Still playing that same old tune
Nina Bernstein files a think piece in the NY Times - For Americans, It's French Sissies Versus German He-Men. But she didn't think too hard:

It was on display again last week, that old double standard. On camera, Germany's chancellor got a muscular handshake from America's president and a meeting that let bygones be bygones. France's president got the official cold shoulder and columnists' heated denunciations.

... an obvious explanation comes to mind: in the American imagination, France is a woman, and Germany is just another guy.

The French themselves depict La Belle France as a bare-breasted "Marianne" on the barricades. They export high fashion, cosmetics, fine food — delicacies traditionally linked to a woman's pleasure, if not her boudoir. And French has always been Hollywood's language of love.

Germany, meanwhile, is the Fatherland, its spike helmets retooled into the sleek insignia of cars like the Mercedes and BMW. It also exports heavy machinery and strong beer — products linked to manliness. And notwithstanding Goethe, Schiller and Franka Potente, German is Hollywood's language of war, barked to the beat of combat boots in half a century of movies.

I wonder if Nina was a psych major?

American officials have long used sexist stereotyping as diplomatic strategy. Franklin Roosevelt once declared that Charles de Gaulle knew no more about economics "than a woman knows about a carburetor." In 1953, Life magazine likened the French government to "a big can-can chorus" and France itself to a showgirl slipping a billion-dollar bill's worth of American aid into her stocking.

Oh no! Not sexual stereotyping!



Er, Nina, the French government has been the guiding light of Euroweenie obstructionism since heck was a pup. Unless you support the proposition that this is typical female behavior, save it for your next bull session at the dorm.