpouring of volonteer aid to help the refugees. "But I also find it scandaleux, all these volunteers working for free," she said. "The government should be doing it and paying decent salaries."

That reminded me of a big, successful French telethon a while back for some charity—I believe for muscular dystrophy. A young woman with the disease was interviewed on the radio right afterwards. She was outraged about the telethon. There should be no place for private charity—the government should take care of it.

U.S. coffee, French health care

From USAToday.com, 14 September:  The cost of health insurance is up to about $11,000 per family per year in the U.S.A., partly borne by employers. And that's with how many people not covered at all?

One of the things the French do better. Make that two.

Starbucks Chairman Howard Schultz, speaking at a health costs roundtable sponsored by cable channel CNBC, called on companies to offer health insurance, saying it's a "moral obligation."

Earlier, he told Washington state congressional representatives Starbucks will spend more on health insurance for employees this year than on coffee, according to the Associated Press.

"It's completely non-sustainable," he said, even for companies such as his that "want to do the right thing."

On Disneyland Paris and the French Keyboard

Today I went to Disneyland Paris. It was school holidays this week, not only in France but also Germany, Britain, and what looked like every north European country.

In the line in front of me was a large English family. By large, I mean huge: tall, big, decent well-off working-class. I found out later they were from Manchester. Behind us in line was a nice international mix of chatter. Suddenly I saw the British father turn around and yell, "YOU! GET BACK!" I looked around and there was a group of North African teenage boys, sneaking their way ahead in the line in the usual French way-- aggressively pushing forward on the side, but all in good humor. The Brits weren't having any of it. "GET BACK!" "How dare they!" "We're ahead of you! You have no right!" "GO BACK--NOW!" "The nerve!" "Oh NO you don't!" The North African kids pretended not to understand (a standard queue-bargers' trick) and shrugged and rolled their eyes and continued to move forward (another). But the Brits were furious and twice as big. Physical violence was not far off. The North African kids decided not to push it. They didn't go back where they had come from, but they stayed a few groups behind us and gave up trying to get past the Brits.

Violent reactions are common when northern Europeans and Americans experience for the first time the pushing and shoving in line that passes for normal in the south. I have now been in France long enough to have a sneaking admiration for those who have the nerve to resquiller (another untranslatable word that means,get around the rules, or more specifically, what the Brits call queue-barging). The French don't approve of people who do it, but it is not unthinkable, outrageous as it is to us. In fact, it is pretty much normal for teenage boys; people just think, "Boys will be boys." The Brits' reaction was so different that it made me realize that some of what keeps people literally in line in Anglo-Saxon countries isn't just politeness but fear of violence. The Brits were actually ready to fight, they were so outraged by what they considered unbelievably rude behavior. However, from the kids' point of view, what they were doing, while certainly frowned upon by manner books, is as normal as speeding on the autoroute, and the Brits were overreacting almost crazily.

I had assumed from looking at them that the kids were French North Africans, but apparently they were speaking German. The Brits assured me that they had traveled all around Europe as tourists, and "The Germans are the worst" for queue-barging. This was a surprise to me, but in fact, the only other people who had pushed past us in a line all day were German.

Most Germans are still mind-bendingly obedient to rules, standing on deserted street-corners at midnight waiting for the light to change, but I have met many unpleasant exceptions in the exact opposite direction. My theory is that these Germans were raised by martinets and rebel against their upbringing by deciding that all rules of social behavior are bad. 

Of course all generalizations are wrong.

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Another word to add to the untranslatable word list: "ride."  In French, you have to say, "What attraction did you like the best?" You can't say, "Which ride did you like most?" But an attraction, of course, can be a show or a picture exhibit. There is no word with the active-movement-meaning of "ride."

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On the French typewriter keyboard, you have to use the shift key to write a period. Maybe French sentences are longer than ours.

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Yasser Arafat is ill and is supposed to be arriving in Paris for treatment. His wife and daughter live in Paris and his wife is a Christian. Many famous people from around the world come to Paris for medical treatment. Arafat's daughter was born in the American Hospital of Paris.

Americans often tell me that our medical system is the best in the world; "Famous people from all over the world come to America to be treated." The U.S. can certainly offer state-of-the-art, top-of-the-line treatment for people who can pay for it. All the same, I don't think a country with 45 million uninsured people can say it has a good medical system.  In 2001, the World Health Organization said that France's medical system was the best in the world, and by this they meant that the entire nation, not just rich people, has the best medical care in the world. There are certainly many, many problems in France, and the health care system is a big one, but this is still something they can be proud of.