How to teach French if you are not and never will be Inès de la Fressange

A decade ago, I began teaching French classes. Also began teaching, period. I was 24, and arrived at the role petrified. I was, most importantly, Not A Theater Person. Language-teaching, I learned, was a performance, above and beyond how teaching is generally. How was I going to do this?! How was I - someone who had applied to history grad school but gotten into French grad school instead (long story), who had not specifically sought out the job of French teacher but who had somehow landed on the track where studying French history involved funding gained through teaching conjugations - how was I going to not just teach conjugations but do so in a way that would wow an audience? That anxiety sorted itself out easily enough, and more quickly than I'd have guessed. I just sort of go into teaching mode, not sure exactly how I do this, but it happens. All that my natural non-theatricalness means is that I need to sort of zone out in a chair for a while after doing so.

But my big anxiety, early on, was that I'm not French. Not a native French speaker, but also, not French. At NYU, it was my impression that there was a lot of value placed on being French. (Why did I have this impression? Neurosis, maybe, but also: A professor once told me how good the French was of one of my classmates... a classmate who happened to be - as we both knew full well - French. As if my own then-deficiencies in ease with the language could be fixed, if only I followed that classmate's example.) French classmates with perfect French and shakier English were (or this was my impression) revered for the thoroughness of their Frenchness. Ease in English was like white sneakers (pre-Phoebe Philo): not chic.

I, meanwhile, was in a bit of a bind. I'd gotten into grad school on the basis of being good-enough at the French itself and stronger on writing papers in English about texts I'd read in French. But all attempts at improving my non-nervous-breakdown-having while speaking French were impeded by the fact that I associated the language with an unrealizable goal: being and having always been French.

This sense of failure as a non-French person manifested itself most dramatically in my feelings re: teaching. While the job title was TA, it was always either teaching or co-teaching a course, and here was my big fear: What if a student asks me something I don't know? There's nothing like fixating on this, and more specifically, fixating on how if this were to happen, it would be the end of the world, to guarantee that when students would ask me about words I did know, and I'd freeze and suggest they consult the dictionary that they were ostensibly meant to use in class in cases like that regardless. (The great "poubelle" incident of 2007. How do you say garbage can? How indeed.)

It's only in the past year or so that I've come to realize the following: There are advantages to teaching a language as a non-native speaker. I know, I mean I know, that French proficiency is a skill that can be learned. I know that there's no shame in arriving at French not knowing the gender of new-to-you nouns. And I know that it's entirely possible to communicate in French while still sounding identifiably, to a knowledgeable ear, like a non-native speaker of the language. Yes, pronunciation is important. But the end goal - at least in most French language classes - isn't to turn everyone, no matter their ear, into one of the handful of people who can speak a foreign language and genuinely convince everyone, including the Académie Française, that this language was their first.

I credit this revelation to a bunch of things, but partly to the fact that I'm now teaching French in Canada. There's no expectation here that someone teaching French - native speaker or not - is from Europe as well as give-or-take Inès de la Fressange. That, and working in a French department in a bilingual country means I'm actually using French, at work, to an extent I never was at NYU. In any case, these days, when I teach French, I no longer feel the emotional need to apologize to the class for having not grown up in the 7th Arrondissement.

The elusive Birkin fit

For the last few weeks, I've had this notion of finding a pair of vintage Levis-or-similar jeans. I'm almost certain I got the idea from the Aritzia website's denim category called "Better Than Vintage." The mere concept struck me as both wasteful (I am 34) and poser-ish (I am also, in some sense, 14). Why not actual vintage, if that's what you're looking for? After all, Instagram is chock-full of French women (such as) in incredibly flattering, by all accounts real-vintage pairs. These women live in France, where vintage US denim has almost got to be harder to find than in Canada, yet they seem to have figured this out.

The plan seemed straightforward enough. I knew, from past trips to vintage clothing stores, where in Toronto the racks full of vintage jeans could be found. And over the course of two recent outings, a brief one to Little Portugal and the Kensington Market, and a more extensive (-feeling) one to Parkdale, I saw them all. OK, not all, but it sure did start to feel that way. I can't say I tried them all on because it was clear from just glancing at them that they would not fit. Not fit, that is, because these were men's jeans. I am a 5'2" woman. While there's no law that says people of my gender and physique can't wear men's jeans, the aesthetic fact is that we cannot do so and have the jeans in question be fitted. The chances are already slim-so-to-speak that a woman my height and general appearance will look like this (or, to put this in slightly more realistic terms, this) under any circumstances, but putting on a pair of large men's jeans seems not to further the cause.

The place with the best selection as well as a useable dressing room was probably In Vintage We Trust, in Parkdale. Even there, they were all too big, except for I think one pair that was too small in the way I remember jeans often being too small in dressing rooms of my youth, before stretch denim became ubiquitous. That is, too small in the waist, hips, etc., but sort of cartoonishly enormous through the legs. A fit that's uncomfortable and unflattering at the same time, and not in the modern-silhouette sense. No matter which pair, what size and shape the circa-1998 label promised, it looked like if Elaine Benes had put on Jerry's jeans.

The fantasy of perfectly-fitting vintage jeans is a complicated one. On some level, it's like all clothing fantasies - about having a flawless-by-society's-harsh-standards physique and looking amazing, especially from certain angles. But it's also a branch of the broader effortlessness dream. The idea is half that you're someone who had all the time in the world to try on evvvvery last pair until you found the one made for your body (that is, a leisure fantasy), half that you just happened upon these ones that fit you great because you're you and you're the sort of person who falls ass-backwards - literally, in this case - into good luck. It goes beyond high-end athleisure, which, while also taking its appeal in part from exclusivity, is nevertheless accessible to everyone under a certain dress size and with $90 to spend on leggings. Finding form-fitting non-stretch pants, with no consistent sizing, is a challenge of another order. Thus the carefree, 'They're vintage!' one is meant to utter to one's Instagram influenced fan base. Easy-breezy.

