Let's talk about sex (just not in French, please)
French may be the language of love, but when it comes to getting down and dirty, it falls flat
So the thing about being single and dating in a foreign country is that, eventually, you wind up having sex in a language that is not your own. Living in Paris, for me that has meant French.
It’s harder than you might think.
Sex talk is tricky in the best of circumstances. We’ve probably all been with that person who vocalizes too much, what they say is a mood killer, or they are so silent that you have no idea if they even realize you’re in the room with them.
(Only once have I experienced the perfect level of dirty talk. But that’s another story).
There are various types of utterances during sex and different levels of verbalization. Most of us are not thinking about proper enunciation when we’re in the throes of pleasure. We might half whisper, half moan, and be only moderately intelligible. It doesn’t really matter.
Although, when it’s happening in a tongue that is not your own, it does.
Think about it. Someone saying, “ohhh, yes, yes,” is not the same thing as their saying “not so hard, you’re hurting me”. It doesn’t really matter if you catch the first one. With the second, it does. Generally, when these exchanges take place in your native language, even if you only hear a snippet of the phrase, you have at least some sense of what the other person is trying to convey.
Not so in a foreign language.
First off, they don’t drill you in the relevant vocabulary in French class. When your brain hears an unfamiliar word, it takes a second to process. That means you can be pondering the meaning of what someone murmured to you for several moments. They’ve moved on to the next body part by then.
“Quoi?” I have queried on more than one occasion. “What did you say?” But asking someone to repeat the dirty little ditty they just whispered in your ear is about as sexy as flannel pajamas. It ruins the moment. Trust me. I have mostly stopped trying to decipher and now just hope I’m not missing anything important.
Speaking French during sex isn’t any easier than understanding it. Sure, I know the words, but they just don’t feel right coming out of my mouth.
“J’ai envie de toi,” a man I hadn’t seen in a while texted me several months ago.
“I want you, too,” I replied.
“Tell me what you want,” the next little blue box on my phone commanded.
I couldn’t. Not only do I feel like a fraud talking dirty in French, but how do you know if you’re being cringe or not? People get it wrong in their own language all the time. What are the odds of my getting it right in French? I try to avoid even ordinary words that can be double entendres, worried that I’m talking about my vagina when I mean to be discussing my cat (the French word has two meanings, too).
“I need your help,” I pleaded with my language tutor during our weekly Zoom. “I need you to teach me how to have sex in French.”
“Don’t bother,” she replied. “Just speak English. They’ll find it sexy.”
My perfectly bilingual friend Audrey agreed. “That’s what I do,” she told me when I brought up my dilemma with her. Audrey grew up in Paris, with a French father and American mother. She speaks the two languages interchangeably. “French just isn’t as good as English when it comes to sex. It’s too soft. There’s no replacement for ‘fuck me’.”
She has a point.
French is known as the language of love, but what it really is is the language of seduction. It is flowery, suggestive, full of innuendo. They don’t even have a decent way to say “talk dirty to me.”
English is direct. Clear. French, on the other hand, is obtuse. Lovely, sure. But comprehensible? Much less so. Everyone here thinks they’re Proust.
Take the opening salvo I received on a dating app not so long ago: “How about a drink together? A moment when our bodies fuse, when every word becomes a caress, in an atmosphere charged with desire. What do you say?”
Franky, I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t respond.
The French might come on a bit strong in the game of seduction, but no one does it better when it comes to talking about love. A friend and I went to see a documentary called Le Coeur qui Bat this weekend, a beautiful, poignant film comprised of interviews with people—mostly boys and men—talking about love. They thoughtfully articulated what it felt like to want love, to be in love, and to lose love.
I don’t think you could have made the same film in the US. I don’t think Americans, especially American boys and men, think about love as much or in the same way. Of course Americans fall in love, but it’s more of a private matter. Here, love—chasing it, finding it, leaving it—is a national sport. While Americans want to be in love, the runup and the aftermath are inconveniences to be suffered through on the way to or from the event itself. The French revel in every step of the process.
I admire that about them, their ability to savor and find beauty in even the mundane or painful elements of life. And while I may not be able to reciprocate, and it might even make me mildly uncomfortable, I appreciate the poetry in French seduction. I may not take it completely seriously, nor do I trust it, but I applaud the effort. I simply ask that, when making the transition from street to sheets, we switch to English.
Loved this. And very thankful I'm in Paris with a copain! One less thing to have to adjust to. Brava! xx
I guffawed several times. ❤️😂