The mysticism about French girls is so bizarre. North American girls want to know their secrets, assuming that all French women must be doing something different that makes them so skinny and beautiful. But the truth of it is they are not all pretty, or super slim or have perfect skin. They don’t all eat super healthy or drink loads of water. Many of them eat out all the time, or take home frozen dinners from Picard, and couldn’t cook to save their lives. They smoke, they tan, they drink. But what is unique about French women, and what you can tell in a glance if someone is French or British, is that French girls don’t dress up. This is not to say they don’t look great or fashionable, but it is what they wear and how they wear it that makes them French. Little or no makeup, flat shoes, big flowing tops. Pretty but super un-sexy. But why?

Being a Canadian girl in Paris, the one culture shock that is still resonating with me is that French men, and especially the immigrants who come here from north Africa and Algeria, gawk. And the have balls. A French girl friend of mine had no idea how bad it is here until she went to Sweden and realized that men don’t do this in other countries. There is nothing that one can say that they are specifically doing wrong. A man who says “Bonjour” or “Bonsoir” or “Belle boites” to you as you pass by is not essentially harassing you. But he makes you feel uncomfortable. And day after day after day of the same type of behaviour coming from men on Paris streets can make you quite conscious of what you are about to wear before you go outside. If I were to wear a pair of shorts, a dress, high heel boots, a tank top, anything considered somewhat “sexy” I would have at least five men speak to me in the eight minutes it took me to get to Metro Melimontant. I might have someone follow me onto the metro car, or coming running after me to ask for my number. And not the kind of man you want to give your number to. In Toronto men will look, and unless they are some asshole construction worker, you can generally wear what you like and walk down the street without anyone saying a word.

And so after four months of living in Paris, I actually started to become more like a real Parisian girl. I stopped wearing the kind of makeup as I used to in Toronto, I bought the big shirts. I rarely showed my legs, saved the heels for special occasions and ultimately kept that cardigan on; especially on my walk to the metro, even in the middle of August. I was still relatively fashionable, not frumpy as my ex would say, but what I found was to be fashionable here was to make yourself look less sexy, revealing nothing; because even though some of them don’t know it, French girls endure what many of us don’t. And so, minutes after I lost my cardigan somewhere between the Seine and Chatelet, I ducked into the closest Etam and bought another, because it served an even more practical reason than dealing with the ever changing temperature in Paris.

As I pretended to be a runner in the Parc de Buttes-Chaumont I had to wonder where I fit in to this landscape of characters. I have in fact, been living here for 4 months so I was really past the point of being a tourist. I am however, unemployed. I have no income. I am not working. I am not old, or brown, or rich or crazy (or I hope I’m not). But I have enough to get by, and soon will be working again so perhaps I fit into a non-category. As I made my way home, getting lost in the winding streets without my trusty map, I reflected on this. France has one of the highest number of unemployed people in all first world countries. On the average day you will see teams of people in bars and cafés, lounging, doing all but nothing. You see poverty and homelessness in the metro system and under bridges unlike any Toronto girl has seen before. And when you live in the 20th, you see, every week, the people in your quartier lining up for free food at the local church.

And so it was after my big (non) run in the park I had an especially strong hankering for nacho chips. You can’t really find them as easily here as you do in North America, but I knew exactly where to get them. I slipped on my new camel coloured boots, just because they were new, and headed to the grocery store ten minutes away. As I walked down the little street alongside the church I noticed a line up had begun. Mostly women, brown and black, many of them with scarves on their heads, all with their little granny carts for the “alimentation gratuit” that is provided by the church every week. I strutted down the street, because that is all a girl can really do in camel coloured heeled boots, and thought how the cost of my boots could feed their families for more than a week. And as I passed the women who had already gone through the church and were now haggling over their tins, I felt ashamed about my craving for nacho chips.

I knew that I would go in the grocery store, buy my chips, my salsa, my herbed cheese. I would walk home with them in my eco-bag in my leather boots and feast all night. They were unemployed. I was unemployed. And so what was the difference? How did I manage to have the life I have. Being unemployed was a choice for me. But for them there was no choice. It just was.

As I made my way back home, the line was still strong. I saw a north african man take notice of me. I looked away. Two minutes later he had caught up to me. He had left the line to meet me. He told me, in french that he loved my “elegance” and my style, and that he has a store of african clothing and jewelery. Out of breath, he gave me his number and his address, said he would show me some clothing I would love and maybe take me salsa dancing. He was nice, good-looking even. He bowed when he said he was pleased to meet me. It was all too much really. And wouldn’t it be just like me to do the opposite that any sane, employed, responsible girl would do, and call him back.