The unseen effort, I suspect - for there's always some - is that these jeans have been altered. Given that the pseudo-Jane Birkins of Instagram are if anything slimmer than I am, that these jeans fit me wrong in the way that they did suggests to me that these other women are getting their jeans altered. Altered, that is, in width. Not hemmed - nothing so short-person and pedestrian. No, I mean taken in, in the legs especially, so as to fit like the new, stretch-having jeans, while somehow being all-cotton. I have now Googled it and it's apparently a thing. It's not that all the effortless-chic Parisiennes have spent hours in the equivalent of Parkdale (in the Marais, as I wistfully recall) combing through used menswear. Who has the time?

But I think it was the leisure aspect that appealed to me about this quest. The dream wasn't so much the jeans themselves as the afternoon or evening I'd have, trying on as many as I felt like, and stopping for a coffee along the way. Neither my weekdays nor weekends have been conducive to that lately. Imagine having the time to sort through a pile of jeans that made their way to a Toronto vintage shop and find ones that just happened to fit me right!

Then when, yesterday, I declared that I was free to spend Saturday afternoon just trying on all the jeans, all of them if I so chose, I was promptly reminded that trying on a heap of ill-fitting pants is not actually a relaxing way to spend an afternoon. Reminded, too, that a jeans quest sparked by a practical-ish need - the fact that my light-denim pair was falling apart and becoming generally unwearable - would not be answered by purchasing a pair of pre-owned pants of any kind. So I full on gave up, de-romanticized the quest for jeans, and spent approximately two minutes trying on and purchasing these, which will do the trick.

A most sophisticated trip to the Eaton Centre

Who is Inès de La Fressange, and why does her name being on an item of Uniqlo clothing make a person ("a person") that much more intrigued by it?

For reasons stemming from the timing of poodle-grooming and the necessity of a TTC day pass for this, I had an excuse yesterday to check out Inès de La Fressange's new line at Uniqlo. I realize this isn't the most exciting use of the one true weekend day of a long weekend, but it seemed like it would be relaxing. Which I'm going to have to say it was.

To be clear, I know exactly who Inès de La Fressange is, or as much as is possible from having read various La Fressange profiles over the years, retaining dribs and drabs. She's very tall and thin. French. A former-and-current model - not young, but so French that she gets to embody glamor at any age. But I doubt the idea is to appeal specifically to whichever subset of the population has read these profiles. It is, I suspect, her name - French and aristocratic, but with Inès suggesting a still more cosmopolitan sophistication.*  It costs 75 euros to have her name on an otherwise nondescript t-shirt. A sinkhole investigation finds a whole Fressangian merch empire akin to the part of Hudson Bay where they sell everything, including all these random wooden paddles, in the store's trademark stripes. No La Fressange paddles, I don't think, but door stoppers, dog leashes...

What does La Fressange's involvement entail? Presumably she's not personally stitching together each garment. Has she designed them? (She's evidently designing something.) Does she serve as muse for a Uniqlo designer (maybe?), or does she get a catalog to look through and say whether or not she approves of whichever style having the stamp of La Fressange? How do they decide that Fressange-anointed items should cost $10 more than their regular-Uniqlo equivalents? If still - and pardon this most peasant of observations - less than, say, Aritzia, which was what brought me there in the first place.

$50 plus tax later and I'm the owner of dark red thick-wale corduroy miniskirt that has Toronto winter (by which I mean fall) practicality written all over it. I'd like to think La Fressange would approve. I also kind of think I once saw her on the street in New York, and that she smiled at La Caniche, but it's possible some other tall, French-looking woman did this.

*Wikipedia tells me her full name is Inès Marie Lætitia Églantine Isabelle de Seignard de La Fressange - the capital "La" explaining why her last name isn't just "Fressange" but rather "La Fressange," which is spectacular - and that her grandmother was part of a French-Jewish banking family, which makes Inès herself vaguely Jewish, which makes me basically Inès de La Fressange.

The French Girl vs. The Frenchwoman

Despite thinking the whole thing is silly - and despite knowing, about as much as any American could, that the whole thing is nonsense - I've never quite been able to avoid falling for the whole Frenchwoman thing. I get - and have long since gotten - that the entire thing is based on a myth. It's subtly racist, classist, and more. It essentializes French women, who are real people, not objects for Anglo tourists to gawk at as fashion references. I know - believe me, I know! it's what my degree is in! - that there's more to France than ballet-flat shopping.

And yet.

The women in the posh parts of Paris do have great style. Yes, this is circular - "great style" is defined, in much of the world, as looking like a rich Parisian woman. But I was reminded of this last year, when I was back in Paris for the first time in several years. Gosh but did these women look fantastic. How boring of me to think this, but there it was.

I left feeling inspired to dress like the women I saw there... all the while realizing that this would have to involve clothes purchased elsewhere (because my Canadian dollars add up to 1/16th of a consignment blazer), and that once assembled by me, once on me, nothing particularly Parisian would result. It's not as if taking inspiration from French classmates and professors during grad school (one, in particular, of each, now that I think of it) left me looking Parisian. But was that ever the point?

