Belately realising things

I recently read an article by a Northern Irish lady named Lorraine Wylie belatedly realising how wonderful French women's lives are compared to Northern Irish women at https://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/life/features/northern-ireland-can-learn-a-little-on-lifestyle-food-and-fashion-from-the-french-37451558.html .  What struck me most about this is that this was published on the 24th of October 2018 (less than a month ago).  Clearly, though the author has a French first name, she has been stuck in a bunker for the last decade-and-a-half or so!  Has it taken her this long to realise how effortlessly perfect we Frenchwomen are?  No wonder effortlessly perfect Frenchwomen like myself feel the need to go on endlessly about this!  MDR.

The article talks about her visit to her French friend Véronique Maquin Chillou.  She doesn't give the name of the town in which this article is set, though she mentions that it is part of Vienne.  I don't think I would be breaching privacy laws to say a quick Google search reveals it to be Chauvingy in Nouvelle Aquitaine.  This part of France is particularly famous for goat's cheese, with less famous foods being Echiré butter, Farci Poitevin paté and Tourteau Fromagé.  Not as wonderful as Provence, but every culinary region of France is wonderful compared to any region (or country) not under French sovereignty.

Lorraine Wylie talks about how she walked up the steep cobbled streets.  I must say, if she views French women's passive exercise as a new revelation, I can't think what sort of isolated circumstances she has been living in.  This woman has probably been sweating away in a gym (and overeating afterwards) in an attempt to lose weight, as is typical among frumpy Anglo-Saxon women.  Meanwhile, we Frenchwomen are staying effortlessly thin, to oversimplify things slightly, by just walking more (using the stairs and less car travel) and saying "la moitié, s'il vous plaît" when offered some food.

Regarding the tips about beauty, yes, a Frenchwoman definitely knows how to use a beauty regimen to make herself look nice, though I think Véronique Maquin Chillou has a fairly laborious routine.  I don't spend anywhere near the time she appears to spend on beauty (I have compressed my routine to a few minutes in the morning) yet Bilal still thinks I am a "bufft'ing" and comes home each evening with a huge appetite for after our sons have been put to bed.

The advice on food is hardly revolutionary.  Véronique Maquin Chillou says she makes rich dishes and avoids processed foods, sticking to simple things (a Frenchwoman loves elegant simplicity).  She also doesn't avoid cheese, desserts and wine, three not-so-guilty pleasures that Frenchwomen regularly enjoy.  The biggest No-sh"BLEEP"-Sherlock part of the article is "As suspected, a slender silhouette has nothing to do with national heritage. It doesn't matter which side of the channel our bread is buttered, staying in shape is simply about portion control."  I don't know how many times the phrase "La moitié, s'il vous plaît" has appeared in this blog so far.  Okay, she might have been suspecting it for a long time, though I don't know why it took so long for her to confirm her suspicions.

Okay, it is generally harder to reach Northern Ireland from France than the nations making up Great Britain (England, Scotland and Wales) by land, but how has Lorraine Wylie been in the dark for so long?  She talks about the tips as if they were groundbreaking new revelations, which they should not be, even in the Anglo-Saxon world.  This demonstrates that there is plenty more work to do with this blog!

A BBC attack on French women's effortless perfection

About a week ago, I came across a BBC article expressing disapproval of French women's perfection.  In it, the BBC journalist named Joanna Robertson attacked the supposed tyranny of the French culture pushing women to be thin.  In the article, she proved that she doesn't care much for consistency either.  Towards the beginning of the article, she wrote: -
"Pharmacies are filled with miracle-claiming diet products and women's magazines run endless columns of slimming advice."
Then later on, she wrote something far closer to the truth, which read: -
"There is an idea put about in what the French call the "Anglo-Saxon" press that French women do not grow fat.  
They simply follow a set of mystic rules, handed down from mother to daughter, that govern their personal grooming, comportment and, most of all, their eating habits.  
A sensible, balanced diet. Plenty of fresh produce. Three meals a day. Absolutely no snacking. Regular, reasonable exercise. Nothing to excess."
It is an almost direct contradiction, though I broadly feel unable to disagree with the points raised in the second quotation.  The major point I disagree with is the word "mystic".  There is nothing mysterious about how we are impossibly thin.  It is the fact that we are impossibly perfect.  We have absolutely delicious food that means we feel satisfied by the taste, rather than the feeling of our bellies being stretched (as is the case with unsophisticated Anglo-Saxon women).  Joanna Robertson is entirely right when she says that obesity is frowned upon in France.

