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CATHERINE MILLET
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Reviews of the book - Portugal, France, Germany
Critiques du Livre - France, Royaume Uni
Interview in the Playboy of Brasil (portuguese)
Oui, so horny!
A French art critic confesses her love for the male organ
(the more the merrier) in a new, pleasingly pornographic sexual memoir.
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By
Stephanie Zacharek
May 22, 2002 | There's group sex on the fourth page and a chapter that begins "I really like sucking men's cocks." But the most shocking thing about "The Sexual Life of Catherine M.," an unfettered memoir that has become a bestseller in France and is just now being published in the United States, is that it isn't particularly shocking at all. A good quarter of the time, it works as pornography (and I use the term in a descriptive sense, not a judgmental one); the rest of the time it's a rumination on the nature of desire and pleasure and the experience of living a life that is specifically arranged to let desire and pleasure have their way with you. It's titillating, explicit, dryly funny and sometimes exceedingly puzzling.
The only truly shocking thing about it is that it was written by a straight woman and not a gay man.
The author of "The Sexual Life of Catherine M." is Catherine Millet (her real name), an art critic and the longtime editor of the French journal Art Press. Millet, who is now in her early 50s, has written eight books of art criticism. In Vogue magazine last year, Francine du Plessix Gray characterized her as "a demure woman ... who wears white dimity blouses with her prim black suits."
Since being a teenager in the 1970s, Millet has had sexual encounters with hundreds -- in fact, a countless number -- of men. Millet has taken and been taken in public parks, in sex clubs and cozy apartments, at birthday parties that would segue gracefully (or feverishly) into artfully arranged orgies. She also recounts a memorable episode in a delivery van parked outside the Soviet Embassy in Paris, where she was visited by a succession of men who rocked her world so hard that her friend Éric, her protector and cruise director during such sessions, had to bring the evening to a close partly because the van was in danger of tipping over.
"The Sexual Life of Catherine M." is a dare to every human being, particularly every woman, who claims to be sexually open. No woman has ever written a book like this. Millet speaks with so much matter-of-fact assurance about her sexuality and her exploits that she's bound to make enemies, even among those who insist they're anything but prudish. (Beware any human being who begins a sentence with the innocently sinister phrase "I'm no prude, but ...," inevitably a prelude to superiority and judgment.) Millet is unapologetic about her adoration of cocks, and lots of them, preferably all at once. And she never adopts the half-defensive, half self-congratulatory tone of so many women writers who fancy themselves sexually free; her sentences never scream, "Look what a groovy libertine I am!"
Millet is too busy for that: Too busy taking on all cummers, allowing herself to be stroked and pawed, masturbating alone or with a partner, perfecting the art of the blow job. She wants to be where the action is and, in pursuit of it, lives out a glorious perversion of the Puritan work ethic. No idle hands for her; she likes to keep busy. "In the biggest orgies in which I participated ... there could be up to about 150 people (they did not all fuck, some had come to watch), and I would take on the organs of around a quarter or a fifth of them in all the available ways: In my hands, my mouth, my cunt and my ass. Sometimes I would exchange kisses and caresses with women, but that was only ever secondary."
To put it any other way would be coy: Millet likes to fuck. And, being a critic -- in other words, a person for whom observation and participation are indistinguishably intertwined -- she likes nothing more than to think and to talk about it. "The Sexual Life of Catherine M." isn't a titillating read masquerading as an intellectual treatise: It's unapologetically both. But what's refreshing about it is the way Millet naturally assumes that we're interested in knowing why she thinks and feels as she does, instead of trying to convince us that we should be. Her raw confidence works like a charm: We hang on every word.
At least, almost. There are patches of "The Sexual Life of Catherine M." that are term-paper dull. Millet wastes a lot of gas, for instance, pondering the pros and cons of fucking publicly in bucolic settings and in urban ones: "[An urban space] presupposes the presence of others, an audience of fortuitous strangers who might penetrate the aura of intimacy which emanates from a partially naked body or from two bodies soldered together. Those same bodies out under the clouds, with only God as their witness, are looking for the opposite sensation; not to make others come into the pocket of air in which their rapid breathing mingles, but, thanks to their Edenic isolation, to let their pleasure spread as far as the eye can see. The illusion there is that their ecstasy is on the same scale as this expanse, that the body that houses them is dilating to infinity."