My thinking is, the appeal of looking like a French woman is really two different things, depending on your age. When I was younger, it was about the gamine look. Not that I ever looked all that gamine - I was, and am, the wrong build for "gamine" - but the idea was to look understated, elegant, not trying too hard. It was a way to look nice but not sexy, which, day-to-day, especially when you're in your early 20s, has its practical advantages. "Gamine" is also a way of tricking yourself getting excited enough about dressing in work attire that shopping for that sort of clothing doesn't seem like a chore, or like a reminder that you're no longer a young person. (Without the myth, without the belief that you're somehow channeling a New Wave actress, you're just a grad student buying used J. Crew ankle-length slacks.)

As I got closer to 30, Frenchwoman style started to be something else: the promise of getting older but not, I suppose, giving up. To me, at almost-34, it seems like a way to look good that doesn't involve trying to look younger. Which is immensely appealing because looking younger is not a thing that's going to happen. Not for any of us. While French women hold no secret where DGAF-ness about aging is concerned (witness the skincare industry of that country), there does seem to be a thing where women of all ages look glamorous. It's an aspiration, even if the reality is, I'm an American with the collection of sweats (school-name-bearing and generic) to prove it.

This is what I think is happening: Younger women and even teen girls in that bit of Paris dress what would seem in the US (and, as I understand it, the UK) to be sort of middle-aged, but the look works for them. Older women dress... exactly the same as younger women, and it works for them, too, at least as well. There isn't, in those neighborhoods, much of a youth culture, at least where clothes are concerned, but nor is there an assumption that The Elegant Uniform is for daughters, not mothers or grandmothers.

My own vision for Older Frenchwoman Chic, for the look I aspire to/to age into/to wear if I can sustain Effort for long enough, is a bit different from the gamine uniform. Fewer Breton-striped shirts. More... black boots? Skirts rather than cutoffs? How far this project goes beyond my imagination, we shall see.

Notes on a gray, almost Parisian Saturday in Toronto

Just now, a lost laundry card turned out to be in the pocket of some laundry-day jeans all along. Crisis averted! Which is, I guess, the theme for the week. If everything that I'd feared had gone wrong, large and small, had done so, this would have been a different Saturday indeed. One not as devoted to the dual goals of living in non-squalor (as in, unpacked and with furniture) and trying to dress more like a glamorous (not gamine; these are different) Parisian.

Today began with a run, and by "run" I mean what was, according to Google Maps, a short jog to the St. Lawrence Market, but which took a long time because I'm still worn out from - yes - a Lululemon Run Club run earlier in the week. (Joining a gym seemed too expensive, so the fancier-sounding but free option it is.) This would have been better to do early in the morning, before the market itself got incredibly crowded. (I'd chosen sleeping in and reading a short story in the New Yorker, about graduate fellowships.) But we now have a lot of Ontario-grown cherries, which came in a pretty basket declaring their provincial origins.

I was still on a noble-and-efficient kick for a little longer, able to sustain interest in getting the apartment reasonable-looking for long enough to vacuum and put some more pictures up, but not quite long enough to find and sort out delivery for a dresser. Still, it's now sort of... civilized here. We can have people over now, with somewhere for them to sit and everything. Which is more than can be said for the last few places we'd lived.

Then came the poodle-centric diversion of taking Bisou to a dog run. There aren't any nearby, so this is a bit involved, and requires taking advantage of Toronto's dog-friendly (off-hours) public transportation system. The run we went to is in the same park as the Allan Gardens Conservatory, which turned out to be pretty spectacular. (And very Midsomer Murders. Orchids!) Right there in the middle of Toronto, all these tropical plants! Cacti! Also: koi! turtles! We took turns, because (very understandably) the conservatory does not allow dogs.

There was something else after. What was that? Oh yes... shoessss. With the help of my more-French-than-I-am spouse, I decided upon a pair from Gravity Pope, in the final sale aka absurdly gorgeous shoes at reasonable prices section. But... too small! And it was the last pair!

Turns out another branch had them in (what I think will be) my size, so in 7-10 days, I will be Inès de la Fressange, crossed with Charlotte Gainsbourg, with a bit of Isabelle Huppert thrown in. I have a whole vision for these shoes, involving black tights, which... look, it does not get hot out in summer in Toronto, at least not this summer, so I might as well wear this outfit before parka season arrives.

Paris, May 2016

It's as I remember it, except for a few things. The first I noticed were the vape shops and juice détox establishments, and the slightly greater presence of donuts and muffins. Not full-on Americanization, but always a notch further in that direction.

Then, the security. Not just at the Jewish museum (which had the usual pre-flight situation, not that I'm complaining), but at every museum. At the larger stores. Not unheard-of globally (see: Israel), but more than I remember from post-9/11 New York. Fewer flags, but more bag checks. And a lot of soldiers with machine guns. More depressing than frightening, I suppose, but I guess it depends where you're coming from and what, on that front, seems normal.

-Other, more personal, and less geopolitical observations: The best bakery is still there, and still has the best croissants (it was closed today, so I was reminded...), and still only hiring male models. Flan, meanwhile, is great everywhere, if not necessarily better than Toronto's Portuguese custard tarts.

-Oh, and chain stores - the French ones have come to the US and maybe Canada as well; the US ones are here if they weren't already; and then there are some international chains from elsewhere. Good in many ways (you can get cool stuff and not need to shell out for flights!), but definitely means there's zero point in going to the Galeries Lafayette if you live near Hudson's Bay/the Eaton Centre.

-And yet! Frenchwomen, super chic. Shouldn't be surprising, but... it had been a while. A cliché for a reason and all that. I'm trying to make a note of exactly why their outfits work (note: me and the rest of the anglophone world, and the answer is partly that they eat less pasta than I do, and I'm not prepared to follow up on that...), although I'm not sure if the necessary shopping will take place in Paris.

