Men are from Mars, Frenchmen Are From Venus? Gender Stereotyping in France vs. Australia

Last night, at a dinner with French expat women put on by Melbourne Accueil, one of the women commented that, 'In Australia, the men are super macho, like Italians. Men never want to speak to me. They don’t flirt with me, like men in the workplace in France would.' This got me thinking about gender in France and Oz. How does my French husband Maxime come across in Australia, for instance? For a start, his name doesn't help him pretend to be a 'super macho' Aussie:


‘Hello, is Max there please?’ a voice on the phone asked me one day.

‘Who?’ I said.

‘Max,’ the voice said.

‘I’m sorry, there’s no one here by that name,’ I said. ‘Oh, wait a minute! That’s my husband!’

I’m glad to say this embarrassing exchange only happened the once, although I still do a double take when anyone calls Maxime ‘Max’. Maxime has introduced himself to some people as Max because he has gotten sick of being called a girl – he’d receive letters addressed to Maxine with the title ‘Mrs.’ And I don’t know how many times I’ve had to say, ‘It’s not MaxiNe, it’s MaxiMe. I know it has an ‘e’ on the end but he’s still not a girl.’ Which is why Maxime sometimes finds it simpler to tell people his name is Max.

But some might think the girly charge justified. I mean, what self-respecting, appropriately hirsute bloke goes to the footy and drinks pear cider? (See The Frog and the Footy) What kind of man likes going to the ballet, is happy to eat quiche and goes into a pub and orders a glass of pink moscato? A Frenchman. Or, more specifically, my Frenchman. I should point out, though, that I have not the smallest issue with the above, and neither does he.

But since we’ve moved to Australia, I’ve become aware of male stereotypes again, having completely forgotten them in France. The blokey and jokey stereotype of the Aussie male. And it’s made me realise that the taboos on men here are really quite broad. Like the taboos on women in France. Allow me to digress:

In France, it seemed to me that beauty was a woman’s highest attribute. I got this impression from the way French women starved themselves to be thin (literally. Frenchwomen don’t get fat because they don’t eat, I don’t care what that French Women Don’t Get Fat book says. I've watched countless gaunt, hollow-cheeked hostesses not eat their own meals, on the pretext of being too busy serving them.) And there's the way Frenchwomen dress – immaculate; feminine; lots of makeup. There were other little things like the fact that at dinner, only men were allowed to pour wine and women had strictly no interest in sport. But what brought home the narrowness of the stereotype and the central importance of beauty was what happened to me during pregnancy: 

Maxime thought my gyny was great because she was French (my previous one had been Swiss). I thought she was less great because she said I had put on too much weight during my pregnancy. I was scolded until I wondered whether we had mistakenly gone to an obesity clinic. How fitting that I originally took the French word ‘grossesse’ to mean fatness instead of pregnancy. Then the doctor gave me a pregnancy pack which told me all about how to keep myself as beautiful as possible with the application of a battalion of creams. All of this was a bit unsettling. Wasn’t it meant to be about having a baby, somewhere along the line? I didn’t really consider my appearance to be of much importance at this juncture. All this relates, I later read, to the French female’s lack of self-confidence. Her sense of self-worth plummets if not propped up with a few creams and slimming teas ‘minceur’.

‘Frenchwomen are not comfortable with their bodies,’ had been Maxime’s analysis.

(I decided I wouldn’t question him too deeply on his experience in this area.)

French men, on the other hand, seemed to be free to behave as they liked. They could eat and drink what they liked and lots of it, and could dance and hate sport with impunity. And at parties, men and women mixed, whereas in Oz – something I’d also forgotten in the years away – men tend to seek out other blokes and women talk to women. Maxime doesn't want to hang with the blokes - he says he often prefers to talk to women. No wonder Frenchmen have a certain reputation with us Anglo Saxons!

Happily, the stereotypes have posed no real problem to us. Maxime blithely tramples Aussie male taboos here, and I steadfastly ignored female French taboos in France (i.e., continued to stuff my face when pregnant). And it was fine … except that my in-laws thought I was some sort of barbarian. Maxime hasn't suffered here either so far, despite his girly drinking habits. The only issue is that my brother-in-law is terrified Maxime will kiss him. Maxime gives my father a kiss on each cheek to say hello each time he sees him, after which he loves to walk up to the brother-in-law with a big grin on his face.

