School for scandal

High-strung and meteoric, Jullien moves in her small Opira-neighborhood office like a Puerto Rican dancer in "West Side Story." (It's one of her favorite musicals, she tells me.) She plucks the sunglasses off her Medusa curls, twirls them, drops them on her cluttered desk by her shrilling cellular phone, replaces them, scratches at her stress-martyred hands.

"Seventy percent of my clients are men," she reports. "30 percent women." Almost all the women, it turns out, come on the pretext of wanting to master communications skills. But in a country with a 33 percent divorce rate, where adultery is the national pastime, most of them really want to learn how to keep the men they have.

"Between you and me," she says, "we French women are spoiled. We've got full rights, we can have an abortion, we can take the pill, we can cheat on our husband -- no one busts your ass anymore if you commit adultery, and it sure wasn't like that once upon a time. We work, we're independent. I just don't understand why we complain."

The main problem with Frenchmen, it seems, and therefore the raison d'jtre of Jullien's school, is the very power French women now wield, women who have no time for families, love or courtship.

Jullien's men -- mostly 30-to-50-year-old engineers, computer programmers, business executives or other professionals -- can't handle these superwomen, don't know how to communicate with them and have come to fear them. Jullien's school is the Last Chance Saloon for those who've already been to shrinks, singles clubs and matchmakers. (There are 1,500 matrimonial agencies in France today.) These men spend $1,000 to $2,200 for two to nine months of learning from Jullien how to overcome their fears -- of rejection, ridicule, psychic castration.

"For a while there, I wasn't exactly cuddly with men myself," she says, fixing me with a serrated gaze. "I was one of those castratrices. Yes, we are ball cutters, but Frenchmen have become pretty wimpy, too, pretty weak. It's like, 'We were victims, now the men are victims, everyone gets his turn.' But that's not going to fix anyone's problems."

- - - - - - - - - - - -

I cross and recross my thighs uncomfortably and can't help thinking of Italy. A similar set of problems -- increasing social mobility, waning family values, the greater independence of women -- arose at about the same time in the heartland of the Latin lover. Ten years ago I reported on Italy's first seduction school, run by Giuseppe Cirillo, aka the Prince of Seduction, a Neapolitan lawyer turned psychologist-sexologist.

Starting in the late 1980s Italian males were suddenly faced with liberated females chanting the slogan "Bread but also roses," a baffling refrain that helped spawn countless then-unheard-of lonely hearts clubs, as well as Cirillo's seduction school. The colorful Cirillo method, as I experienced it, involved individual and group activities ranging from the banal -- matching facial expressions with Cirillo's "75 primary emotions," gauging "gait and body language," using "voice modulation, eye and hand techniques" -- to the outlandish.

Not only did I engage in thigh-to-thigh role-playing (in one session I had to explain my way out of being caught sleeping with my girlfriend's best friend), I was also introduced to Cirillo's secret weapon, the "tavola delle esclusioni," a painted wood silhouette of a woman with strategically placed slots at head, shoulder and waist level. Out went the lights; in came a female presence. After sliding the silhouette's panels back and forth, allowing us to see the mystery woman's eyes, lips or waistline, Cirillo ordered us to step up one at a time and knead and stroke her. This was an extravagantly embarrassing episode, though my fellow students, some of whom hadn't been inside a flesh-and-blood woman in years, went pink with pleasure.

Next Page: "There isn't a single American who knows how to flirt"

• View blog reactions