Cette machine est pour les hommes

Spaces that exclude and include

Dear Friend, 

I hope you had a good week. 

Thank you to those who wrote back last week to my letter about being Jewish-ish and the bitter-sweet presence of Jewish loss, but also Jewish culture in Paris. I admit I had some trepidation sending that letter, it felt more personal than usual, but I am glad that I did. 

To be Jewish is a complex thing that is hard to define — a Jew may be religious or entirely secular; may be from Istanbul or Manchester, New York or Oran. What it means to be partly Jewish is perhaps even more diffuse and difficult to pin down. One friend, who I didn’t know is also Jewish-ish sent me a text message after I sent my letter saying, “we must discuss this next time we see each other. I am also sort of Jewish”. Her mother is not Jewish, so by traditional Jewish law, based on matrilineal descent, she is ‘not Jewish’ — but her paternal grandfather was a rabbi and, unlike me, she grew up celebrating Jewish festivals. It’s interesting stuff, and I was pleased to write about it. 

Right now, I am writing to you amid a biblical (Old Testament) storm here in Paris. After two weeks of sun, the skies have opened quite dramatically on several occasions today. When the first hailstorm hit earlier, neighbours in the building opposite mine suddenly popped up at their windows like dolls in a doll’s house and looked up to the heavens. 

I’ve been thinking quite a lot this week about places and spaces. The physical layout of Paris determines a lot of the particularities of living here. The Haussmannian apartment buildings force Parisians to live stacked up on top of each other, and very often — as with my apartment — facing each other. As I’ve mentioned before, during the pandemic, I actually made friends with my former across-the-street neighbour, Dr. Diane — but this is an exception. Most of the time we never know the names or occupations of these figures we see every day making breakfast, smoking world-wearily, eating with their family on tiny two-foot deep balconies, soaking up the sun. 

The window of the apartment opposite

Because of the lack of private outdoor space, the commons, as it were, function as everyone’s garden. Moments that would be private become semi-public, one of the reasons, I think, why Parisians are concerned perhaps more than most with appearances. An example: I live on the fourth floor with no garden, so if I want to give my dog Babbet the chance to run around off-lead, I need to go to a public park. This morning I took her to a narrow rectangle of dusty earth up by the Sacré-Coeur, where some of the more well-heeled dogs and owners of the arrondissement gather. Some people, like me, sit quietly on their own, soaking in some sun, while others gather in small groups, talking about their lives, their work, and of course their dogs.

These people are strangers, but we share this intimate moment in public together, because the activity would not have been possible in private.  This is one element of space I’ve been contemplating, but I have also been thinking about spaces that exclude and include. For example, the gym. The nearest branch of my gym is housed in a huge warehouse-like building with a skylight. There’s a large central exercise room where classes take place, several metres above it is a horseshoe-shaped gallery, lined on three sides with running and cross-training machines. With my friends Kate and Lauren, we call this space the “judgement chamber”. If you do a class in the exercise room down below and you are, say, on the floor stretching, it looks like an army of sweaty people are running over your head, or else about to jump into a void.  Strange! 

Like many gyms, this space was evidently designed with men in mind first, and women as a secondary afterthought. For example, the men’s changing rooms are on the first floor (the gallery/judgement level), right by the ‘musculation’ area, which is usually also dominated by men. The women’s changing room, on the other hand, is up on the fourth floor. Now, there is a lift, but the men who work at reception say that it has been broken for two years and there is no plan to fix it. So, if you want to use the locker room as a woman, you must first climb up four narrow flights of stairs (a warm-up, if you will), then come back down to the first floor, and then walk back up to the fourth floor to shower and change. 

In the French language itself, the masculine dominates over the feminine. You can have a group of 100 women, but if one man joins, that group becomes ils (masculine ‘they’), not elles (feminine ‘they’). In the gym, it feels like everything is enveloped in ‘ils’. 