‘Don’t you want to give Maxime a kiss?’ I'll ask my brother-in-law with a smile.

The brother-in-law will then put up his hands and back away, saying, ‘No no no! I’m good, thanks, Max.’

Ah well. In Australia, maybe Maxime will have to stick to kissing women. I don’t think he’ll really mind.
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The Frog and the 2014 Budget: Can Your Kids Still Afford Uni if They Speak French?

In order to persuade my French husband Maxime to move to Australia, I plugged Australia incessantly when we lived in France. But before agreeing to move, Maxime told me I had to make a ‘business case’ for it (he tends to use corporate-speak in everyday conversation).

‘I don’t want to be worse off for moving,’ he’d said. 

Oops.

Up the top of my highly sophisticated and thorough ‘business case’ (i.e., excel spreadsheet with two columns: ‘cost in France’ and ‘cost in Oz’), was a comparison in the price of petrol, quickly and persuasively followed by the price of meat. I sneakily left out the price of cheese.

‘What about tax?’ Maxime had asked.

‘Well … we won’t get to divide our taxable income by the number of kids we have, but there is no compulsory social contribution to pay, so tax-wise, maybe we’ll be even?’ I said hopefully. (Except that the social contribution means you get paid 70% of your last salary when you're unemployed. Fingers crossed Maxime's company hangs in there and he never finds out what you get if you're unemployed in Oz!) ‘And health and education are (almost) free, just like in France!’ (I chose to gloss over the Medicare levy and the curiously named ‘HELP’.)

Maxime’d been afraid Australia was like the US, with its shambolic healthcare and education system where you have to take out a mortgage in order to pay for a university degree, starting adult life behind the eight ball.

‘And how about the standard of Australian education?’ Maxime wondered.

‘No worries, we have a great education system!’ I assured him. (I based this opinion on a sample size of one. Me.)

But now everything I said back then has just been turned on its head by the new budget. We are going the way of the US. This means that down the track, the kids may well end up going to uni back in Europe. Which they can do, if they do an International Baccalaureate in year 12. And if they can keep up their French. 

But that’s another issue. Having taken wage cuts to move to Australia, we've had to do our own austere budget and French lessons for the kids were on the block! I hope Maxime makes a good homeschool teacher ...

The Frog Does a Diet: The Amazing Ciderman

Fourteen course degustation menus, brie with truffles, potato gratins and mousses au chocolat are things of the past for my French husband Maxime. Mostly. Along with his new fitness regime, there is Maxime’s new diet, which I alluded to last time (The Frog Becomes a Fitness Freak), and his entourage have been most impressed at how he’s persisted with it.

This has been possible, says the thinning one, because of the move to Australia. He’s a hemisphere away from the old triggers and the old enablers/fellow bon vivants. In France, even the tradies were trouble: like the time a bloke came over  one night after work to discuss renovating our bathroom. I’d let Maxime handle it, due to my lack of French vocab concerning tiling and towel rails. I’m not sure how much bathroom discussing went on, but apparently, it was thirsty work.

‘Maxime!' I said the next morning. ‘You drank FOUR bottles of wine with the bathroom bloke?’

‘How did you know?’ said Maxime, all round-eyed.

‘Er, let’s just say the four empty bottles on the dining room table were a bit of a clue.’

Now, following the dictates of his PT, Maxime has been transformed – he hardly drinks any wine at all. This has had unexpected consequences: when we went out the other night, Maxime shunned red wine and ordered a pear cider, followed by an apple cider and then – OMG! – sparkling moscato.

‘Maxime!’ I said, ‘You’re drinking like a teenage girl! You must be out of practice - you’ve forgotten how to drink like an adult.’

‘Oh. Yes, I suppose so,’ he said, a little embarrassed.

Now, instead of calling him the Wine Lord, I call him the Amazing Ciderman.

Maxime can stick to his new low carb, low fat, low sugar diet, he tells people, because he finds something yummy to eat that’s healthy. Surely, I think to myself, he can’t be referring to his hand-squashed chia seed and cayenne pepper smoothies/lumpies? (‘Muddy puddles’, as two year old Julien calls them in a homage to Peppa Pig.) Or does Maxime mean yummy and healthy like his cupboard full of assorted birdseed and various denominations of chaff? What’s more, despite all those pepper smoothies and delicious psyllium husks, occasionally, Maxime will be tempted by the Dark Side. His parents send him chocolate from France, for instance. He defends this by saying he ‘needs’ a supply of good quality chocolate (i.e., French chocolate. (Michel Cluizel and Bonnat, for example)).