I note one point that appeared towards the end, which read: -
""It is an absolute tyranny," says Marjorie, a 49-year-old business executive, herself pencil slim.
"The tyranny of the silhouette, we call it - but it is also a kind of dream because it represents total success.
"It is not like in the UK where TV shows have women of all shapes and sizes doing all kinds of things. I love that - chubby 55-year-olds kissing men full on the mouth. You would never see that here," she adds.
Marjorie works near the Paris suburb of Saint Denis where there is a large immigrant population from the Maghreb.
She is inspired by these women with their full, rounded, curvaceous figures and the way they walk tall.
"They are so much more feminine than our Parisian chic," she says, "but the sad truth is that if they want careers in this society they are going to have to get skinny to get ahead.""
Fat and feminine!  These two terms are almost mutually exclusive.  I view it as severely unfeminine to be fat.  I have seen such scenes on British television with obese 55-year-olds kissing men on the mouth and it made me feel physically sick, but anyway.  In pre-industrialised society, men needed to marry a woman with strong arms, because he knew he would need someone who was capable of doing large amounts of physical work on the farm.  Proverbs 31:17 reads, "She girdeth her loins with strength, and strengtheneth her arms."  The English NIV renders this as, "She sets about her work vigorously; her arms are strong for her tasks."  However, in an industrialised society, there is no longer a need for women to be heavily built.  This does not mean we work any less hard.  Today's women work just as hard, even if the work isn't always physical.  However, as Joanna Robertson seems to be close to admitting, but doesn't want to, thin is beautiful.  This is unfortunately a fact that she correctly indicates has not yet occurred to "Maghreb" women living in France.  Bilal told me that he never liked the sight of women from his culture having "full, rounded, curvaceous figures".  He has told me that he always thought it looked horrible.  Granted, Bilal comes from Mali, which is outside the zone traditionally known as the Maghreb, but that is a minor detail.

Bilal has told me that one of the reasons he enjoyed being able to take the bus and get out of La Savine for a few hours at a time on Saturdays and weekday evenings (of course, on Sundays, his reason was coming to church) was because it was so refreshing to him to see lovely, thin French women, rather than the "full, rounded, curvaceous figures" *cough* of the immigrant women he came across in La Savine.  Granted, this was a minor reason: - a much bigger reason was that he found it hard work steeling himself against all the hip-hop gangland culture he witnessed in La Savine.

This was the main reason, but for him, seeing chic and elegant French women was a bonus for him.  As he has reminded me, such women no longer interest him, as I have agreed to be courted by him.  He has been entranced with my beauty for a long time, hence why he was willing to wait several years to receive my father's approval to court me.  Why wouldn't he be?  I'm the impossibly dainty French woman!  As Joanna Robertson points out, we French (rightly) regard being skinny as a sign of success.  Bilal has rightly recognised that there is more to me than my physical beauty and has correctly said that my physical beauty is only the tip of the iceberg.  However, he says he just finds the sight of fat Arab women using a veil to hide their ""full, rounded, curvaceous figures" disgusting.

Why can't the rest of the world appreciate the beauty that we French women possess with our effortlessly dainty figures?  It is not true to say that we have these because we smoke, because we use magic, because we pop pills or anything like that.  It is ultimately down to the power of a simple, but very powerful phrase: - "La moitié, s'il vous plaît" ("half of that, please").  It means we enjoy the pleasure of good food, but we only eat dainty portions thereof.  We don't have fat diets, we do eat things besides cabbage soup at mealtimes and we don't starve ourselves!  When someone offers us some food, we just say, "La moitié, s'il vous plaît": - if that means we have to only put half as much on our forks to allow us to keep pace with the other participants at the meal, then that is exactly what we do.  We cut the food into dainty pieces, put these dainty pieces into our mouths and savour the immense pleasure of eat bite, so that we don't need to consume huge quantities to feel full.

So there you have it.  The secret of my success.  Women around the world should say at least a hundred times a day the phrase behind my success: - "La moitié, s'il vous plaît".