Building relationships is more important than men’s desires
“The importance of sexuality is attested to by the fact that French hospitals automatically give mothers of newborns lessons in pelvic exercises before they leave hospital to ensure that newborn mothers get back into shape for love-making as soon as possible”, wrote Hakim. In her book, The New Rules: Internet, Playfairs and Erotic Power, she specifies that “as soon as possible” means after six weeks.
So whose priority is the love-making? The newly-delivered mother who may still be bleeding, sore and exhausted from being up all night feeding her baby? Or her man’s? Is Hakim’s argument that the French emphasis on sex and tolerance of affairs is liberating actually a manifesto for French machismo?
The article was carried because of the very public serial infidelity of president Hollande who left Segoline Royale for Valerie Trierweiler before being discovered having an affair with actress Julie Gayet. In our home we don’t pay any attention to such idle chat-chat. Except for a little role-play now and then, in which my husband has the line, “A man ‘as ‘is needs!”
He likes to goad me that Hollande is an inspiration, 59 years old, heavy on the Grecian 2000 and still able to pull the lovely Gayet. My only revenge is to suggest heavily that Hollande’s being the most powerful man in Europe is no hindrance to him when it comes to pulling the women. My husband usually responds that he is probably “a leetle demon in ze bed”. Indeed that may be the least of his personal charms. But isn’t this really an old story, not a new one? The story of a rich and powerful man moving from an older and less good-looking woman to a younger woman who is still fertile?
“Mistresses have always been the private privilege of the president”, said the French journalist Christian Malard on The Marian Finucane Show on RTÉ at the weekend, adding that this had been the case from de Gaulle through d’Estaing and Pompidou to Mitterand “the one who broke the record.” And as Hakim points out in her book, she may have got her interest in the importance of affairs from her French education which made her aware of the “ubiquity of official mistresses” in French history and public life, her favourite being Louis XV’s famous paramour, Madame de Pompadour.
Official mistresses make me cringe. I hate to think of women gaining their position in society from a sexual relationship with a man. The economic imbalance between the man and his mistress, which Hakim accepts as common, makes me sick. If feminism has meant anything surely it has meant an end to women selling their sexuality? Not in France, according to Hakim, though I know many Frenchwomen who would disagree. She reports a Frenchman as saying that “offering an exciting weekend away in an attractive destination always secured a seduction.”
This brought me back to my younger days when an older, married man attempted to lure me into an affair with the promise of a holiday in the US. He had been married 14 years, he told me, and his marriage had lost its spark. I told him that if I wanted a holiday I’d buy my own. I was furious that he didn’t know his luck to have a secure home and a loving family. To add insult to injury, his wife was a knock-out beauty.
Hakim admits that there is a potential imbalance between partners in an affair when one is unmarried. The focus of her liberal applause is internet dating between married people. She sees this as the symptom of a welcome recognition, which she says is common in France, that marriage is essentially about children and property. She writes approvingly, also, of upper-class Japan, where she says procreation and sex belong to different spheres, and “it is conventional for politicians and wealthy men to have mistresses and enjoy the company of hostesses, geishas and courtesans.”
How dated, how chauvinist, how depressing an opinion of marriage that is. At its heart is a rejection of mothers as lovers and fathers as parents. It’s true that pregnancy and childbirth have effects on a woman’s body. The French are right to insist on pelvic floor exercises as any mother who has got into difficulties on a bouncy castle will testify. It’s true, also, that motherhood has a profound effect on a woman’s psychology and orientates her, for a time, towards her child.
But surely a mature man can wait for his sex life to return if he loves and respects his partner? Surely any decent new father will be busy enough supporting his partner to feed and nurture their child to pass up on sex for a little while? Unless there were problems before the arrival of the child, he will grow dearer and dearer to his partner as they share the care. Sex will return eventually and if it doesn’t a bit of therapy might be a better idea than a new partner.
Tolerance of some men’s infantile jealousy of babies was what caused the craze in 18th century Paris for whipping newborn babies from their mother’s breasts and sending them off to wet nurses.
Only 5% of babies whose births were registered in Paris in 1780 were fed at their mothers’ breasts. The rest were contracted out to often indifferent rural women who were sometimes lactating and sometimes not. So many babies died that wet nurses went by the nickname “angelmakers”.
There are many theories as to why this practice continued for close to a century, including the fact that many mothers needed to get back to work. There was also the superstition that having sex spoiled a mother’s milk, which was probably made up to hide what was for men the real problem: Breast-feeding women were often less interested in sex and often infertile.
Having the freedom to feed your own child was seen as a key feminist issue by some British writers, including Mary Wollstonecraft, often described as “the mother of feminism.” Anne Bronte, the less well-known sister of Emily and Charlotte, gives a riveting account in her novel The Tenant of Wildfell Hall of a woman whose marriage is destroyed when her tyrannical, selfish husband tries to stop her feeding their child.
Maybe Catherine Hakim would just have advised him to have an affair. She makes clear that men’s interest in sex is greater than women’s and also makes the important point that sexual needs are genuine human needs.
But shouldn’t we men and women work harder at achieving relationships which are both committed and sexy rather using the Internet to design a world which looks just like the old one: dedicated to satisfying male desires?
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