‘Why?’ I ask him.

 ‘Because if I buy Cadburys I have to eat the whole block,’ says Maxime.

‘Huh? Why?’

‘It’s because it’s bad quality.’

I’m still struggling with Maxime’s logic.

‘With good quality chocolate I only need a couple of squares.’

I think hard about this and decide that I think he means that because the chocolateness is so dilute in ‘bad’ chocolate, he needs to eat much more to get a hit.

How many treats does a frog need?

Mystery packs of Tim Tams also appear in the pantry from time to time. And then disappear. But Maxime doesn’t berate himself, knowing that guilt is counterproductive (and not much fun). He thinks the odd blowout is necessary to maintain discipline and thinness the rest of the time. For instance, Maxime announced this morning that he has to be good:

‘I got a bit out of control on the weekend,’ he said. ‘There was a packet of chocolate biscuits at your Dad’s place. And I could see it was from ALDI too, but I couldn’t resist - it was at my hand reach, so I ate the whole packet.’

‘Oh dear,’ I said sympathetically. (Although I think those biscuits were meant for the kids, not Maxime’s stomach.)

‘But I know that I be back into my good habits this week. And I’ve been doing a lot of skipping at work.’ (He keeps a skipping rope in his office.)

So it's all good. Except maybe for Maxime’s colleagues having to listen to the boom boom boom of Maxime’s skipping. Especially since his office is between the CEO and the CFO ...
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The Frog Becomes a Fitness Freak

Given my last post (Aussie Lunch Break, French Breakdown), this one is going to surprise. Because Maxime’s major discovery since coming to Australia is not the restaurant Shoya, not Mount Mary wine, not Bruny Island cheese, not even TimTams, but yoga. Of all the things I expected him to get out of being here, yoga was not one.

He has been swept up in the Australian craze for personal trainers (PT) and bootcamps (though he has yet to be swept up by Aussie fashion - the craze for sleeve tats and bushranger beards. When he had to pick up the kids from school, he came home puzzled, saying, ‘I was the only parent without a tattoo.’ What a rebel!)

Maxime's life-changing moment came on a day trip to Mount Baw Baw (as they do). We were having lunch (no surprises there), when my attention was snagged by a line of spiky rubber mats on the ground near our al fresco dining table. We hadn’t known this, but it was an extreme sports weekend at Baw Baw. We’d just come for the less extreme sport of having lunch and looking at the view. But the thing is, despite my association with a decadent frog, I’m actually a long-time runner, with long–time injuries to match. And I wondered wistfully if a spiky mat might massage various tight muscles. But I’m a shy type, and so I made Maxime (not a shy type, as you’ve no doubt gathered by now) ask the bloke next to the mats about the product.

 It was the beginning of a beautiful relationship. Maxime purchased a mat right then and there. But not for me, I was chagrined to discover – for him! What did he need a spiky mat for? A digestion aide? Not only that, he made himself an appointment with the mat guy for a PT session the following week (in Melbourne, not Baw Baw).

I just looked Maxime, mouth gaping and a weeny bit cross.

Spiky yoga mat

‘I thought in Australia it would be easier to start a new exercise regime,’ explained Maxime. 

‘How do you mean?’

‘There’s the outdoor lifestyle. And it’s easier to eat more healthily. They try to cook healthily in restaurants here. You can have something vegetarian which tastes interesting.’

Well, I knew that in France, vegetables were often soggy and soaked in either oil or butter or cream or all three for good measure and bad arteries, but did Maxime just say vegetarian?! I mean, this is someone who, as we drove through the rolling hills of the Belloc in France, announced that the region was famous for its agneau and said, ‘Mmmm, I can’t wait to eat them!’ as we passed a flock of sheep.

‘OK,’ I said now, ‘but what are you going to use that mat for?’

‘Yoga,’ said Maxime.

‘Yoga on that? God. I guess it would be good for nerve stimulation and stuff, but … ouch!’

