On the wall by the stage I notice a large plaque of names, similar to the one at the British Embassy that lists the ambassadors to Paris. This is slightly different, though. It’s a roll of honour of past dancers—names like Lady Pousse-Pousse, Diva Novita, Vanity Starlight and Venus Océane. Not their real names, of course—traditionally, a Crazy Horse dancer’s name is given to her by the show manager or artistic director after her first night on stage. The girl can refuse it once, but has to take the second name offered. Most of them apparently accept the first choice.
The music starts, and is typically Parisian. Not accordion, you understand—these days, you mainly hear that played by Eastern European buskers on the métro. No, this is ’60s French rock’n’roll, what they call yé-yé.
The curtain opens on a very un-Parisian scene—a row of naked female Grenadiers, marching on the spot and saluting. It’s a clotheless version of the Changing of the Guard at Buckingham Palace. They have the black-fur busbies, but there any resemblance with English soldiers ends. Their uniform is a flimsy framework of jacket that reveals their bare breasts, and they are wearing nothing down below except what looks like a strategically pasted rectangle of black silk to protect their modesty. Not a very practical outfit for standing around outside the Palace.
After a few minutes, the curtain falls and the tableau changes—now it’s a silhouette dance in coloured shadow, a Parisian version of the credits of a James Bond film. Next comes a solo dancer miming to a song that suggests, rather unconvincingly given her almost total nakedness and willingness to point her buttocks at perfect strangers, that she’s a ‘good girl’.
And as the show progresses, I realize that the girls in fact do almost no stripping. And although having young women shake their smooth, shapely naked buttocks at me for an hour or more is not a neutral experience, the dances are not at all pornographic. The girls are somehow too perfect, too doll-like, for sexual thoughts. The show is an almost abstract use of the female body, even in the slightly fetishist sequence where we see only legs and high heels.
The dancers also look so alike that there’s no way a spectator can fixate on one of them, as the rich gentlemen at the nineteenth-century clubs used to do. This is a deliberate policy. The dancers are chosen according to strict physical criteria, and two measurements have to be exactly the same—the distance from nipple to nipple and from navel to pubis. Only guest stars are ever allowed to break the mould.
In the final tableau, all ten or so of the girls dance around the glittering letters D-É-S-I-R, miming to a bilingual song that talks rather erotically about Champagne flowing between one’s fingers, and then the show is over, the lights go up and the audience files out into the foyer to buy souvenir T-shirts and spangly knickers.
I wonder what my partner thought of it all—as a feminist, she might say it totally dehumanizes women, and accuse me of taking her to see the public enslavement of her gender. Relations might be frosty for the next few days.
We cross the street towards the Chamber of Agriculture and, nervously, I ask her opinion. She reflects for a moment, and then says that the show was much classier than she’d expected. ‘And I’d really like to know how that girl took off her stockings without taking off her shoes.’
It’s a conclusion that says as much about Parisian sexual politics as it does about the city’s erotic cabaret.
Où est le sexe?
Where, then, does this leave Parisian sex?
The city cherishes its reputation for being completely uninhibited and free-speaking. Deep down, it still thinks its theme tune is Serge Gainsbourg’s song ‘Je T’Aime, Moi Non Plus’*****, which contains a chorus that can be hilariously translated, rather like one of the old French sex films, as ‘I come and I go, between your kidneys, and I restrain myself.’
The song’s orgasmic gasps and groans are not just the sound of Serge’s posh new English girlfriend Jane Birkin expressing her surprise at how turning herself into a Parisian sex kitten has launched her career, it is also Paris saying, ‘Bonjour, everybody, listen to us shagging.’ And as Bernard-Henri Lévy’s previously quoted outburst in the Sunday Times shows, Parisians still have a tendency to think they’re the only ones doing so.
In fact, though, as we’ve seen in this chapter, sexually speaking, Paris has changed a lot in recent years. Pigalle is gradually shedding its seedy skin, and even though the Crazy Horse plays on the old showgirl reputation, it has turned its shapely back on the sordid pornographic side of the city’s history.
Of course, Paris’s peep shows, sex shops and swingers’ clubs still exist, as does the prostitution—you can find women, men and everything in between hanging out on pavements all over the city if you know where to look—but these days the explicitly sexual stuff has pretty well all been marginalized.
There are still plenty of erotic things to do here, but nowadays, more often than not, the explicit sex is left up to your imagination. Just as, in my chapter on Romance, the Hôtel Amour gave up trying to be a love hotel and turned into a true-love hotel, Parisian sex has stopped being seedy and has gone mainstream. It’s still naughty, but these days the naughtiness is also nice—romantic, even. The hard core has gone soft.
Though it’s probably best not to destroy Bernard-Henri Lévy’s world by telling him so.
* For the full story of his amorous adventures in Paris, see my book 1,000 Years of Annoying the French. Though for Edward it was less about annoying them than seducing them, both sexually and diplomatically.
** I should add, for legal reasons, that he is not a minister at the time of writing.
*** In French, file can mean prostitute. When
