Masculin féminin1966

Paul:
[Voice-over] From January to March, I continued the opinion polls. Do vacuum cleaners sell? Do you like cheese in tubes? Do you read a lot? What's a cadre? Do you like poetry? Winter sports? Short skirts? How do you react to an accident? If your lover left you for a black, would you mind? Do you know about the famine in India? Do you know what a Communist is? Do you use birth control pills or a thing in your vagina? Where do you live? What's your salary? Why are society women more frigid than factory girls? Do you know there's an Iraqi-Kurd war on? Gradually, over these three months, I came to realize that these questions did not reflect but deformed the collective mentality. My lack of objectivity, even when unconscious, tended to provoke a predictable lack of sincerity in those I was polling. Unawares, I was deceiving them and being deceived by them. Why? Probably because polls and surveys quickly veer from their true goal, the observation of behavior, and instead insidiously go for value judgments. I discovered that the questions I would ask any French person expressed an ideology that reflects not present mores but those of the past.