But the determined frog did. He yoga-ed all over the place on his bed of rubber nails. He still does training with his Baw Baw PT too, and, to the mystification of colleagues, has begun skipping at work. He has bought a special adult skipping rope (i.e., not pink with tassels) and while his workmates eat their Not Lunches, they can hear ‘pound pound pound’ coming from Maxime’s office.

What's more, where in France, breakfast consisted of croissant au chocolat, now it consists of smoothies. (Everyone these days seems to be eating gruel, as my dad calls it.) Each morning, Maxime mashes up chia seeds and rice bran and various combinations of coconut, turmeric, cinnamon and cayenne pepper, which have special properties, like making you live for ever or something. And Maxime only uses ‘quality products’, because, he says, otherwise the spices taste ‘like nothing’. So he buys a brand called ‘Herbs of Gold’, as in, gold for their marketing department. The only snag is that Maxime has a deep mistrust of our blender’s capabilities, so he makes his smoothies by hand. They are hand squashed, with the result that the smoothies are more like lumpies.

And unfortunately, he always wants me to try a sip.

‘What do you think?’ he asks eagerly.

‘Well, what can I say, Maxime?' I answer. ‘It’s completely foul.’

There’s one last consequence of all this new lifestyle and yoga-ness. Now, whenever the kids roll around on the floor in random fashion, Maxime insists that they are performing the Downward Dog or the Upright Pigeon or the Lopsided Duck or something. Personally I think they look more like a cut snake or a stuck pig.
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Aussie Lunch Break, French Breakdown

‘How’s work?’ friends of ours asked my French husband Maxime recently. ‘Is it much different working in Australia to Europe?’

'In Australia, work is very casual compared to Europe,' said Maxime. 'There are no formalities to follow. You can even swear!'

Maxime made a few observations of this nature. Then he suddenly announced that at work in Australia ‘no one has lunch.’

The friends looked puzzled. ‘No one eats lunch at your work?’

‘They DO have lunch,’ I qualified. ‘Just not one that counts to Maxime. They eat a sandwich at their desk.’

That is, Maxime’s co-workers ingest various coloured pastes on pre-sliced bread, including margarine which Maxime believes is toxic (and pronounces with a hard ‘g’ so it sounds like a variant of Margaret). All this is Not Food, hence these people do not have lunch.

‘It’s so depressing!’ Maxime sighed to the friends.

Not Lunch

Our friends were at a loss. After all they’d been ‘not having lunch’ themselves for years. I explained that in France, everyone from the babies at the crèches to the school kids at their school canteens to the grown-ups in their grown-up canteens expect three course, cooked lunches. Processed paste on bread at your desk is such a far cry from the convivial lunches with friends Maxime used to have in France that it’s more of a distant whimper.

Now that he works in Australia, every lunchtime, Maxime leaves his workplace to forage for ‘real’ food. But sadly, he’s in a part of Melbourne famous not so much for super gastronomy as for supermarkets. In desperation, he ends up buying tins of tuna from Woolworths. This is all the more upsetting for him since he knows what Melbourne can offer in terms of food:

Before he started his current job, Maxime would occasionally go on a trip into Melbourne to network. He always prepared these trips very carefully, spending the evening before researching diligently. In The Age Good Food Guide. He'd adored The Press Club and Vue de Monde. Then one lunchtime, he really outdid himself. He came home on the day in question bright eyed and flushed. He was raving even before he was through the front door:

‘I just had one of the best meals of my life!’ he exclaimed.

‘Did you?' I said. 'Great! Where did you go?’

‘I went to Shoya. It was amazing.’

‘Is that Japanese? What did you have?’ 

I sat down and settled myself in for a lengthy conversation, knowing Maxime was going to describe every bite, down to the last grain of sushi rice in intricate detail.

‘There was this fantastic dish – sashimi served in a spherical ice container. Their degustation menu was incredible,’ he said.

‘You took a degustation menu?’ I was surprised. Degustation menus are usually about five courses long. I’d feel silly eating a meal like that on my own. Even provided I could fit it all in ‘How many courses were there?’ I asked.

‘Fourteen.’

‘FOURTEEN?!’

Maxime looked a little sheepish. ‘They were only small courses.’

‘Hmm,’ I said, trying not to imagine what this all cost. Then, (not) thinking of cost, something occurred to me. ‘What did you drink?’ I asked, narrowing my eyes.