A friend of mine once put it better: "Hooray! Hooray! The first of May/Outdoor humping starts today." But if you can forgive Millet her occasional episodes of overintellectualized flatulence (she is French, after all), "The Sexual Life of Catherine M." holds you tighter than a pair of handcuffs.
Millet's narrative meanders, but she's certainly able to focus sharp attention on what she likes and why she likes it. She writes openly but almost a little shyly about her body, acknowledging that, like all other women, she can't see it as others do. She likes her ass, and enjoys offering it freely; she likes being looked at, admired, toyed with. She explains why, as much as she enjoys sex with multiple partners, she could never be a prostitute (part of the reason is that it entails many of the same preliminary niceties of traditional courtship, a minuet Millet loathes -- she prefers to get right down to it).
She also explains, in the best way anyone could, about the challenges and difficulties of her chosen life in relation to her longtime partner (Millet has had an open marriage with one man, off and on, since the '70s). A brief passage on migraines and how they change her observations about her own body -- and even her very existence -- is fascinating, particularly if you've ever suffered the pain of one yourself.
Not long into the book, Millet's descriptions of tangled limbs, spelunking tongues and many, many stiffened cocks achieve a kind of somber formality; as you grow accustomed to such details, they become less and less explosive, although not necessarily less erotic. In that respect, Millet's vivid descriptions of various arrangements and tableaux carry on the tradition of Sade. And her freedom with the language recalls Henry Miller, although her prose has a more elegant polish.
She recounts her experiences with one lover who seemed to heighten her anticipation and pleasure by making appointments that she had to move heaven and earth to keep: "These meetings were always at an ungodly hour for anyone trying to carry on professional activities that were just a tad dependent on office hours: between eleven o'clock and midday, between half past three and four o'clock in the afternoon ... the day before I could already feel the nervous tension in my snatch subjected to the vibrating of the seat on the Metro while I looked forward to our reunion. The feeling could be so maddening that I sometimes preferred to get off a few stops before my destination, to calm myself down by walking. That man could lick my snatch indefinitely."
Millet's book reads as if it couldn't have been written by a woman -- at least, no woman we've yet met. It's miles away from the psychically and physically detached erotic burblings of Anaïs Ninny (who got paid by the page -- and it shows). It's significantly different, even, from the more modern, determinedly kinky, femme-macho writing of Pat Califia -- for one thing, Millet's book isn't a work of fantasy or fiction (and her descriptions of various scenarios are so vivid and resolute that you never once believe she made any of it up). And beyond that, "The Sexual Life of Catherine M." never reads as if it were consciously written to arouse us -- any erotic charges it sets off are simply inherent in the details Millet chooses and the way she lays them bare.
That may sound odd when we're talking about an explicit sexual memoir, but it's one of the most enthralling qualities of Millet's book. She's not rattling off textbook images of things that might potentially make us hot, but explaining with great care and thought the things that turn her on -- our imaginations are left to wander happily through the book, and our libidos are free to respond, or not, at whim. Her recurring preference is for being taken and attended to by several men at once (a common enough female fantasy), but she has no masochistic leanings. (Some of the situations she has found herself in sound inherently dangerous, but there's also a sense that many of her encounters were carefully arranged with friends or friends of friends, and she counts many current and former lovers as friends as well.)
Millet has a sense of humor, too. She describes a scene in which she can't help giggling after a lover intentionally pees on her -- she doesn't pass judgment on him for it, but it simply isn't her thing. He's offended by her response, and years later when they meet again, he reminds her of her deficiency: "There's one thing you're not good at, and that's being pissed on."
"The Sexual Life of Catherine M." is only on its surface a book about sex; it's really a book about living, which is why it's certain to anger some people even as it delights others. So much pornography created for and by women is weighed down by its own timidity, as if it were trying its damnedest to be hot and yet not offend delicate sensibilities at the same time. I once tried to watch a Candida Royalle movie and nearly fell asleep in the time it took the two central characters to pack their nice picnic lunch, find the appropriate grassy, romantic spot and look around appreciatively at all the pretty trees around them. When the frisky pair finally took their clothes off, the woman kept her hiking boots on, a nature-babe affectation that only made the whole scenario more dismal.
