Letter from Paris: A Loveless Spring?
By Amy McDaniel
TSL Correspondent, Paris Bureau

As a student abroad in Paris, I planned to consume as much French writing as possible. I started out with the requisite Rimbaud and a daily Le Monde. Then after about three weeks, my address change for the New Yorker kicked in, as did the demoralizing realization that my poor inflection would always encourage shopkeepers and restaurateurs to try out their English. Or their American, the language I have been told continually that I actually speak.

Rapidly, perhaps predictably, my weekly dose of cultural literacy and literary fluency replaced my francophone zeal. I remembered that language could have subtlety, imagery, and wit. As much as I prided myself on my comprehension of the French play on words with Bush and Butchery at the war protest, I had trouble seeing why the Algerian classic I was reading for Colonial Literature was so Faulknerian apart from its sheer incomprehensibility.

Yet strangely, my habit of secluding myself in my apartment to read American magazines and make American-style brunch with my friends exerted a negative influence on my French sex life. I had assured myself, and had been assured by other Americans, that at the destination of my transcontinental journey there awaited a surplus of young men eager to help me understand the meaning of amour. We, my encouraging friends and I, were all bitterly disappointed. Especially me.

Well unless you count all the men at bars and clubs whose oh-la-la-easy-American-girl radar was impressive but not enough to score a portable number. I don't count those. My French lovers were supposed to be artists who frequented virtually unknown but undeniably hip cafés on the outskirts of the city or who knew about the most exclusive underground hip-hop shows on those crowded clubs/boats on the Seine (we found out about one but it was sold out by the time we finished playing our Pomona-imported drinking games). The ones we met promised to go to Morocco with us but did not even return our text messages to go to for a drink.

Three months later, I felt marginally better about my ability to read French and figured that something in French might explain why I wasn't having sex in France. I went to my program's library today, doubting that I would find anything relevant. The library specializes in books with names like, Contemporary French History, Contemporary French Art, and Contemporary French Art History. I scoured the shelves for a book by n'importe quel French theorist. I grabbed De la Séduction ("Of Seduction"-all translations my own) by Jean Baudrillard, who had been recommended to me by a close, personal friend. My friend said that, in sum, Baudrillard says that no one has sex anymore.

Indeed, the title of Part One is called "The Eclipse of Sex."

Elated at the possibility of finding a comprehensive and contextualized theory to account for my frustration, I went to a park nearby and read on, ignoring the really cute French guy playing guitar who was trying to ask me how I was doing. I worried, though, that the "anymore" part of Baudrillard's ideas might have expired, since it was written twenty-five years ago. Then again, they were supposed to be having more sex twenty-five years ago. Twenty-five years ago, there was no AIDS.

Maybe no one is having sex anymore, but Baudrillard is really scoring with his chapter titles. "Porno-stéreo" taught me that like the perfecting techniques of modern music engineering, pornography makes sex too real to be seductive. "End of secret." Hyperrealism, as it turns out, is not the same as surrealism-it's actually really evil and to be avoided.

"I'll Be Your Mirror" (title obviously already in American to reference the Velvet Underground song) describes the bad, narcissistic kind of seduction that borders on incest. This might be a good rebuttal to my film teacher, who, in reference to a scene in Nord in which a mother gives her son a hand job, told us, "It's shocking, but at the same time, it's tender." But for Baudrillard, and for me, the son's desire for his mother is at its base a self-seduction due to family resemblance. However, I don't think that's why I'm not having sex in France.

"The Fear of Being Seduced" gave me some answers. My own fear is keeping away my potential lovers. It's not fear of or inability for love or sexual excitement, but, as indicated by the chapter title, fear of being seduced. The lack of sex is in our society, not just in my apartment. "The most serious deficit always falls on the side of charm, not of pleasure, on the side of enchantment, not of vital or sexual satisfaction, on the side of the rules of the game, not of the symbolic Law. The only castration is that of the deprivation of seduction."

Seduction, driven away irretrievably from all of us by porn-stereo.