More sheepishness. Much more of this and Maxime would be starting to grow wool.

It turned out that he’d washed his little lunch down with most of a bottle of Mount Mary. He produced a mostly empty bottle with a glass’s worth left in it that he said he 'saved' for me - to placate me for the fact that he had just literally eaten a giant hole in our budget. Thus I learned that you let a Frenchman loose in Melbourne at your peril.

It was very lucky for our savings that Maxime started work not long after that. Now, alas, he no longer dines on spherical ice receptacles of sashimi, but spherical tin receptacles of tuna. And no wonder Australian work lunches make this grown frog cry.

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What Does a Frenchman Watch on TV? (And Does He Find Pépé Le Pew Offensive?)

Actually, now that we’re in Australia, Maxime doesn’t watch anything on TV. I tried to get him to watch Doctor Who once. What was I thinking? I mean, what would a Frenchman think of a hero who doesn’t have a sex life?

I nevertheless did my best to explain: ‘So … there’s this guy who can travel through time. In a phone booth,’ I said.

Maxime blinked.

‘That’s him in the big rainbow scarf,’ I pointed.

‘The gay one?’

‘He’s not gay! Or at least … I don’t think so ...’

It didn’t help that although I’m sure the daleks used to be scary when I was five, now they just looked like excited male compost bins with knobs on. Maxime was in hysterics. But recently, it’s been my turn to have a giggle at the expense of froggy TV: Maxime’s taken to looking up French shows on the internet.

‘Did you watch Wattoo Wattoo the superbird when you were little?’ Maxime asked me the other day as he trawled YouTube for improving French cartoons.

‘Er, no.’ I said.

Maxime had already introduced me to Barbe à Papa, a cartoon about an environmentally conscious, heroic blob of pink fairy floss. Wattoo Wattoo, I discovered, is another hero about as unlikely as spun sugar with superpowers. He/she/it looks like a fat, spherical magpie. He comes from a cube-shaped planet and can breed asexually by splitting in two (or more). (And Maxime thinks Doctor Who has an odd sex life!?)

I think Maxime is looking for French cartoons about fat magpies and magic fairy floss because he wants the kids to watch something in French. He’s afraid of them losing the language. I can sympathise with this at least. I used to worry the kids would never learn English when we lived in France, and was frustrated that even cartoons from England and the US were dubbed into French. Even the ‘words’ in the Teletubbies and In the Night Garden were dubbed into French, which increased their absurdity tenfold. I used to imagine the poor Frenchman doing the dubbing. Jacques sitting hunched over his café in front of a mike, cigarette drooping from his lip, attempting to sound enthusiastic about having to say lines like ‘Ooh, Upsy Daisy, regarde, c’est le Ninky-Nonk.’ The French certainly came up with some strange translations too: 

'Want to watch Wee-Wee,' Chloé said one day.

Interesting choice, I thought. ‘Wee-Wee’ turned out to be poor old Noddy (Wee-Wee is spelled ‘Oui-Oui’ i.e. Yes-Yes, i.e., Noddy). Tweety Bird lucked out in translation too and landed ‘Titi’. Ironically, the French fought shy of Winnie the Pooh and preferred to tactfully call him Winnie the Little Bear. 

I tolerated Chloé watching Oui-Oui because it was one of the French-English bilingual cartoons shown on French kids' TV, although it was actually French speakers who said the English words. They mangled the words so badly I wondered if it wasn’t all counterproductive. ‘Furny’ was how they said funny, which is what it wouldn’t be if the kids learnt to speak like that. And I hoped fervently they didn’t all grow up to sound like Dora.

But now we’re in Australia, we have a new problem. An embarrassing one – you never realise until you’re sitting next to a Frenchman how many cartoons we have that send up the French. In the Mr. Men cartoon, Mr. Uppity has a French accent (actually, I personally find this pretty funny). There are also French salt and pepper shaker characters on Sesame Street who make also sorts of nasal sounding French snorting sounds while they talk about ‘ze num-bear nine’. Luckily, the kids seem oblivious to the fact that Sesame Street is taking the mickey out of their accent. And then there’s Pépé Le Pew. When this is dubbed into French for French TV, the French choose not to embrace the Frenchness of a love-drunk, smelly skunk and pretend he’s Italian instead. Instead of l’amour, just like a big pizza pie, it’s amore.

