2 posts tagged “france”

My French friend Clement is staying in my spare room for the next two weeks while he's between apartments. In lieu of rent, I told him he should just make me nonstop French food while he's here.

Today I woke up to the sound of duck crackling on the stove. Duck. All, like, l'orange and shit. And this was 10 in the morning.

On a normal holiday, hangover Thursday, I would be eating a Danish from the chain-smoking baker down the street, drinking microwaved day-old coffee to mask the Lucky Strike frosting. I could get used to this...

I came across this article this morning while avoiding academic obligations, and I'm finding it really interesting. This chick named Pamela did a worldwide study of infidelity. She found the following things:

• In France and America, 4 percent of men admit to having sex with someone other than their wives in the last year. In Australia, for some reason, it's only 2.5 percent. In Togo, it's 37 percent, in the Dominican Republic it's 20 percent and in Peru it's 13.5 percent. There's a lot of stewardesses out there...
• In Brazil, it was legal until 1991 for a man to murder his wife and her lover if she cheated.
• "In Russia, cheating is more of a relational problem than a moral violation. Nearly 40 percent of Russians said in a 1998 survey that cheating is 'not at all' wrong or 'only sometimes' wrong. Psychologists in Moscow told me that if you live in a two-room apartment with your in-laws, as many Russians do, an affair is practically obligatory just to get relief from the constant bickering." Nice.
• This guy's Danish at heart: "A [Japanese] businessman who frequented sex clubs — part of Japan’s 2.37 trillion yen ($1.8 billion) live sex industry — told me he never questioned his wife when she handed him divorce papers one day, after two years of what he had thought was a happy marriage." Can you believe that shit? Sitting crosslegged in front of your breakfast one morning, your wife comes in, says 'I want a divorce', and you just say 'aight.'
• "Americans cherish monogamy, but they value honesty even more. In the 1970s and 1980s, as it became easier to divorce and couples counseling emerged as the forum for resolving marital spats, Americans decided marriage ought to be a transparent zone without any secrets. They developed a unique mantra about affairs: It’s not the sex, it’s the lying." She's right, we do have a overly-open model of marriage. I don't really know where over-sharing obsession in American life comes from, but I'm sure it's Clinton's fault somehow.

• "Though they prefer monogamy, when the French do cheat they typically aren’t saddled with guilt. Couples give each other privacy so that they don’t trip over unwanted information." See? Why can't we be cold and distant from our loved ones, like the wonderful wonderful French? I don't know how French people got to be this way either, but if my alphabet had that many silent letters, I'd probably be aloof too.