Why French Women Don't Sweat

The mystery is solved

Jeanne Damas not sweating/Shuttercock

The big mystery about the French is not how they can eat bread, drink wine, and still stay slender (small portions + no snacking + walking), but how they can dress for late autumn in early September and not sweat their heads off. French women, as far as I can tell, don’t sweat.

September 1 is La Rentrée, the day everyone returns from vacation and resumes their daily routines, which includes packing away swimsuits, sandals, and summer linens, while donning jeans, pullovers, blazers, wool scarves, and even puffer vests.

One evening in mid-September, we attended a dinner party in an un-air conditioned top floor apartment. The high that day was 86 degrees, but because it was post-Rentrée, there was a nice piece of pork loin roasting in the oven. My French friends all wore jeans or trousers, turtlenecks, blazers, and scarves. I wore a sleeveless linen dress, a cotton scarf and a light cardigan to demonstrate that I understood the assignment, even as I was unwilling to suffer heat stroke in that tiny – though lovely! – apartment. Still, by the time the pork was served, I was yanking off my clothes like a coed on a bad acid trip.

If you’re wondering whether peri-menopause is involved, I can assure you that French females from 9 to 90 all share this same super power. Maybe they’re born with fewer sweat glands than Americans of Polish-Irish stock (me). Maybe they don’t sweat because they’re anti-air conditioning, and their bodies have adjusted to the heat. Maybe they don’t sweat because they drink water like humans, not camels. You’ll never see a French woman lugging around a Stanley Cup.

I’ve spent a truly ridiculous time wondering about this. Then last month I figured it all out.

The Man of the House had planned to go on an overnight camping trip with a bunch of guys from the rue. Jerrod and Marc would ride their motorcycles, Jean-Pierre would his bike, others would hike in, and they would all meet up at a remote patch of wilderness in the foothills of the Pyrenees. There they would sit around and eat and drink (exactly as they do at home), then hop into their camping hammocks for an uncomfortable night’s sleep, before leaping up in the morning to find a café for petit déjeuner.

The day of the camping trip there was a strong southerly wind. The sea was up, a symphony of shutters throughout the village bang banged, and in our garden, a shurb I’d planted just that morning was ripped from the pot and sent sailing into a neighbor’s yard.

I suggested they should reschedule the camping trip for the next weekend. But everything was planned, and the French do not like to reschedule, so around 4:30, I waved to the MotH and Marc as they roared off down the street.

I went back inside and saw that the MotH’s phone was still sitting on the charger on the kitchen counter. A nuisance, but not one I thought much about until a few hours later when, during the weekly writing class I teach on Zoom, my phone rang. It was Marc. I assumed he was calling to let me know they’d arrived safely (MotH being unable to call because he’d forgotten his phone). I silenced the call, but then Marc called again. At the third call, I felt myself break into a sweat.

Class ended a few minutes later. Before calling Marc back, I checked our neighborhood WhatsApp group.

At 8:04 someone had written “we are going to create a new group called Where is Gérald? The first one to see him, let the rest of us know”

At 8:07, someone else posted a picture of the beach and wrote, “No Gérald here.”

At 8:10, the guys who’d hiked in posted a few serene pictures of the sunset.

At 8:11 I posted Qu'est-ce qu'il se passe ! (It means ‘what’s happening,’ but not in a casual beatnik sense. In tone, it’s more like, “holy crap, what is going ON?”)

At that moment, Peta showed up and confirmed what I’d already figured out. The others had arrived at the remote patch of wilderness, but the MotH had not. He’d been following Marc, who had his phone, and thus the GPS coordinates for the campsite, but among the steep mountainous curves they’d gotten separated.

“I am now a widow,” I thought, and burst into tears. Peta, who is half English and half-South African, said “It’s too soon to worry.” On WhatsApp, our French friends said, “Bah, he’ll turn up sooner or later.”

The French are simply not prone to freak-out. They don’t borrow trouble. They don’t project. Not one of my French friends believed my husband had been flung off his bike by the wind and was currently lying in a ditch with an ugly, compound leg fracture (in my imagination, the was bone sticking out), waiting to be devoured by a wild boar.

Later, I concluded that this is the reason French women don’t sweat.

It has nothing to do with the season, hormones, a dearth of sweat glands, or lack of hydration. The French simply don’t catastrophize the way Americans do. They don’t spend a lot of time worrying about what they can’t change. They literally do not sweat the small stuff, or even the medium stuff. If they do get exercised about something, they protest or go on strike. Otherwise, they tend to be insouciant, a French word that is the same in English, meaning carefree, accepting the situation that’s right in front of you. (This is not to say they don’t get depressed. They may be insouciant, but they can also be as morose as this cat.)

You’ve probably already guessed that the French were correct about the Man of the House. As they rode into the mountains, he lost track of Marc. Then, when it started to get dark, he turned around and came back home, stopping only to buy a good bottle of wine.

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