In both movies and literature, there's plenty to be said for cutting to the chase, even if many of us enjoy all the flirtations and preambles in real life. Millet is a model of efficiency -- she doesn't want to waste her time or ours. Her sensuality is written on the page not in blurred curves and soft moans, but in a sign language that recognizes the beauty of a good stiff cock, and in the sense of fulfillment and heightened self-knowledge that comes with taking charge of it. Whether you share Millet's predilections is beside the point; what matters most is not what she says but how she says it. There are always going to be those people who wonder why anyone should speak as freely as Millet does about such a private thing. Millet's response, one that races far beyond the question, is, Why not? There's no shame or embarrassment in "The Sexual Life of Catherine M.," except for that we bring to it ourselves.
About the writer
Stephanie Zacharek is a senior writer for Salon Arts &
Entertainment.
DOING IT IN THE ROAD
by JUDITH THURMAN
A Frenchwoman reveals a life of sexual excess.
Issue of
2002-06-10
Posted 2002-06-03
I spent part of every summer until I was ten with my grandmother, who lived in a working-class suburb of Boston. The neighbors were devoutly Catholic, and they occasionally took me to Mass at their parish church up the hill. On sultry August afternoons in that era before vernacular prayers and air-conditioning, my friends and I used the sanctuary as a place to cool off and to play the confession game. One girl would tell her sins and the others would invent her chastisement. We were fond of the word "flagellation." Peggy, who was pale and fat, entertained the fantasy of scourging herself for a mystic bridegroom. I considered converting, so as to be eligible for sainthood. In the late nineteen-fifties, there were still not many avenues of glory open to ambitious virgins who couldn't tap-dance. Heroic self-abnegation was, as it has been for two millennia, one of the few.
Marie scornfully rejected any thought of taking the veil. She had already tried smoking and had no intention of practicing any romantic austerities. It was she who first pointed out that there was a cavity between our thighs, and that boys would want to put their "thing" there, and that if we let them "it would hurt like hell the first time, but you do it for love." I must have read about St. Catherine of Siena (1347-80) for the first time that summer, because her hagiography left an indelible impression that I associate with the secrets Marie thrust upon us in the purple-tinted gloom of Our Lady's. As a young novice of the Sisters of Penance, Catherine had nursed a woman with breast cancer. The lesions were suppurating and gave off a nauseating smell. Because she aspired to dominate her physical sensations—attractions and repulsions—in the name of submission to a higher power, the future Doctor of the Church drained some of the fluid into a ladle and drank it. That night, Jesus came to her in a vision and invited her to drink the blood spurting from His wounds. A few years later, she wrote, "I, Catherine . . . turn to and lean upon the tree of the most holy cross of Christ crucified and there I wish to be nailed; and do not doubt that I will be pierced through and nailed with him for love and with deep humility."
In a working-class suburb of Paris, another Catherine, surnamed Millet—a devoutly Catholic schoolgirl of my generation—dreamed of becoming a missionary nun. Her large family lived in a small apartment. The parents' marriage was unhappy, but they were too poor or too conventional to separate. Catherine once glimpsed her mother and an admirer stealing a kiss, and she describes this memory pompously as a "primal scene." She and her mother shared a bed. Curled up on her side of it, the daughter masturbated resentfully and inexpertly—she says that she had not yet located her clitoris and wouldn't for a long while. Young girls often indulge in violent fantasizing even as they stopper their nascent lust with an excess of prudery. Catherine abandoned her reading of a Hemingway novel when she discovered that the heroine has multiple lovers, and she reacted with hostility to an atypical confidence from her mother, who casually remarked one day that she had slept with seven men. It was more intolerable, though quite natural, for Catherine to imagine that her parents might picture her in a man's arms. She fled their house soon after she was deflowered—at eighteen ("not particularly early," as she notes). While she never tried to hide her subsequent, hard-driven promiscuity from friends or colleagues, she always concealed it from her mother and father. They are presumably now both safely dead.
Catherine did not become a missionary, or at least not the kind she had once imagined. For several decades, she has edited a journal called Art Press, curated exhibitions, and written art criticism. But, with boundless and in many respects conventional female application, she has also pursued her desire to be nailed for love. Last year, Millet published an ostentatiously obscene work of erotobabble in the form of a memoir about her "unreserved abandonment of the self to a way of life." "The Sexual Life of Catherine M." provoked a predictably heated dialectical response in the European media while selling some three hundred and fifty thousand copies in France alone, and it has just been translated—carelessly and in places incoherently—into English (Grove; $23).
