(MSNBC) - Quelle horreur! The French, of all people, seem to be having troubles in the bedroom.
According to a recent survey (conducted by the makers of the erection-enhancing drug Levitra, so grain of salt and all that) 76 percent of the French sometimes suffer from lack of sexual response. They cited reasons any harried American couple might cite: the kids, the job stress, the Blackberry-iPhone-Droid triumvirate of desire-killers. We may think of the French, with their cafes and all those weeks of vacation, as being less-frazzled than the rest of us, but they aren’t, necessarily — and it’s dinging their reputation as lovers.
But was that reputation ever justified? Do the British deserve their image as cold, if polite, fish in the bedroom? Are Latin lovers really more passionate? And are Americans boringly vanilla lovers?
National sex stereotypes matter. We felt their effects in all those “man up” comments aimed at male politicians from Tea Party females during the last campaign.
But it turns out the stereotypes we all know and love, like the “French lover” and "the icy Brit," were mostly created by literature.
The modern idea of an international publishing industry started around the mid-1660s and, as books spread, so did stereotypes, explained Pamela Cheek a professor of languages at the University of New Mexico and author of “Sexual Antipodes: Enlightenment Globalization and the Placing of Sex.”
Books became an important, if often infrequently acknowledged, part of the Enlightenment revolution, the same revolution that inspired America’s founding fathers.
Partly because of such "dirty books," and partly due to French PR, France got the reputation of being sexually free.
Not to be outdone, the British began publishing their own explicit books like "Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure," more popularly known as Fanny Hill in 1748. It did wonders for creating the stereotype that of British men as conflicted spanking fetishists.
Read the rest of the article here.
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