The Agony and Ecstasy

"We found all different ways of caressing and different positions. He'd laugh and we'd really go at it, relaxed and having fun."

"I'm obliged to have sex with my wife. It's like food. If it's not very good, I eat it anyhow, even though I don't like it."

If the old national stereotypes about sexual behavior were true, the first speaker would be a Frenchwoman, the second a bored American husband performing his marital duties by rote. Actually it is the other way round; moreover, their sentiments typify those of their compatriots, according to two new sex surveys recently published on opposite sides of the Atlantic.

Not since the Kinsey reports has there been such a large-scale study of American sexual mores as Sexual Behavior in the 1970s by Morton Hunt (395 pages; Playboy Press; $10.95), based on a poll funded by the Playboy Foundation (TIME, Oct. 1). But given the long-heralded sexual revolution in the U.S., Hunt's conclusions should not surprise anyone. Among them: married couples are having sex more frequently and are doing so "more imaginatively, voluptuously and playfully than their counterparts of a generation ago."

On the contrary, the French are miserable and inhibited in their lovemaking, according to the recently published La Realite Sexuelle (375 pages; Laffont; $8). Roger-Pol Droit, 25, and Antoine Gallien, 27, have gathered together 22 vivid tape-recorded interviews from people of different ages and backgrounds--but with similar complaints. "I never thought marriage involved sexual relations," confessed a 42-year-old Marseilles secretary. "She'd always say the same thing: 'I'm going to end up pregnant,' " complained her husband. A 36-year-old librarian from Dieppe said that she had accepted the fact that she was frigid "the way others have a crooked nose or are missing an arm."

The book stresses that for the most part, the French still live under a repressive moral code; sex education and contraception are very rarely taught and practiced. In many parts of the country, parents expect their daughters to maintain their virginity until marriage, and masturbation is taboo. "Male domination" is another cause of the French sexual misery, says Gallien, who adds that "our book is profoundly feminist."

Within two weeks of its publication, more than 7,000 copies of La Realite Sexuelle disappeared from bookshelves--a brisk sale by French standards. Reviews were mixed. Le Monde hailed the study as "an extremely violent indictment of a morality." Jean Dutourd, novelist and satirist, writing in Paris-Match, was caustic. "The only thing that seems to function adequately are people's tongues," he wrote of the book's interviews. "The repressed, the impotent, the perverted, the virgins (for there are some left) recount their misfortunes with tireless complaisance." Nor did Dutourd approve of the authors' conclusion that sex education would help matters. "They think it is possible that one day everyone will make love well. Upon my word, I find them very optimistic. Love is like everything else--there will always be people who are gifted and people who aren't," declared Dutourd. If that is true, and if the new sex surveys are correct, it is unquestionably the Americans and not the French who have the aptitude for love.

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