Millet was born in 1948. Twenty years later, student revolutionaries mounted the barricades gaily chanting "Merde au chagrin!" They piously believed that desire sets one free, and many still do. Catherine M. thinks of herself as a "libertine" philosopher ("My backside is the other side of who I am"); as an evangelist of sexual liberation theology; as a "valiant warrior" waging a class struggle against the "gentrification" of her erotic life; and as a mystic searching for the "grail" of "fornicatory communion," though her more obvious goal seems to be inclusion in the record books for various Olympic feats of endurance and agility. Over the years (her chronology is vague), she has been what the French call a partouzeuse—an orgiast. Orgies, mostly of the gourmet, mate-swapping variety, have taken place in luxurious Parisian salons and specialized clubs for centuries, though they were particularly popular in the nineteen-seventies, when Millet was young. Within weeks of losing her virginity and running away from home, she discovered group sex, and her gymnastics in the garden and bedrooms of a borrowed villa outside Lyons with a band of contemporaries led to progressively more heterogeneous and less well-upholstered sessions of consensual gang-banging on benches in the Bois de Boulogne, on the games table of a louche swingers' club, on the corrugated-metal slats of a truck parked outside the Soviet Embassy, in the cabs of semis, under the stands at a soccer stadium, sitting up in a sauna, supine in the grotto of a mansion, in stairwells, offices, back seats, cemeteries, bathtubs, peep-show cubicles, a three-star restaurant, museum storerooms, and on the hoods of cars in parking lots on the outskirts of Paris, where throngs of frenzied anonymous strangers would, for hours at a go, serially or several at a time, take their pleasure in all of her willingly proffered orifices. "I was completely available," she writes (her favorite orgy being a brag-fest), "at all times and in all places, without hesitation or regret . . . and with a totally clear conscience."
The "quality" of an experience, Catherine M. says, was unimportant to her. She preferred to keep the genteel preliminaries—coquetry, foreplay, drinks, a friendly hello—as brief as possible. She didn't mind, and even welcomed, filth, rudeness, haste, uncomeliness, and bumbling in her partners: "To fuck above and beyond any sense of disgust was not just a way of lowering oneself, it was, in a diametrically opposite move, to raise yourself above all prejudice." She prided herself, rather like a sled dog mushing through a blizzard with a vial of life-saving vaccine, on never begging off, despite a raging migraine or an excruciating case of "the clap . . . the shared fate of those who fuck a lot." (It is striking, though, that Millet ignores that other shared fate of so many who fornicated as recklessly as she did without protection—death. There isn't a single reference to AIDS, not to mention what must have been intensely bothersome chronic cases of herpes and cystitis. One has to wonder if she hasn't exaggerated her exploits or possibly invented some of them. Anal intercourse with forty men in a night calls for an exceptionally hardy specimen.)
One also learns, toward the end of the memoir, though by then without surprise, that Millet first realized that she'd never had a proper orgasm when, in her late twenties or early thirties, alone in bed, she finally achieved one with the help of a "Japanese vibrating dildo." Though she alludes grandiloquently to her "vast plain of desire," few women would seem to have learned less about the geography of rapture from its exploration, or derived so little profit from its mining rights: "The teasing I have had for offering my body so easily but not knowing how to make money out of it!" Though Catherine yearned to be "a high-class prostitute"—"a Madame Claude girl"—or, even better, an icy tease like Belle de Jour, slumming in a seedy brothel, her short, slightly bowed legs, artless enthusiasm, and distaste for pillow talk disqualified her. But over the years she did collect, in addition to the dildo, a few tokens of gratitude: a designer bath towel, some costume jewelry, taxi fare, the odd hundred-franc handout, a contribution toward a Saint Laurent dress, and free dental work. Few careers in public service have been as selfless.
Lust is a great and inexhaustible literary subject, but writing graphically about what excites one isn't literature. The same stupid things excite everybody. Pornography is a form of pidgin—a trading tongue without the deep wellspring of nuance that produces clarity. Millet's memoir was greeted abroad as "absolutely staggering" (Le Monde) and in some reviews here as a profound contribution to our knowledge of the senses. Italian television staged a debate between Millet and the archbishop of Como—a "courteous" encounter, she recalled in an interview. "He only made two critical observations: that my book was less philosophical than those of de Sade—I don't agree . . . and that he wouldn't like to be my husband."
