Why are French people so open about their sexuality? Even movies with strong sexual content get lower ratings in France than they do in the U.S.
I am going to disagree with the fundamental premise; I base my views upon long experience & association with France and with the French. I lived and studied in France in my teens. I dated French women and long ago married one. I have two grown French daughters. I am American. And we are speaking in generalities here, otherwise neither question nor attempt to answer makes any sense at all.France is actually a pretty conservative place, sexually. In my admittedly anecdotal experience it is far more culturally conservative about sex than either the United States or the United Kingdom. Most of my French friends agree with me on this. It’s hard to find factual evidence to make this case, although one data point is a 2016 study by a major international condom maker which put the average age of first sexual intercourse of young French women at 18.7 years, well behind the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, and more than a dozen other western countries surveyed — many of which are considered quite conservative. In my experience prior to marriage, French young people were far more culturally conservative than their American and other western peers. The French take longer to get to know each other, are more cautious in beginning relationships, and take sexuality far more seriously than we do in the Anglo-Saxon world, in my experience.Americans get confused by certain French traditions such as France’s notorious tolerance for topless bathing on the beach by some French women (who rightly argue that this is hardly more provocative than an American’s bright neon bikini — “au contraire!”) and French movies — which downplay gratuitous violence as far more alien to the lives of viewers than human sexuality, which is universal. But let’s not forget the negative side of the ledger: France is a more latin, macho society far more tolerant of predatory men and exploitative sexualized advertising. Sexual harassment is more tolerated in France; women are sexualized by French men to a degree that Anglo-Saxon and Northern European women would find intolerable.I don’t know anything about French movie rating system. Frankly one of the things that shocks me the most about American cinema is our national tolerance for psychologically pornographic levels of violence in American popular cinema. On that front we could learn something from the more restrained French, although unfortunately the trend in French movie-making seems to be going in the American direction.
Is 'Paradise Lost' by John Milton closer to Protestantism or to Catholicism?
I think it’s decidedly Protestant, and fundamentally so - it’d be impossible to imagine in a Catholic context. I think the question might be coming from the angle of Dante’s Divine Comedy: both are epic poems in a cosmological context, and since Dante is older, isn’t Milton basically an English Dante? No, and in fact they stand worlds apart.Paradise Lost is a fundamentally Biblical narrative, wrung from reading the “Scripture” as a book. The setting and characters are unmistakably of the naive and mythological Old Testament cast, and Milton - in however elevated a sense - tries to tease moral lessons out of his work, which lessons are unmistakably Protestant in character -e.g. his abhorrence of elaborate temples and imagery as idolatrous.The Comedy, on the other hand, takes the syncretic spiritual world of the middle ages as its scene-setting. Dante does not so much tell a mythic drama as stroll in a garden of symbolic flowers, and does not shrink from using these in a “non-PG” fashion, ranging from eroticism to savage critique. He is much less fearful of playing around with his material, and his picture of the heavens is if less coherent more ‘realistic’ in imprinting his own images of it.Perhaps the most overt thematic sign is, I’d say, Milton’s immense preoccupation with Satan. I have found it is primarily in Anglo-Saxon Protestant culture that the Devil acquires so deep and appealing a significance, to the point of being a heroic figure of rebellion in a sense, and of immense inverted potency at worst. For medieval people, and for the ‘older’ forms of Christianity in their native ground, Satan is a cosmic dreg of dregs, hardly worthy of mention or much regard: regarded with actual (not ‘alluring’) fear and distaste when present, and ignored otherwise. In the American context, I gather African-American Christians are much closer to old European modes of thought in this respect than the ostensibly Europeanized Whites themselves.“The reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels & God, and at liberty when of Devils & Hell, is because he was a true Poet and of the Devil's party without knowing it.” ~William BlakeNeedless to say, Milton himself was a Puritan Protestant - much more Protestant than the “Catholic-ish” Church of England - and decidedly anti-Catholic in his personal views. There is little to surprise us here.