-The following two things - one great, one not-so-great - are probably related: So I'd last been to Paris five years ago, and due to various career-shift-type reasons, was unsure when I'd ever have a chance to come back. Things converged to make it possible and I'm beyond thrilled to be here. Like, ogling each and every apartment building and sighing over how beautiful everything is. The full tourist thing, in other words. But! Between my tourist vibe; my unwillingness, in my dotage, to dress as if I'm not American (fleece, jeans); and the fact that my spouse and I do - sorry - tend to speak to each other in English; I've had the very odd experience of speaking to people in what is without a doubt the best French I've ever spoken and getting responses along the lines of (and this was said in French!), would you prefer the English menu?

I don't take it personally, I don't think (these are tourist areas, in the sense that just about everything in central-ish Paris is, and I have French-Canadian friends who've gotten the English-response in Paris in these situations). Except maybe a little, considering that the $$ paying for this was primarily earned teaching French classes. And that one of the places where this happened, I was buying a French novel, and not some sort of leather-bound thing that could plausibly have been for home decor.

I mean, I can summon enough non-neurosis to realize that this is the default way of being welcoming to visitors - not just tourists, and goodness knows not just anglophones. (The Germans at the next table did want to do everything in English.) At any rate, the croissant situation and the sheer gorgeousness of this city make up for it.

Cleansing through Paris

There's France, a country in Europe. Then there's Frahnce, an idea, a symbol, a prime study-abroad destination, an Anglo-American fantasy, a disappointment to some Japanese tourists, and the place where Alice Waters learned that American food was inferior. I'm not sure which of these Dionna Lee's guide is in reference to.

As would make sense for "Into The Gloss," where the guide appears, it begins with advice on where to find "100% organic juices, açaí bowls, and homemade almond milk cacao shakes." As the commenters correctly note, this is an odd pick for a city with... well, for a city with this as an option. Other suggestions include shopping at an H&M-affiliated store with a location on lower Broadway; getting cheesecake at an American-style café; and having an expensive vegetarian dinner. This is, in other words, an upscale, fashion-world version of a guide to Paris's McDonalds and Starbucks locations. A guide for those who find snails not too weird but too fattening. (The cheesecake can, I suppose, be Instagrammed but not eaten.)

But the beef in the comments seems mainly to come from the framing: "Paris Like A Local," the post is called, when basically everything being suggested could be better-accomplished in New York. But... does that necessarily make it not a like-a-local guide? New York is so hot right now in Paris, or was when I was there, which was granted a while ago now, but I've heard things, and it's my understanding that that remains the case. The more Williamsburg-ish a place is, perhaps the more likely hip French people will be in it. Or hip Parisians, a group that includes expats. After all, Parisians aren't going to shop exclusively at stores that only exist in Paris. It's a let-down for you-the-tourist if you can find the same thing for less at a mall, but not for someone who's unlikely to ever set foot in the Quakerbridge Mall (and how nice for them) in the first place.

Very important thoughts of the morning

-In the past week, I've spoken French while driving; read (part of!) Kafka's The Castle; and gone running at 7:30am. All of these because of peer pressure. I'm starting to think my friends are not just lovely people I enjoy spending time with, but good influences. (Otherwise it would be singing along to Bastille while driving, reading one of those contemporary novels that inevitably ends up being set in Brooklyn even if I hadn't realized this when choosing it, and running later in the day or not at all.)

-Into The Gloss has taken a refreshing step away from reminding us that Parisian women are effortlessly chic to ask readers about their hometown beauty looks. The way the post is framed, I was worried that what they're looking for was a bunch of 'where I come from, everyone's tacky and conformist, unlike in NY/Paris/London where I live now, now that I work in/want to work in Fashion', but the results are far more varied.

-Jezebel kind of gets but kind of misses the point of "You Did Not Eat That." And oh, the comments. I have my doubts about "thin-shaming," and I say this as someone who has, yes, been thin-shamed. I mean, it's a thing if you're thinner than is generally considered attractive, unhappy about this, yet constantly being accused of having dieted to get to that build. I'm sure that does get frustrating. But when we-the-merely-not-fat stand accused of "anorexia," or listen to (mock) disbelief that we eat carbs, are we actually insulted, really? I mean, beyond the way it's insulting for your body to be commented on no matter what? It's more woman-shaming than thin-shaming, if anything, because one doesn't leave such an interaction (at least I don't) thinking life would be easier if one were a different size. One just leaves feeling sort of gross in a generic leave-me-alone sort of way, and extra-gross if it happens in a professional context.

Pants (in the American sense)

When I moved to the woods, something happened to how I dress. Gray sweatshirts started to feature more prominently. Shoes became not merely city-walking compatible but poodle-in-woods-compatible, which is another whole level of comfortable. It's not that the previous incarnation had been all that haute - I was living in Paris and NY, but as a grad student and not in the finishing-school sense - but even so, the chances that I'd go out in sweatpants, loafers, and a puffy jacket were slim. I'd make some effort.

Here, I sort of figure, I probably won't see anyone who isn't a deer or squirrel, and everyone human I might see is someone who's seen me in the above-mentioned ensemble. And it would be kind of silly to dress up to write something from the couch at home. I know this is something people do, mimicking officewear for work not done in an office, but do these people's dogs require quite so much muddy exercise? And isn't the advantage of not-an-office the ability to wear sweatpants so old you don't remember if they're from Old Navy or Target?

