Pablo Picasso was so struck by her beauty when he first saw her that he took a bowl of cherries over to the table where she was having a meal with a friend. That was 1943, and although Françoise Gilot was 40 years the painter’s junior, she went on to become his lover and artistic muse for almost 10 years. She also infuriated him later by writing a memoir, Life with Picasso, which was published despite a legal challenge.

Now, at the age of 93, Gilot is generating more literary controversy. But this time the indignation is likely to come from women objecting to what could politely be described as an “old-school” approach to female sexuality. Gilot has co-authored a new book, About Women: Conversations Between a Writer and a Painter, in which she and the American writer, Lisa Alther, author of the 70s feminist classic, Kinflicks, discuss the “dilemmas, benefits and demands of womanhood”. The pair have been friends for 25 years, so the exchange of views is frank and, in the case of Gilot, highly provocative. Perceived political correctness in relationships between men and women appears to be her particular bugbear.

“There are probably fewer rapes in France because people are less repressed,” she writes. “If a man whistles at you and you smile, that oils the social wheels and eases the tension between the classes and sexes … It’s a kind of give-and-take that acknowledges that the other person exists, so in that sense it’s not treating another person as an object.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Françoise Gilot with Pablo Picasso and their son, Claude, in 1952. Photograph: Roger-Viollet/Rex Shutterstock

“To take offence all the time makes every relationship disagreeable ... Each time a man says something to me, if I take it as an insult, then I’ll be insulted several times a day by strangers I’ll never see again … Whereas if I smile vaguely and go my way, it doesn’t cost me very much.”

Gilot was a young artist when she met Picasso. Over the next decade, he went on to immortalise her in paintings, drawings and prints and they had two children, Claude and Paloma. Her Life with Picasso sold more than a million copies in its first year alone.

Her views on relations between the sexes are not shared by her friend. Alther points out that American women “resent being turned into an object, knowing that any clod on the street can assess them physically or sexually, often in unflattering terms”, while comments in the street are “often delivered with the intention of demeaning”.

Why assume “the worst of somebody?” asks Gilot: “There’s always a subtle ambience of eroticism in the streets, in the air, of Paris. For instance, when you go to the market to select peaches, if you ask the vendor, ‘Are your peaches ripe?’ he’ll often say yes with a wink because the peach is considered a fruit similar to the female sex. Sometimes having intercourse is referred to as ‘eating a peach’. So there will often be a little innuendo that isn’t rude but just reminds you of the eroticism of life.”

When a woman walks in the street in Paris, men are entitled to whistle or make a remark as they pass by Françoise Gilot

While Alther recalls an American woman in Paris voicing “disgust over the floridness of Frenchmen’s compliments”, Gilot argues: “When a woman walks in the street in Paris, men in a truck or a car are entitled to whistle or to make a remark as they pass by. It’s not meant to lead anywhere. American friends sometimes say, ‘I was attacked in the street today.’ By which they mean that some man said something to them in passing. I reply, ‘Well, they were trying to pay you a compliment.’”

She adds: “In Paris, a woman will say, ‘Today in the street I heard three whistles and four comments. I don’t need my mirror to know I’m in good shape.’”

Gilot says she learned early on how to deal with unwanted advances: “When I was 15 … young men started noticing me, so I asked my father how to get rid of them. I didn’t want to say no from fear of being impolite, but I didn’t want to say yes. ‘Of course not,’ said my father. ‘But I thought you were a woman?’ – meaning that I had to have the guile to find ways to refuse without saying no.”

Younger generations of women are unlikely to accept such skewed terms of engagement. Sarah Green, acting director of the End Violence Against Women Coalition, said: “There are many young French feminist activists who disagree with that point of view and who are tired of being harassed when they’re trying to get on with their everyday lives.” She added: “It isn’t reducible to social class … Wealthy bankers standing outside pubs will shout at women and some builders have never shouted at women … It isn’t flattering. If those men get a ‘no’ or a ‘go away’, they will then become abusive. The idea that it’s jocular, trivial or working-class culture is just wrong. At the worst level, it affects some women’s decision-making about where it’s not safe to travel.”

About Women: Conversations Between a Writer and a Painter is published by Nan Talese Books, an imprint of Doubleday, on 17 November.