Never on Monday

It has long been believed--especially in France--that the French more or less invented sex and even enjoy a monopoly on it, or at least on some of its more exquisite nuances. But now, 24 years after Alfred C. Kinsey published the first of his pioneering reports on the sexual habits of Americans, a team of French scholars has actually got around to studying sex in the land of I'amour. The result, published this week, is a massive 922-page Report on the Sexual Behavior of the French, whose findings are as surprising as were Kinsey's disclosures in 1948. Judging by the sample of 2,625 men and women, both married and single, who were interviewed for the report, the French are in fact far more conservative and less imaginative in their lovemaking than they hitherto suspected.

Although every true Frenchman is popularly supposed to have a mistress, some 70% of the husbands polled and 90% of the wives asserted that they had never been unfaithful to their spouses. Moreover, 50% of both sexes regard adultery as "unforgivable." On the average, the French women declared that they had been to bed with no more than two men in their lives, while men admitted to intercourse with less than a dozen women, including prostitutes. The myth of the widespread cinq-`a-sept or cocktail-hour dalliance was also exploded; 82% of both sexes said that they make love at night before going to sleep, 11% choose the morning and only 7% indulge in the afternoon. More than 95% of men and women who participated in the interview overwhelmingly favor intercourse in the classic position, with the male on top of the supine female. But they scarcely ever do it, in any position, on Mondays and Tuesdays, which for some unfathomable reason are erotic deserts.

Still, couples in their 20s reported that they make love on an average of five times a week, apparently excluding Mondays and Tuesdays, while those in their 50s have intercourse nine times a month. For 24% the sexual act itself lasts 15 to 44 minutes, far longer than the five to nine minutes allotted to foreplay by 27% of the men and women. About 45% of the women (but only 19% of the men) said that they prefer to make love in total darkness. According to the report, the volubility of Frenchmen extends even to lovemaking. The majority of men talk during intercourse, while their partners are more silent--so much so that 64% of the men expressed the wish that the women would speak up more.

Although the pill and other modern methods of contraception were made legal in France in 1967, evidently most of the French agree with the late President Charles de Gaulle's celebrated dictum that the pill is a mere "diversion," which the state has no obligation to provide for its citizens. Some 54% of the men said that they still practice coitus interruptus, and most of the women prefer the unreliable "rhythm method." Only 9% of the women take the pill, while some 30% of all those polled said that they are opposed to any form of birth control. Many were skittish about answering questions regarding masturbation and homosexuality, and some declined to reply at all. Only 19% of the women admitted to ever having masturbated, as compared with 73% of the men. Homosexuality proved even less popular, on paper at least; only 2% of the women and 6% of the men admitted one or more homosexual acts. By contrast, the two Kinsey studies showed that 92% of American men and 62% of women had masturbated, and 37% of the men and 13% of the women acknowledged having had one or more homosexual contacts.

The Frenchman of 1972 is apparently about as unfaithful to his spouse as was the American male of Kinsey's day. On the other hand, 28% of the American women interviewed by Kinsey's team declared that they had been unfaithful, compared with only 10% of the French women. As the French report asserts, "the oft-advanced theory of declining morality is not borne out"--at least not in France.

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