But today, I was meeting a friend for lunch and thought, I'm going to wear the slightly uncomfortable pants. No, not the British meaning (WWPD has some discretion), just U.S. English for the black Zara jeans I ordered online without knowing the right size, and thus ordered in what's maybe half a size too small. Such that they look normal enough - the ubiquity of stretch is such that, really, how could they not - but are definitively pants and not sweatpants. To the outside world, I looked about as I always do - no 'why the dress, special occasion?' effect, and they're not even all that flattering - but I didn't feel like I was in pajamas.

And then, as the afternoon progressed, something happened. No, not corset-style fainting. A kind of burst of professional activity I'd wanted to catch up on. (Reminder to self: this will happen in the library or the coffee shop more often than at home.) And even a driving mini-adventure - that is, a trip to a strip-mall I'd never driven to alone before. I spent the day feeling very... not glamorous, exactly (it takes more than the Zara jeans for that), but competent. I leaned in, even if leaning in any particular direction posed some difficulty. My epiphany, it seems, is pants.

How Isabelle Huppert got her groove back

-In New York, Bisou learned that she had gotten a nice haircut "for New Jersey." This has to be the best underhanded compliment ever.

-And back in New Jersey, I watched "In Another Country," a movie that one is probably supposed to discuss in terms of cinematography, but I will be WWPD about it and mention that what's most interesting is that it chucks two romantic conventions: that the woman must be young (or younger than the man), and that if one party in an opposite-sex romance is to be East Asian, it shall be the woman. The movie's about various women played by Isabelle Huppert going to Korea and falling in and out of love with a bunch of Korean men. Most notably, each of these women gets her groove back with a lifeguard who spends much of the movie running, shirtless, to the shore, "Baywatch"-style. Although the main message is a more predictable one: if you're going to be a woman of a certain age, be French.

-You know how "health" advice is always euphemistic diet advice, as in how to lose weight? I believe I've managed to transcend this with the following suggestion for how to eat one's vegetables/use up the vegetables purchased with best intentions: tempura. Dust them with potato starch (if some is on hand; not sure this step is necessary), and dip in a batter that's a mix of all-purpose flour and seltzer. (Someone online recommended Diet Dr. Pepper in place of the seltzer. I would not do this.) Fry the vegetables (I used eggplant, asparagus, and carrot) in a mix of peanut and sesame oil. For extra carbs, serve with rice.

"I learnt classical Spanish, not the strange dialect he seems to have picked up." - Basil Fawlty's unconvincing excuse for not being able to communicate with Manuel.

Lately, I've spent time on a regular basis with no fewer than four native-French-speaking friends. And here's my problem: I associate French-the-language with French-the-discipline. I equate sending an email in French to emailing my advisor. To a situation where, if I mess up the gender of a noun, I might suffer professionally. Speaking aloud means formulating a coherent thought as one would in a seminar - something that might lead to a term-paper topic and maybe even a dissertation.

How did this come to be? Part of it's my own personality*, I suppose, but part of it is also, I'm convinced, about how I came to know French. I'd taken the language from age 8 on, but only really learned it while studying abroad in France. Which sounds so great - language immersion! Except that the immersion was in the form of intense UChicago courses conducted in French. The profs, some native-French and some not, all had impeccable French. But "French" was this thing whose grammar one learned in intricate detail, or the language of a giant stack of historical or literary texts. I'd read these texts in a genuine Parisian cafe... where the only French I'd speak was to order "un cafe, s'il vous plait." Our group lived not only together, but in an American dorm, with other Americans studying abroad. But there wasn't much time for hanging out - I had more (but also more interesting, given my interests) coursework that term than any other in college. Even if there were French people around, or if I'd been outgoing enough to track some down, I'm not sure when this socializing even would have taken place. Subsequent trips to Frahnce were like this but more so - but at least I have a dissertation to show for it? 

Anyway, I now have a new approach to addressing this. Rather than talking with a French-speaking friend in English, I explain that I'm shy about speaking French but very much want to do so. And then they'll speak French and so will I and that settles it. I just need to spell out what the issue is - i.e. that it isn't not knowing the language - and problem solved. 

*An actual anxiety dream I had recently: It took place (where else?) at my elementary/middle school. But I was enrolled. As an adult. Because even though in the dream (as in life), I had my high school diploma, there was some middle-school credit missing that I could only take at my middle school, like that's where the class was offered. (It didn't come up in the dream that I have a diploma or two beyond high school at this point, although in the context, it wouldn't have mattered.) I was in some office in my middle school lobby, or near the basement gym (which figures prominently in these dreams), trying to deal with the missing credit (my plan, in the dream, was sensible enough - I was going to let them know I already had a high school diploma, and had therefore finished as much of middle school as could possibly be necessary), when I saw a stack of some kind of... they were something like course evaluations, but students made them about one another, for the class I'd been taking (but, presumably, failing). And I could see two of them said that their problem with the course was a fellow student, Phoebe.

The dream ended on a strangely realistic note, with my thinking, huh, seeing as I'm on 91st and Madison anyway, I might as well stop for coffee and cake at Yura. My subconscious is a perfectly functioning Yelp when it comes to sit-down bakeries. 

Fitness strategies for the desperate

It was, as many readers no doubt noticed, a cold winter in parts of the U.S. Was and is. While I'd been very good about running in the fall, when the ice arrived, and I couldn't alternate between the treadmill and running outside, it all kind of came to a halt. Various minor winter-blah illnesses further conspired to get me as out-of-shape as possible as quickly as possible. The prospect of a half-hour of guilt-free weekday sitcom consumption failed to cancel out the two frozen minutes' walk to the gym. Did I mention I've gotten very used to life with a car? 

So behold, my plans for battling running-inertia. 