This morning, I decided to ask Maxime what he made of all this:

‘Do you find it offensive how in our cartoons here, there are all these cartoon characters parodying the French?’ I asked.

‘No,’ said Maxime. ‘Because it doesn’t sound French to me.’

It just sounded like someone talking a bit strangely, apparently.

‘But what about Pépé Le Pew? You know, Pépé le Putois?’ (As he’s called in French.)

I thought he might really be upset by that one, but somewhat disappointingly, Maxime just shrugged and said, ‘I don’t care.' And he added, typically Frenchly and philosophically, 'Only truth hurts.’

He meant that the French aren’t really smelly, so they don’t care. (Because everyone knows that’s the Italians!)

If You Drink Wine and Drive, You're a Bloody Frenchman?

I never saw a booze-bus in Europe, and now that we're in Australia, we see them every other weekend. My French husband Maxime shakes his head in wonder at them. He got tested twice the other day on one of his forty minute Odysseys in search of decent bread. But it doesn't stop him enjoying wine when we go out if he wants to. He knows his limits. Although ... Maxime's limits seem to be quite large.

In more than twenty years, Maxime's only been stopped and breathtested twice in France. On the first occasion, we were in the pretty village of Villefranche de Conflent. At dinner, Maxime ordered a bottle of wine as usual, seeming to overlook the fact that I was pregnant and wouldn’t be drinking half of it. I nursed a token glass while he made his workmanlike way through the rest. 

'Orrrgh, your breath reeks of alcohol!' I complained when he tried to kiss me after dinner. 

My sense of smell got hypersensitive when I was pregnant (it’s the closest I've ever come to having super powers). I coughed and waved away the last of Maxime's alcohol fumes and then we got in the car and started the half hour drive back to our hotel.

Just a few hundred metres from the restaurant, however, we spotted some flashing blue lights.

'Oh. I don’t have my driving documents with me,' remarked Maxime.

 'Oh Maxime,' I sighed as the gendarme signalled to us to pull over.

'You’ve just come from the restaurant?' asked the gendarme. 'What did you have, a beer or two?' 

'Err, something like that,' said Maxime, trying to sound offhand. I strove to make the pregnant nature of my form more obvious in a bid for sympathy.

'Please breathe in here,' he said. Maxime did so. 'Hmm,' mused the gendarme.

Oh God, I thought. I’m pregnant, it’s late at night, and now I’m going to have to walk home from Villefranche de Conflent.

‘It’s zero,' said the gendarme. ‘OK, you can go.'

I don’t know how that happened. If the gendarme’d used my nose instead of the breathalyser, Maxime’d probably just be getting out of jail now.

The second breathtest occurred in the Doubs, after Maxime had consumed half a bottle of wine, a beer and a drinking glass full of farmer’s homemade absinthe at a local farm. Again, Maxime was exonerated by the breathalyser. The conclusion we came to is that Maxime must carry a special French version of the alcohol dehydrogenase gene giving him super alcohol metabolising powers.

But despite the fact that drink driving laws cause Maxime no particular problem personally, he is still very upset about the ‘police terrorism’ in France as are many of Maxime's friends, especially a winemaker friend of ours called Seppi (short for Joseph). Seppi told us he'd written to the government to complain about the drink driving laws. 

'The state is systematically destroying French culture, strangling the French wine industry,' he explained. 'They stake out village wine fetes with gendarmes. And what happens as a result of the persecution of wine? The young people get drunk on alcopops and beer!' 

Just like those culturally retarded Anglo-Saxons across the Channel, he was implying. Maxime is in wholehearted agreement with Seppi. The wine lake, according to Maxime, is a problem not because there are too many producers in France making bad wine, but because Sarkozy cracked down on drink driving. Friends in the restaurant industry agree, upset because people don’t order a bottle of wine with lunch anymore.

But despite all this, now that we're in Australia, the Aussie police would be unlikely to catch Maxime over the limit irregardless of the battalions of booze buses, since not only is he the fastest metaboliser in the West, but, he’s been inspired by his new life in Australia to start a health kick: he's started to cut down on wine and chocolate. He splashes out on a Mount Mary or visits wineries and terrorises tasting room staff less often than he did. Mind you, there's a limit to everything: the Bruny Island cheese parcels keep on arriving on our doorstep with a a surprising frequency.

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