Why is it so shocking to have no sex life?
Sophie Fontanel’s sex life fascinates France. The reason? For 12 years it was non-existent, writes Anne Billson
IHAVE a rendezvous with the author of The Art of Sleeping Alone: Why One French Woman Gave Up Sex. I am five minutes early, so install myself on a banquette next to the revolving doors of Le Meurice Hotel in Paris to survey all the new arrivals passing into the marble-floored foyer from the rue de Rivoli.
As I wait, I check my notes: this is 50year-old Sophie Fontanel’s 12th book and it is a bestseller. “We live in a culture in which people would die rather than admit to having felt listless about sex at one point in their lives,” she writes in the preface.
And she is right — we are all supposed to be getting it regularly, perfect sex, and if we are not, it is seen as a cause for concern, somehow pitiable or unhealthy.
Not having sex is nowadays thought of as an unnatural state, to be remedied at all costs by means of problem pages, couples counsellors, singles bars, websites. That a woman might actively choose to opt out is, to many people, unthinkable behaviour, as strange and exotic as retiring to a nunnery.
The Art Of Sleeping Alone chronicles Fontanel’s decision to give up sex for 12 years, and examines other people’s reactions to her self-enforced celibacy.
After a 20-minute delay, during which we are both sitting at different ends of the hotel lobby wondering where the other is, we finally make contact and order non-alcoholic cocktails. I feel flustered and unprofessional, but she could not be nicer.
I remember she is a journalist too — an editor at French Elle. She is wearing a turquoise corduroy jacket, red-andwhite striped shirt, blue jeans and Acne boots with kitten heels, and looks effortlessly chic, and I am left feeling simultaneously under- and overdressed. It’s a knack Frenchwomen have.
The Art of Sleeping Alone is not so much a narrative as a series of elegantly written vignettes on the chosen theme — some of them apparently semi-autobiographical anecdotes, others more philosophical reflections.
Like all good Parisians, Fontanel was on holiday in August 2011 when the book was published. It instantly sparked so much discussion in the media, on blogs and in online forums that her publishers told her to cut short her holiday and return to Paris.
“People were saying, ‘This is insane, this account you’ve written about your life . . . How is it possible?’ They talked to me as though I were some sort of strange animal,” Fontanel recalls.
“When the book came out, so many women said, ‘Me too, I stopped as well.’ And then at the end of a week of this, I realised that this one case history, the experience of one woman, was relevant to a lot of people, and that, in fact, I had unwittingly touched on an issue that was rarely talked about.”
Elective celibacy became the topic du jour. “I was amazed to see how much it shocked people, simply because I had been open where people usually boasted or fibbed. People just don’t express dissatisfaction with their sex lives.
“For example, there’s a phrase, ‘We made love all night long.’ But who wants to make love all night without sleeping or talking? That’s the sort of thing I deal with, the sort of thing that needs to be talked about. It’s the sort of sexuality that is terrifying for women — and for men, because it’s they who must maintain the erection. When my book came out, a number of men told me they were glad I’d written it, that it was liberating for them too.”
Some people assumed she had given up because she was getting no pleasure from it, which she says was not the case; her dissatisfaction was gradual, not triggered by a single incident and to do with a failure to find “the whole package” — a physical relationship that would live up to her hopes and dreams.
No sex, she concluded, was preferable to bad sex.
Fontanel had escaped an increasingly unsatisfactory relationship (“For weeks I’d been obliged to shake my head at whatever my lover proposed”) by going on holiday alone to a ski resort, where she decided that “my life would be soft and fluffy. I was through with being had.” The ensuing period of celibacy lasted 12 years.
She immediately became an object of curiosity to her friends, both male and female. Some tried to pair her off; on occasion she even invented fictional lovers to get them off her case.
And as with the media when her book came out, there were others who reacted “as though I were obsessed [with sex]! In my book I don’t use a single vulgar word or banality, yet I’m supposed to be the one who’s obsessed because I’m saying what I don’t do. I find that fascinating. You can wear a thong, discuss your sex life, make sex tapes, and nobody says a thing. You can make love to a monkey, and nobody says a thing. But if you say, ‘I don’t do it,’ that’s just not on.”
Fontanel is a born and bred Parisienne. She studied linguistics, worked as a researcher in New York and as a television presenter at Canal+ before magazine journalism.
Fontanel, who lives in the PalaisRoyal, an area that was once home to Jean Cocteau and Colette, has never married or had children. Marriage does not appeal. “Every time I go to a wedding, I have the impression of being present at a lie . . . For me it’s the beginning of the end. In films, it all stops before the wedding.”
At the end of The Art of Sleeping Alone, the narrator’s period of selfimposed celibacy comes to an end. “I fell in love with a married man,” she says. “It’s not a secret, but it’s discreet.” They are still together.
“What’s miraculous about sexuality is that it can die out, but also be rekindled in two seconds. As I said in the book, there are two things I missed when I stopped having sex. One is the loss of self when you make love, and it’s so good and intoxicating that you lose control. When you don’t make love, you are always in control. The second thing is to be caressed, to be in someone’s arms, with your head on his shoulders.” —© The Daily Telegraph, London