-Make appointments to go running with friends in the area. This means keeping a mental - maybe even physical - list of who might want to do this, and being a bit more the organizer than I usually am. But seeing as all that needs to be organized is a time and place to show up in sneakers, I can probably handle it. 

-Announce to the aforementioned list that I am about to go running, not so much to go with people (people do tend to require notice) as to compel myself off the couch. There, the danger is in spamming my friends, but the chances of my doing this (the running or the emailing) often enough to constitute spam are low indeed. 

-Bring Bisou! Except I'm never quite sure this counts as exercise. With all the sniffing and marking, there's not much continuous jogging involved. But it has a certain undeniable two-birds-one-stone advantage.

-Save the better and longer podcasts for running, i.e. not for dog-walks. That would be Dan Savage, of course, or the Marc Maron interview with Lena Dunham. That would most definitely not be anything about recipes from NPR. 

-Tell myself (and this I've been doing, sort of) that it's a damn shame not to run when it's warm out. (Check!) Convince myself that anything above freezing counts as "warm." (Eh...) 

-Be a French aristocratic fashion model (who says things like, "See, I've had this great chance in life of being born with good genes. I was born tall, with a pretty face (not to everyone's taste, I concede), and a thin body."), move to Paris, and hire someone called Bruno to whip me into shape.

"She looked like a ninny, dressed by rote, wearing what she thought made her look feminine rather than what suited her body and her job."

Behold: a man telling a woman not to dress for men. Jean Touitou, founder of the expensive French denim-and-more company A.P.C., thinks intelligent women who aren't dressed to his liking look like idiots... and somehow presents this as if it were a feminist observation. Women, he claims, dress in ways that "emphasise body parts that call out to men's sexual desire," which is wrong, he explains, because "these so-called sexy clothes are often hideous." Hideous... to him. And why on earth does she care what he thinks?

Women should dress for themselves, and eventually for other women, and only then maybe also for a handful of men. But they must step out of this outrageously sexed-up hell of signifiers; if they don't, this junk will make them lose their self-respect. 

Does he not see the irony? A man saying that women shouldn't dress for men? Or is he including himself in the "handful of men" women might aim to please? "I advocate understatement," he writes, which... I get that his business is selling gamine-menswear clothes, but is this some kind of political position? Does the Guardian want some kind of feminist hear-hear? If so, I'm afraid I won't oblige.

The ideal woman: a Korean Heather Locklear

Having bored of idolizing French women and their beauty routines, real or imagined, we may now turn to those of Japanese and Korean women. What does it all mean? An imminent shortage (no, noooooo) of the Tsubaki shampoo and conditioner? (Actually not such a disaster - I've stockpiled.) Anyway, I like it - it's time that mainstream beauty products and advice expand beyond that which is geared to a white woman whose principle beauty complaint is insufficiently voluminous hair.

Meanwhile, others are now idolizing celebrities, as vs. nationalities, and asking plastic surgeons to turn them into their favorite stars. The NYT Styles piece about this rounded up quite a handful. Women who feel they look too much like Cameron Diaz (this is a problem???) get surgery to look more like Kate Winslet. But the people they pick are so random! Heather Locklear? An ostensibly cisgender man who wants to look like an especially feminine-looking female French singer? And the results are predictably disappointing. I say "predictably" because I've brought photos of the hairstyles of famous or semi-famous people to the salon, only to discover that whichever dare I say holistic effect this haircut had on this other person, it didn't come together in at all the same way for me. It stands to reason that plopping Heather Locklear's nose onto not-Heather-Locklear's face would be similarly futile.

From Paris to Gristedes

-It's another day, so there are yet more instructions on how to look French. It's the usual, though - Frenchwomen don't go to the gym, don't use much makeup, do use a lot of moisturizers, and get medical pedicures. (I remember seeing those places all over Paris - had I been there as a beauty writer and not, you know, a grad student with a croissants-and-discounted-t-shirts budget, I might have had to investigate.) Frenchwomen look "natural," although what this means is that whatever they do, they call "natural," even if it involves injections of something that isn't Botox, but is instead "natural." (Isn't botulism natural? Isn't injecting anything into your face reasonably high up on the artifice spectrum?) And there's once again the French-hair recommendation, which those of us without the "French" hair texture can go on ignoring.

-The latest twist in YPIS: insufferable Thought Catalog essays on how terrible it is to be hated for one's privilege. What I suspect, but couldn't prove, is that what's brought this merry band of poor-little-rich-girls* to this topic - to this spiral of guilt and defensiveness - isn't, as they claim, that those who have less are making them feel bad. Rather, it's that there's a whole lot of YPIS being hurled among those of comparable levels of privilege, and a certain number of rich kids fail to catch on. While it's not impossible that a cashier at Gristedes is judging her for having shopped at a sample sale, my guess is that this young woman (who lives in a "West Village Apartment" [sic], because she's so rich, "apartment" must be capitalized?) has learned just how fancy and schmancy she is from peers who are just a bit more discreet. Peers who know it's not socially acceptable (in the UK maybe, but not here) to condemn someone for seeming gauche and nouveau-riche, and who then channel that sentiment into sanctimonious claims about how terrible the Gristedes cashiers must feel when ringing up some college kid with a discounted but likely still expensive handbag.

My theory, then, is that somehow all that YPIS gets unfairly projected onto the actual not-so-privileged, who are likely far more interested in when their shift at Gristedes ends than in whether the woman whose Diet Coke they're ringing up has student loans and if so, whether her parents are helping her pay them back. Which... I'm not sure what to conclude. There have always been ostentatious types who self-present as unashamed rich girls, in a Real Housewife-type way. But now, at least in some circles, the message has gotten through that there should be some embarrassment at unearned advantage. Which, I guess, why not? But as much as it's fun to mock the rich and oblivious, it seems as though the fight against obliviousness ends up subsuming whichever fight against inequality. Reduced obliviousness among the Gristedes customer base doesn't do much to help Gristedes workers. Whether it does anything is its own discussion.