The other day I was sweating away on the cross-trainer, doing a combination of different moves that are deeply uninteresting to anyone but me — but for the purposes of this story, you need to know I was alternating pedalling forwards and doing some backwards marching. At some point, a young man came over to my machine and stood by it in my eye-line until I was forced to take my earphones out to address him. “Madame,” he said earnestly, “you are pedalling backwards. I thought you should know.” “Thank you for your observation”, I replied, “I am doing so deliberately”. A week before that, another man had come up to my friend Kate while she was lifting weights and informed her “excusez moi, madame, cette machine est pour les hommes” — this machine is for men! 

If you are a man reading, maybe you will think these incidents sound rather trivial, but if you are a woman, you will appreciate, I think, what it is to, at any moment, have your subjectivity interrupted by a man’s. To be just going about your business and for some man to feel he can just bother you. Deep in your bones, you know he would not have felt entitled to make the same comments to a fellow man. 

In Ways of Seeing, John Berger writes about what it means to be a woman in space. It is strange, in a way, that a man has written one of the most eloquent descriptions I’ve read of the physical, visceral challenges of being female in a male-dominated society. But then again, it makes sense — he can express accurately and confidently how men think and act, because he is one! 

“A woman must continually watch herself. She is almost continually accompanied by her own image of herself. Whilst she is walking across a room or whilst she is weeping at the death of her father, she can scarcely avoid envisaging herself walking or weeping. From earliest childhood she has been taught and persuaded to survey herself continually.” — John Berger

In the same essay, he goes on to make a brilliant visual analysis of male and female roles by tracing the history of oil painting, all the way up to advertising images of the present day. It is crushingly accurate, and still dispiriting. 

Conversely, however, there are also spaces that I find eminently soothing because of the way they include and enclose women. For example, the nail salon. I go to a place called Meet Nails in the 18th arrondissement about once a month for manicure and pedicure. I don’t spend very much on clothes, but I really value neat hands and cared-for feet. Me and plenty of other people, it seems, because Meet Nails is almost always busy. 

It is run by three women from a province of southern China, who speak to clients in French and to each other in their home dialect. They have one younger male employee. I find the space uniquely comforting. It’s clean and brightly lit and the walls are adorned with big, colourful images of elegantly manicured hands, surfaces are dotted with well-looked-after succulents. I love the well-ordered abundance of the nail-polish bottles, lined up symmetrically on shelves behind the tables where the beauticians work. I like the neatly organised pots of tools and tiny little boxes of powders and gels. I get great satisfaction from the careful application of polish on each nail in confident little squares. 

Expressive to-do list

Most women who come there know the process (buff, file, base coat, machine, first coat, machine, second coat, machine, oil, cream, pay with cash) and there’s a non-verbal shorthand between the beauticians and the customers, a kind of gentle dance or ritual. Even though there is often one male here, a member of staff or a waiting family member, their presence doesn’t turn elles into ils, and that’s a refreshing feeling. 

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Thirty-second book club

This week I’ve been dipping into a book called Doughnut Economics by Kate Raworth. If you read closely, you’ll know that I am on a quest to become more informed about the mechanics of the economy, and this book is very helpful in that regard. The author valiantly finds myriad ways to try and make complicated economic theory accessible for the layperson. She variously uses metaphors around food (the eponymous doughnut), Shakespeare, music etc., and I very much appreciate it. However, it is dense, and I still need to read it rather slowly to take it in. 

Less intellectually challenging: I also read Spare by Prince Harry in the format of a bootleg PDF sent to me by a friend. I felt very flattered when my friend Hattie said to me “you’re the cleverest person I know who has read that book”. Thanks Hattie! I will take that compliment. I will say that it was not the best written or most lucidly perceptive book I have ever read, but it was interesting. I do have some thoughts on it/him/the whole royal thing, but perhaps they are thoughts for another day.

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Thank you for reading this letter about storms, the gym, nail salons and ways of seeing. As ever, please share the letter with another friend if you liked it. And a huge THANK YOU to new Pen Friend sponsors, your painted cards will be on their way shortly!

Next weekend I will be in Provence/Marseilles. I hope to write from there on Sunday as normal, but bear with me if it comes late — I may have been consumed in a cloud of pastis and apricots.

Have a great week! 

Yours, 

Hannah