Ever since Joan of Arc battled the British, we Anglo-Saxons have loved and hated French women in equal doses. Samantha Brick's dishy tirade against new First Lady Valerie Trierweiler --- "Think I'm in love with myself? I'm a shrinking violet next to man-stealing French women like the new First Lady Valerie Trierweiler" -- is just the latest incident in this long history of transcontinental vitriol and vacillation.
Brick is a British columnist who provoked a firestorm of media attention when she wrote a piece titled "There are downsides to looking this pretty: Why women hate me for being beautiful." Brick described how she's been blighted, snubbed, and hated by nearly every woman she's encountered "for no other reason," she wrote, than her "lovely looks." So apparently stunning are her looks that "paranoia has gripped the women around me." Brick has been been "frozen out of their lives" because of her beauty and pained by the sweeping superficial judgments of other women.
It's odd, then, that Brick would write her own sweeping superficial diatribe against French women. Brick begins her piece nearly eviscerating France's new First Lady, Valerie Trierweiler, starting first with her looks. ("She strutted onto the international stage this week, in a split-to-the-thigh designer chiffon dress," writes Brick. Her hair was "perfectly coiffed, her high heels towering.") She then makes a bold assertion: Trierweiler, according to Brick, has "brazenly stolen another woman's man -- the new President Francois Hollande -- from under the nose of his unsuspecting partner."
How Brick has such intimate knowledge of the private lives of French movers-and-shakers is anyone's guess, but from there, Brick lets it rip. She lobs one grenade after another, using Trierweiler as a point-of-departure for dissing French women in general: They are all "hostile and predatory, ever eager to humiliate their rivals and never batting a beautifully made-up eyelid about falling into bed with someone else's man." An adulterous affair is "a feather in their cap, or merely another scalp." They are "not interested in girlie shopping trips" and you will "never find groups of French women bonding over a coffee together either." Brick is "shocked time and again" at the "extremes of animosity" she has encountered after making "every effort to forge friendships with French women."
Brick claims that her ability to peer into the hearts and souls of all French women comes from her longevity living among them. She declares, apparently in earnest: "I have now lived in France for four years and there are few who have better insight into the sinister machinations of a French woman's mind that I do." Excusez-moi? Seems to me Brick could use another decade or so of living in France to understand its natives in a more culturally balanced and relevant light.
Take infidelity. All French women are not having affairs while they jauntily tip back their champagne flutes and bat their eyelids, as Brick suggests. Despite enduring stereotypes that cultural naïfs like Brick love to recycle -- research has shown that the French are no more adulterous than Anglo-Saxons and, as I've written before, it's often the biggest moral pontificators among Anglo-Saxons who literally get caught with their pants down.
However, when Brick claims that "there is no sense of female solidarity" in France -- when she sniffs that Trierweiler didn't even offer "a cursory nod to 'the sisterhood'" as she "gleefully posed in her glamorous attire;" or when she bristles with resentment at not quickly bonding with French women on "girlie shopping trips" -- she's onto a more subtle historical reality. In France, there's no word or concept for sisterhood. And that's partly because feminism played out differently there; it burned with less militancy and lacked, as French historian Mona Ozouf saw it, "the unparalleled dimensions and unprecedented ferocity" of its Anglo-Saxon counterparts.
French women have deep, enduring friendships with each other, but many do tend to identify as much with men -- sometimes more so -- as they do with women. The upside of this is that there's no American-style war of the sexes going on in France. French women generally love men. And vice-versa. This state of affairs stands in stark contrast to Anglo-Saxon countries, where commiseration about men is often more common than complicity with them. The downside, however, is that, as acclaimed French author and historian Michele Sarde once wrote, French women "have so loved their men, fathers, sons, brothers and lovers or husbands to such an extent, that they've neglected to love each other." This explains their sometimes chilly behavior toward other women, and the lack of what we Anglo-Saxons call sisterhood.
If Brick finds women in general "problematic" for "measuring themselves against each other by their looks rather than their achievements" -- if, as she writes, "older women are the most hostile to beautiful women -- perhaps because they feel their bloom fading" -- it might have something to do how women continue to judge each another based on their looks (in ways that cosmetic surgery has irrevocably changed), never mind Brick's difficulty relating to other women, no matter what their nationality.
Ironically, Brick's tone is so hostile to French women and her preoccupation with her own looks so fierce that she's proven herself a pretty problematic member of the sisterhood. Sounds to me like Brick could use a nice glass of French wine and a big hug from a French girlfriend.
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I'm sure it drove Brick crazy that these women would rather talk directly with men rather than talking behind their backs.
Gasp! Heaven forbid the woman would approach HIM first...can you imagine?! THE HORROR!
I'm sure she couldn't stand to see a woman have sex with a man based on mutual connection and not what he had in the bank.
IOW, French women do not want the craziness of the "modern woman" inflicted on their country. They'd rather love and appreciate their men.
Foreign women have gotten word of the madness the modern woman has created with their relationships with men, and they decided to pass.
Can you blame them with the unhappiness in American women being at an all time high?
The worst part is rather then address the issues that come with the modern feminists, women would rather use labeling tactics on men to try and put them in their place (ex. "you want a foreign woman because she's subservient bla bla bla...").
The psyche of the modern woman is flawed deeply. It's no wonder why American men are beginning to jump ship and seek comfort from our foreign neighbors.
These are both great looking, successful men with college degrees and well established careers. After dating several American women, they could not stand the mentality of these American women.
Nothing ever seemed good enough for these American women.
I have dated plenty of American women and see the consistent pattern of selfishness, narcissism and unreliability. They seem to place no value on producing a good relationship and think that everything is owed to them.
I am sure there are plenty of great American women that don't fall into the description I have stated, I just haven't come across them.
BTW- both of my friends who got married to the Asian woman now have children and never seemed happier to me.
Modern feminism is nothing more than an excuse for selfishness, with an attempt to make a man feel guilty for expecting a woman to contribute equally.
During college I talked to a foreign student who said she simply couldn't identify with the American women. They mostly talked about men, but rather then talking about how they were going to introduce themselves they would rather talk about how they are going to do things to get him to notice her. If he didn't notice with plan 1 then plan 2 was to find out through a friend blab bla bla...
She said these type of discussions gave her a headache so she began limiting her time with them, since it was more enjoyable to associate with men.
She asked me why American women couldn't just go up to someone they liked and say a simple world like, "hi!" I let her know there wasn't enough time in the evening to explain the madness and she chuckled.
She told me I needed to take a trip to her country to see what real confident women were like.
Now more than ever...I see why...
I say USA.
How say you?
Just saying....
You are talking merde.
What makes you think your attempts to control and manipulate men endear them to you? Only seeing the world in terms of what women want isn't being progressive or modern. The future belongs to those whose empathy knows no boundaries of gender, race, religion, culture, or superficial affiliation. We need to focus on our common humanity and save our energy lecturing anyone who can't see past the surface long enough to see our true failings.