*The gender angle here is huge, too huge to properly get to in this post, although it's kind of like what I was saying here.

"A jacket"

Inès de la Fressange (whom we've met before) is now offering five tips for how to be a chic Frenchwoman or just look like one. Fashion advice is often accused of being out-of-touch, or misogynistic in its demands to suffer for fashion. This, however, swings marvelously (comically?) in the other direction. To look the part of a Française, you will need the following:

1) "A denim shirt"

2) "Ballerina flats"

3) "Jeans"

4) "A jacket"

5) "A navy sweater"

In other words, there's an excellent chance that the ingredients for being a chic Frenchwoman are already in your wardrobe. You're a fifth of the way there if you own jeans! And note that four of the five items are as much menswear as women's, the remaining one being a relatively comfortable alternative to the usual.

Still, because this genre demands that The Frenchwoman chastise The Anglowoman, we get a bit about how you "look like a rat" (!) if you wear a black sweater rather than a navy one. Whatever that means. And she advises buying a shrunken blazer (fair enough), and doing so... at a children's department. That is the ultimate taboo - a woman who mentions shopping in a children's department is, according to the rules of this sort of thing, announcing that she's tiny. Which, maybe she is, maybe she isn't - she might just be short, and since "kids" effectively means petites in up to an 8 or 10, it's altogether possible to be not-so-tiny (if not-so-big, either) and shop kids'. But Fressange is twelve feet tall, a former model and Professional Thin Frenchwoman, so rest assured, that's her meaning.

Even so - even though Fressange calls the women she's advising rodent-like and makes them feel fat, even though there's nothing especially "French" about most of these items or combining them - this is probably the most appealing fashion advice I've seen in ages.

Tooth and nail

-Nail art had its day, and its day is, evidently, done. Nails may now return to the realm of skincare and haircare, where we are to seek out the appearance of 'health.' The fun days of glitter and neon for adult women are over, and now the trend is adhering to the dress code of some corporate law firm we don't even work at. I know because I read it on Into The Gloss, and because even before reading that, I'd painted my own nails a sheer pale pink. But if nail art brings up all kinds of appropriation issues, the "nude" nail has its own set of minefields. Specifically: "nude"? What's "nude" on one complexion isn't on another. Nail polish isn't the same as concealer or foundation, and a pale beige may look great on dark brown skin (although a dark brown polish may look not so amazing on pale beige skin). But yes, "nude" - acceptable for describing the color of something - nail polish, shoes, etc. - you yourself are wearing, maybe, but not for describing the color something is in the abstract.

-Canine dental care is expensive, is the understatement of the century. There's nothing even wrong with Bisou's teeth, but they must be cleaned to keep it that way. And we left with instructions on canine dental care that seem geared towards turning this - once combined with the half a day that must go to walking, fetch... - into a full-time job. Daily toothbrushing (this had been on an every-other-day schedule, along with brushing) and some kind of gel you're supposed to put on your dog's teeth before bed. I have trouble believing the 80-year-old women one sees walking 20-year-old poodles around Paris go in for all of this, but just as American women don't get to enter into a healthy, wrinkle-free old age on the wine-croissant-cigarette diet, American poodles can't live on Camembert and market-scavenging alone.

Bisou moonlighting as another dog's tail.

Bisou in the springtime, striking a pose.

Bisou mid-yawn, a menacing sight.

Frenchwomen, househusbands

-I'm confused. Didn't we just get through discussing Hugo Schwyzer, and how he was extolling the virtues of dating older women in print (well, online) while chasing after far-younger sorts off-blog, and how this may or may not have been the precipitating factor in his downfall from the feminist blogosphere? Was the lesson not learned? Not any Schwyzer-specific lesson, but rather that essays from men about how older/non-pubescent women are actually beautiful end up seeming like protest-too-much declarations about just how gorgeous women are not past whichever age? That they read as "nice guy" to feminists (or just irritating because who cares what some random dude we don't even know thinks about what we look like), and get whichever "game" sorts panties in a twist because Science tells us that women become hags at 17. No productive conversation ever ensues. The boring reality - that individual men and women of all ages are desired and thus beautiful, but that "distinguished" doesn't sell bathing suits - is maybe, I don't know, too simple? Haven't we moved past this brand of nonsense?

Evidently not. The NYT Style blog just published a different man's essay about how women get more beautiful with age, really they do, even women in their 80s can be hot, really they can. As the astute commenters there have already noted, the piece is accompanied by photos of three French actresses, between the ages of 23 and 37. See! A woman of 37 can totally be attractive, assuming she's a beautiful French actress.

But the photos are the least of it. The text itself is a mix of the nauseating, insist-too-much thing about older women's charms and some of the stalest Francophilic cliché I've come across and that's saying something. It contains this gem: "Frenchwomen respect the natural adornments of time and are perhaps less in thrall to the fatal glow of false youth." Gah! From le very same newspaper: "A survey by the market research company Mintel found that 33 percent of French girls between 15 and 19 are already using anti-aging or anti-wrinkle creams."

-I can't possibly be the only one who questioned Prudie's advice to this 30-year-old whose long-term boyfriend has house-husband written all over him. She makes "over six figures" (seven?, and yes, I know that's not what she means) but insists, "I live in one of the most expensive areas in the country, so I would need two incomes to support a family." Well that settles it! Prudie gives the Prudie equivalent of DTMFA: "You look at your boyfriend and see a life partner and great father. I see a sponge." 

