As a character in her narrative, she goes about asking a range of people to explain French seduction – or rather, to amplify her own definitions in the book’s opening pages: La Seduction is a seductive book because she is both susceptible to the allure and critical of or charmingly amused by its pretensions. “The idea that an American is going to penetrate the system? No.”īut Sciolino has learned from the French. “I have never met an American, never, who has really understood what drives French society,” he said.

Nevertheless, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing warned that her inquiries into the nature of French seductiveness would never adequately illuminate their subject. She is as connected as an American can be in Paris.

It’s the only way to avoid frightening men.’” These women unanimously considered “the politics of American feminism divisive, brutal, and unnecessary.”Įarly in her career, Sciolino was a Newsweek correspondent in France, and in 2002 she was named Paris bureau chief for The New York Times. One member said, ‘If you want to have equal opportunity and treatment in professional life, you should above all stick with seduction. I responded that if they have to play the femininity game, they will always be treated as somehow inferior. She says, “What surprised me most was that a number of my women’s club members do not favor uniform gender standards in the workplace.

Sciolino holds the distinction of being one of the very few non-French members of the Femmes Forum, a Paris-based private club of prominent women living in France. The key word here is “suddenly,” for in La Seduction, Sciolino’s pert consideration of French culture and style, she recounts conversations with prominent women who voice no such complaints. “Women suddenly said that the Mad Men style of behavior they had put up with for so long at work – the leering, the inappropriate touching, the sexual banter – was not acceptable.” “France is having its Anita Hill moment,” Elaine Sciolino writes in a recent issue of Time regarding the infamous behavior of Dominique Strauss-Kahn.

French Seduction by Laura Hault