"The Sexual Life of Catherine M." suggests, however, that the mental hymen of the reading public is a membrane capable of miraculous regeneration. Surely, works in which a tough French girl who will do "anything," and who has read too much Bataille, complacently flaunts her voracious appetite for violation in the name of free agency—aggressively seeking what men like to pretend women must be forced to beg for—aren't subversive anymore, despite the current fashion for them. The dreary films of Catherine Breillat, "Romance" and "Fat Girl," and the repulsively cynical "Baise-Moi," by Virginie Despentes and Coralie Trinh Thi, belong to the same genre as "The Sexual Life of Catherine M." It is also now almost fifty years since the distinguished essayist Dominique Aury published "Story of O" under the pseudonym Pauline Réage. Even then, the subject and the imagery were hardly original: the Sadean château; the mysterious, priapic confraternity; the female initiates—temple whores—who reverently acquiesce in the penances imposed by their priestly dominators. Inverted Mariolatry is a trope of the French erotic tradition, which endlessly retells the same story of defilement. She who is without sin is submerged by her Lord in a baptismal river of filth to emerge as She who is without shame. The author's gender gave authority to the novel's premise of absolute carnal surrender as an avenue to divine grace, and Aury was the first woman to write so frankly and unsentimentally about her fantasies of bondage. But what is most thrilling (rather than merely titillating) about "Story of O" is the tension between its radically explicit scenes of torture and fornication and the purity of the sentences that describe them. Aury's reticent virtuosity—her withholding—is the foil for O's abject self-abandon. If this weren't the case, her fable would be not the masterpiece that it is, but a clinical case study of masochism, author's and subject's, in the form of a mildly heretical, comically exalted, didactically perverse, and ultimately banal piece of French art porn, like the volume here under review.
Millet's chthonic vulgarity is a provocation. She poses as a combatively uncongenial woman who lives according to an old-fashioned, romantic code that abhors bourgeois prudence. Her asocial persona even wears a faint halo of autism: the idiot savant obsessed with repetition and feats of arithmetic (the first and least awful chapter of the book is called "Numbers"). Given her fascination with scorekeeping, detachment, and anonymity, her sexual ethos seems a little queer—in the style of the seventies—and one sometimes wonders if the narrator is not a woman but a gay female impersonator. Like the denizens of the old West Village trucks, piers, bathhouses, and bars, Catherine M. is addicted to the rush of novelty and controlled menace, to the thrill of sodomy in public places with faceless thugs, and to lightless back rooms full of ambiguous moans where the sudden flare of a match illuminates a grimace. She loves the morphological variety of male members and styles of penetration as much as if not more than coitus itself. She recognizes the rapport between lust and wanderlust, both of which simultaneously dissolve one's bearings and refresh one's keenness of sensation.
Yet the middle-aged swinger who narrates "The Sexual Life of Catherine M." is also a credentialled intellectual with a nice apartment, an impressive academic bibliography, and an athletic life of the mind. In the name of piety, many a puckish Renaissance painter tested the tolerance of his orthodox patrons with a flamboyant St. Sebastian or a slutty Eve, and Millet, the art historian, plays that game in reverse. In the name of authenticity, she challenges the black-garbed hierarchs of moral relativity to call her bluff. At least one of them did. "Can anyone still believe," Jean Baudrillard wrote in Libération, railing against reality TV and Millet's "exhibitionism," "that truth remains when its veil of secrecy is lifted?"
Lazy as most of Millet's prose is, it bears the pretentious imprint of her critical training. "I am a formalist," she announces. In ruminative asides, she wishes to impress us with her life's "antinomies": privacy and exposure; solitude and plurality; confinement and escape; propriety and transgression—the conflict between the vestal and the bawd who shape her character. "As far as I can see," she writes, "there is a balance to be sustained between the acquisition of moral and intellectual qualities which earns the respect of our peers, and a proportional excellence in practices which flout these qualities, brush them aside, and deny them." The most interesting paradox, however, is that Millet's spectacular hubris in telling this story under her own name is an act of self-mortification more hard-core than any in the text. She even seems to be courting, like her namesake, a kind of martyrdom. The pustulant public ridicule that she drains into a ladle and forces herself to swallow with such a show of humility must be particularly galling to a cultivated French palate.
