Just to get away from football...

The Guardian reflects on the French gender wars:

"The jaunty-sounding French feminist group, Les Chiennes de Garde (which translates as Guard Dogs or, if you prefer, which I'm sure you don't, Guard Bitches), this week launched a petition for "mademoiselle" to be banned from administrative use because - gee, you think? - it "perpetuates the submission to macho values". Women are thereby sexistly compelled to reveal their marital status while men are required to reveal only their gender. The petition says: "The madame/mademoiselle option means that a woman has to give an indication of her availability, in particular her sexual availability. A letterbox is not meant to be a dating agency." Not even in France, where, as Joni Mitchell noted, they kiss on main street. The petition is to be presented to MPs and Catherine Vautrin, minister for social cohesion. You can sign it if you go to www.chiennesdegarde.org.
...
French journalist Judith Perrignon, though, contends that mademoiselle should be retained because it suggests coquetry and girlishness, while "madame" codifies the funlessness of monogamy. Perhaps, then, "madame" is the real problem, enshrining as it does the phallocentric power of what Cixous called "the Anti-Other in papaperson" (damn him)! If so, what is the correct way to address a Frenchwoman? Sensible answers on a postcard please."

This is only one of the etiquette problems of dealing with French women. When I used to visit France regularly, my difficulty was understanding at what stage in one's relationship with a Frenchwoman one moved from shaking hands to cheek-kissing (two cheeks of course). Then the move from 'deux bises' to 'trois bises' was equally incomprehensible. But French women seem to have an instinctive understanding of these things.