Who, if not a Frenchwoman, should write the story of flirting — «a love game without consequences,» as one of the definitions given in the book says. However, as Fabienne Casta-Rozas, a French journalist and historian, assures, the Anglo-Saxons infected Europe with the virus of flirting.
They attributed educational significance to flirting, believing that it would teach young people to curb passions and maintain power over the body and heart. More often it turned out the other way around — flirting let the beast of sensuality out, but the heroes of the first half of the book, dedicated to the 68th and early 1960th centuries, usually managed to defeat him. However, then ideas about the limits of decency changed. Two world wars, the first feminist manifestos, the free marriage of Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, American influence with the appearance of Elvis Presley and the beat poets pushed humanity towards the inevitable — towards May XNUMX, towards the sexual revolution, and hence the end of the era of flirting. And therefore, in the mid-XNUMXs, Casta-Rozas puts an end to it, noting that a completely different book should be written about the new style of seduction that replaced flirting.
Text, 380 p.