Just follow the crowd

Sometimes, not knowing where you are or where you're going can lead you to delightful places

One of the peculiarities of living in a nation you didn’t grow up in is that you don’t know its cultural references. That can be true even of your native country; I spent enough time outside of the US in the late 1980s and early 1990s to be completely unaware of quite a few hit TV series, songs, and movies that friends sometimes mention.

That’s all the more true when you’re in a foreign country. When I hear about a public figure passing away in the US, I’m often surprised to learn that they were still alive. Here, I have no idea who they were in the first place. I am becoming acquainted with the glitterati of French society through the obituary page.

Not having your cultural bearings somewhere has an upside, too, in that it results in everything being a bit of an adventure. I still vividly remember being in Soviet Moscow, probably in 1990, and meeting up with my friend Katya, who said she was taking me to some event. She may have explained what it was, but I didn’t understand and didn’t really try to. First, there wasn’t any point—my non-Russian friends and I referred to Moscow as “wonderland” because we always wondered what the hell was going on. Second, it didn’t matter to me anyway. I was up for all the experiences this strange land had to offer.

We met in front of what looked like a big conference center or concert hall. I could hear music but she led me through a lobby and down a hallway. We met up with a man who led us through a warren of corridors. Finally, he came to the door he was looking for. He opened it and I followed Katya into a dressing room in which a diminutive blond man was dressed like a blue-sequined mermaid. I had absolutely no idea who he was or what was going on, but after a few moments of small talk he went out on stage to perform what struck me as a rather schmaltzy rendition of “Feelings”. I would later learn that his name was Sergey Penkin and that he was a rising star in the Russian music scene. He remains one of the country’s most famous performers.

The lesson that stuck with me from that day was that you should always go along for the ride. You might know what the destination is, but there’s a strong chance it will be interesting. At worst, it will make a good story one day. So when a lighting artist I hadn’t seen since we met at a New Year’s Eve party a couple of years ago sent me a message on Instagram inviting me to a small gathering of women to see her latest show and then go to a new quasi-secret spot together, I had no idea what to expect, but I enthusiastically accepted.

The intimate exhibit was entitled Exotica and was centered around the female form. Some of the works featured ferrotypes of images that Pauline David, the artist I had met, had made; others involved hand-blown neon tubes superimposed on colored images of women’s bodies. “This exhibition revisits the aesthetics of a past where exoticism has crystallized in the visual imagination and where women reigned as absolute mistresses,” the introductory paragraph in the catalog explained. Pauline’s inspiration was old cinema and cabaret, but her view is contemporary.

I sat down to read the catalog and sip the pink spritz someone had handed me when one of the women, in her late 20s, struck up a conversation with me. I commented that seeing nudes shot by a woman felt different than nudes shot by men—the female gaze versus the male gaze. She said that women had finally stopped trying to gain power using the rules of the game established by men and now owned their power in an entirely feminine way.

We had an engaging and wide-ranging conversation about women and sexuality that was interesting to me both because of her perspective as a French woman and as a younger woman. Women in their 20s and 30s have an ease with their bodies and their sexuality that my generation generally didn’t have at their age. We were bound by male ideals of beauty and desirability and any attempt to deviate from those felt like a protest, a chafing against power structures. These younger women simply don’t give a fuck. I love that about them. That’s not to say that they aren’t living in the same patriarchy that we all are, but I’d like to think that their complete dismissal of societal norms might result in lasting change.

A few men had been relegated to the space next door while we women discussed Pauline’s work. Somewhere around midnight we all piled into Uber vans and headed over to La Fontaine Gaillon, a hip Paris restaurant that is the new home of artistic director and immersive event organizer Dan Marie Rouyer’s renowned Mini Club, a confidential weekend lounge. It operates a bit like La Esquina did back in the day in New York; one messages Dan in advance to be put on the list.

The atmosphere at the Mini Club is warm and welcoming. As soon as we walked in, Dan, whom I had never met, greeted me and introduced me to some of the other guests. I was offered a chair and sat down next to a man who told me he had known Dan for decades. Across the room was a group of young men who couldn’t have been older than 20; the man I was talking to told me that he and Dan were friends with one of their fathers.

We engaged in the usual what-do-you-do-and-who-do-you-know-here small talk, and then the conversation turned to Gisèle Pelicot, the woman whose husband had been drugging her and inviting strangers in to rape her. I said how brave I found her insistence that the trial be public. He agreed that she was courageous but said he thought it was a smart legal strategy as well. If the trial had been closed, the prosecution would have assassinated her character, he said. With the trial open to the public, they couldn’t get away with doing that.

There may be an element of truth to that, but anyone who has followed sexual assault trials has seen that women are routinely accused of having done something to provoke their attacker or to have somehow “wanted it”. Indeed, earlier that week a man I know told me that he found it hard to believe that Gisèle had really had no idea all those years that men were having sex with her.

At around 2:30 am the group I had come with went outside to smoke. They were talking about heading to another club, but I decided to go home. I may still be up for an adventure, but my nights out no longer end with the sunrise.