OVERSEAS BRIEFING

Author: Jason Siegel

PARIS - Imagine you are an advertising executive, and a yogurt company asks you to market their newest flavors. Ask yourself, what would be the easiest, most logical way to market this new dairy delight? If you said, "Why, that's simple. Just show a naked woman eating yogurt," then clearly, you've spent some time in France.

The attitude towards sex in Europe has been described by a gamut of Americans as everything from "appalling" to "awesome, dude." Children walking the streets of Paris will see advertisements featuring nothing but men's torsos and upper thigh area, fully naked women or the Eiffel Tower as a hilarious phallic symbol. None of these, it should be noted, seem to have as negative an effect on children as the split-second view of a female celebrity's pectoral region.

Though there is much ado about women's sexuality, the sex appeal of men (including yours truly) does not go overlooked, as I found out during Paris' annual sales.

I went looking for a variety of clothes, hoping to find something, anything that might be reasonably chic and within my price range. While I was browsing, I happened upon the underwear department and was shocked.

Apparently, the Parisians don't believe in boxers - not incredibly surprising in itself, as many other countries shun them as well. What surprised me was that the only underwear available for adults and senior citizens alike would, in the United States, be appropriate only for Deuce Bigelow et al. (I ended up with a nice button-down shirt, thank you very much).

With no FCC and Puritanical advocacy groups breathing down their necks, French television stations and movie theaters are free to show as much or as little sex as they see fit, even on government-run stations. This, however, does not result in French airwaves being dominated by nudity and constant innuendo. In fact, sex comes up less often here than in the United States or Chile, the two countries I'm most familiar with.

As for the effect this openness toward sexuality has on the rest of the society, it's not that much. For example, the teen sex rate in France is not that much different from the rate in the United States.

On the other hand, the pregnancy rate tends to be much lower, in part because of a willingness to teach kids that condoms do work - contrary to what the most popular abstinence-only education programs teach in the States - and in part because male homosexuality is not linked to a lack of virility, thus teen gays don't feel the need to prove their manliness by hooking up with a girl.

Yet, for all this openness, I'm still left with one question. Who sees a naked woman and thinks, "Man, I want some of that...yogurt"?