Debra Olliver argues that the French women’s nonchalance makes them sexy, a point, which I find hilarious because it is shallow and limits itself to a titillating stereotype :
[…] Granted, French feminism didn't play out the way it did in Britain, and was not nearly as militant as it was in the US - no British or American feminist could declare what French feminist Sylviane Agacinski once did: "We want the power to seduce and be seduced. There will never be a war of the sexes in France."
For many sociocultural reasons there has always been more complicity between men and women in France than in Anglo-Saxon cultures, and that complicity breeds a different kind of woman. This is at the heart of fascination with French women. Franco-American actress Charlotte Rampling once said that "French women have been made beautiful by French people. They're very aware of their bodies, the way they move and speak; they are very confident of their sexuality."
Indeed, French culture has made them "like that" - which is very different "from us". And one fundamental difference is that, behind the "yik-yak-yik-yak" that Williams describes, French women fundamentally don't give a damn about much of the moral and social dogma that ties so many Anglo-Saxon women up in knots.
The fact is that sex and sexiness are less moralized and divinized in France than they are in the Anglo-Saxon one. French women are allowed to use and to show their body because it isn’t equated with sin and all kinds of potential disasters of biblical proportions. It is for this reason that women politicians present themselves differently in France and in the United States. Hillary Clinton, for example is allowed a very limited amount of freedom in the way that she uses her body or rather hides it with her clothes while Ségolène Royal had more freedom and was allowed to avoid the desexualizing uniform that is the pantsuit and to wear more revealing and feminine clothes. Thus, it’s all about sex and morality. In France, when woman shows her legs, people look admiringly without shame and bitchiness and sexiness are not antonyms. In the Anglo-Saxon world, when a woman shows too much skin, she is bad (not in good way) and bitches are almost never sexy because they are considered power-hungry and that it is emasculating. The fact that it was necessary to proclaim that “Bitch is the new Black” to make it less threatening and unsexy proves my point. I think that the difference is just one of nonchalance but rather one of views about quintessence. Anglo-Saxons still believe that a woman’s body is her identity, that she doesn’t own it fully, that she has to be mindful constantly of its tempting nature and to cover it to protect themselves and poor men from a nature who did not equipped them with the will to resist the flesh. The French believe that women are allowed to play with, to use their body as an instrument because it is theirs and because by doing so they are helping men to look and to fantasize about what they cannot touch.