Second gah! of the day. If we want to see more women being high-powered lean-inners, we need to accept that some such women will be in 50-50 power-marriages, while many more will be the higher-powered of the two spouses. Otherwise we're effectively condemning women like this one to choose career over family. If she dumps this guy she's crazy about because society tells her she needs a man at least as ambitious as she is, who's to say such a man is around the corner?

Yes, fine, it's different if there's something wrong with the boyfriend that explains his not having worked full-time (we don't know precisely what he has been doing, which Prudie rounds down to "playing computer games and staring at his Claudia Schiffer posters"). Is he depressed, is he a terrible person, how exactly shall with pathologize his situation? But if he's just not that ambitious, and she's ambitious enough for them both, and has been with him since forever, and remains fond of him, what's the problem? He can take care of the kids when she's staying late at the six-figure firm, and won't mind when the firm relocates to Singapore because video games and Claudia Schiffer posters can travel.

"Occasional"

Pamela Druckerman, the woman behind the book (books!) telling Americans how to have well-behaved, vegetable-eating French children, has written a guide to taking the kids to Paris. It contains amazing advice, everything from "where to find a potty" to "Paris is not a den of anti-Semitism or adultery." (But what to do when the potty contains lewd and anti-Semitic graffiti? Apart from hope that your child can't - yet - read French.) There's advice on how to get food for picky eaters, which... isn't that Druckerman's thing, that children need not be picky eaters? And then she suggests McDonald's?

She doesn't let up entirely, though: "Croissants and pain au chocolat are of course on offer too, though these tend to be occasional treats for French children." What what what? If you're in Paris for a week (or, ahem, a semester), damn straight you're eating croissants every morning. That's your "occasional" right there - that you don't actually live in France. Find some other road to cultural immersion that doesn't involve pastry deprivation.

Or you could go the more ascetic route, as one father advises: "One thing that proved helpful was buying a fresh baguette in the morning when we left the hotel and breaking off pieces of it for them through the day. They were quite happy with that and a bottle of water."

Naked men and French pastries

-Daniel Bergner, whose book I still need to track down, is soliciting information from women about whether they find naked men attractive:

How important is the visual to you? How does it play out in your sexual life? Is it essential? Peripheral? Do you bring home the visual turn-ons of the day when you get into bed with your partner? If the visual is important to you, is your partner aware of this? As always, please write from personal experience and be as specific and honest as possible, but stop short of pornographic.

This is, if nothing else, one heck of a writing assignment. How exactly does one talk about not merely "the visual" (which is nice and abstract) but the sexiness of naked people without this veering into X-rated territory? What could one possibly say, other than something that sounds like a description of a painting in a museum? It seems as though anything frank one could say on this topic would risk titillating, no matter the intention. As much as it would be great to get rid of the myth that straight women merely tolerate naked men in exchange for the social role of girlfriend or wife, it doesn't really seem like collected PG-13 anecdotal evidence would get us there.

-The NYT food-writer whose specialty is lentil-based cardboard (recipes that sound like they'd be great if whichever ostentatiously removed full-fat ingredient or animal-products were brought back in) has revealed a secret life as a pastry-cookbook ghost-writer. At least one vegan is furious. But in a sense, this kind of adds up. One of the rules of healthy eating is that anything's OK as long as it's French. White flour ceases to be poison when it goes by the name farine de blé. That's either because within the context of a traditional French diet, croissants seem not to pose a problem or because all of this is really about demonstrating class status with food choices. Or perhaps a bit of both.

 -A conversation between Dan Savage and Andrew Sullivan. Highly recommended. All the more so if you have a day "off" that you've devoted to turning the "study" in your apartment from messy-adolescent-bedroom to space-work-could-actually-happen-in. Makes the time fly.

When they got to the part about female desire being different, though, I tried not to preemptively wince. Were we really about to hear two men explain that women are like so? Because it started to seem to be going in that direction. And it wasn't even that they're gay - I'd heard both make this argument in the past.

As it happened, we only heard one do this. Sullivan asked Savage to agree that there are differences between men and women, suggesting that one would have to be all kinds of politically-correct (and not a tell-it-like-it-is libertarian) to dispute this, and Savage kind of agreed, but kind of laughed this off, agreeing vehemently that "gay men are men." But when Sullivan tried to insist that women are set on monogamy, whereas men inherently crave variety, Savage was like, no, that's not what the new studies are saying. And to his credit, Sullivan responded that this was the first he'd heard of it, but didn't insist that these studies were wrong, and did indeed seem open to the idea that social construction plays into what we think female sexuality consists of.

But what struck me was what Sullivan's claim that in heterosexual relationships, men are fine with cheating, but women are not, would imply. It would imply that, while women object to men straying, men do not object to women doing the same. Which contradicts not so much what gender-is-a-construction types may believe about women's vibrant and varied sexuality, but also what's been popular-to-the-point-of-stale cliché for ages: that (many but not all) women accepting that 'men have needs', while (many but thankfully not all) men are jealous and possessive. It would seem that these gender-normative men who are fine and dandy with fooling around are happy to do so themselves. That that's the "open" they favor.

So this may not be that much about women being like so after all. Men, as a rule, appear to have a different expectation of fidelity from female partners than from male ones. Is this because, on some primal level, babies? Is it because of popular assumptions that women would only stray if they intend to leave - that their betrayal is by definition emotional betrayal? The patriarchy (she says, burning her bra, so as to further rile the bra-fit sub-Reddit)? Whatever it is, it does sort of seem the missing piece.