Men and women suffer from grandiosity in different ways. Men tend toward fantasies of omnipotence, women of uniqueness. Millet wants her readers to ask themselves the question "How can she?" and one does. But perhaps her motive, hidden in plain sight, is prodigiously ordinary: to hold the interest of a man. She has, for thirty years, been a partner in an intimate union of two who share a bed, a bank account, vacations (they especially like "outdoor fucking"), squabbles, a workplace—a "couple culture," as she puts it—and who have for a decade been legally wed. Her husband is a novelist and amateur photographer named Jacques Henric. Though neither of them ever renounced "sleeping with lots of people," his affairs, Millet says, her voice trembling a little, like any betrayed woman's, filled her "with a terrible feeling of being supplanted," and Henric's possessiveness was just as volatile as that of any Latin lover. Was he the enraged brute who, as she slept, slashed her shoulder with a razor in "revenge" for "one of my unwisely detailed accounts"?
Henric published a companion volume to "The Sexual Life of Catherine M.," called "Légendes de Catherine M.," and its cover features the shapely naked "backside" of the young Millet. "A free woman," he writes, "without guilt, is a pretty gift for a novelist." The memoir of a sexual showoff, one might add, makes a pretty gift for a voyeur. The author's head shot of Henric shows a taurine man of about sixty-five, in a black leather biker's jacket. There are more photographs inside—mostly snaps from their holiday trips over the years—including several taken in Spain of Millet doggedly flashing her droopy little breasts, neat pubis, short legs, and "supple" waist at the grave of Walter Benjamin. They are accompanied by a flaccid text of such orgiastic fatuity that it seems like parody. Vaunting his own obscure novels and commingling his wretched blather about reality and appearances with the refined aperçus of poor Benjamin, who deserves to rest in peace, Henric proceeds to drop more august names in a few pages (Rimbaud, Joyce, Baudelaire, Artaud, Genet, Kafka, Proust, Céline, Lacan, and the indispensable Bataille) than there are drunks in a phone booth. The tone of his voice eerily recalls that of the only other French erotomane who is as tedious to read: Colette's first husband, Willy.
Colette would probably have slept with Henric to teach him a lesson while dismissing Millet as one of those women whom she calls "a Madame How-many-times." She might also have chastised her familiarly with the same smart slap that she gave to her friend Radclyffe Hall, who had asked for a critique of "The Well of Loneliness": "Obscenity is such a narrow domain. One immediately begins to suffocate there, and to feel bored."
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From Volume 24 Number 14 | cover date 25 July 2002
The Sexual Life of Catherine M. by Catherine Millet. trans. Adriana Hunter | Serpent's Tail, 192pp., £12, 6 June 2002
Unless you are one of those who don't have a television set, or who only watch opera on BBC4, you will surely have noticed an advertisement currently playing between the acts on the commercial channels. A man and a woman are sitting at a table finishing a sandwich. He is guiltily unsatisfied with the neat, respectable snack/sex they've just had. 'I do love Kate,' he whispers to a friend on the phone. 'It's just those sandwiches. I need something filthy, like a kebab.' His mate advises him to get himself a Pot Noodle. Cut to dark alleys, garish neon and gaudy young women outside 'Live Food' shows. Our man asks one if she does Pot Noodles and receives a slap round the face. Some things a girl won't provide. He keeps trying and failing until eventually he finds a woman willing to give him what he wants. She looks about shiftily and whispers: 'Round the back.' The two of them are on a bed, guzzling their Pot Noodles and groaning with extreme pleasure. 'It felt so wrong - and yet it felt so right,' the man intones in a voice-over. The advertisement ends with a shot of a Pot Noodle and a woman's voice declaring: 'Pot Noodle - the slag of all snacks.'
The food/sex correlation is hardly new, but there is something novel about dragging it into the gutter rather than escorting it through the doors of the Ivy. The bland current assumption that food and sex are both commodities to be traded up by those with social aspirations is nicely overturned. You may love Kate but you hanker for a slag. And there's the hint of a solution to the dilemma in the ad, which as well as making the connection between food and sex is also perhaps offering them as alternatives, suggesting that the lower appetite might be assuaged by substituting filthy eating for filthy fucking. You can have your cake and eat it, and hang on to the doily.
There is a Pot Noodle moment in Catherine Millet's otherwise supercool, anxiety-free sexual autobiography. In a sauna she has sex with numberless men and even as she goes to the shower has her clitoris 'aggressed and . . . nipples pinched'. A 'little masseuse' works afterwards on Catherine's aching body and carries on a pretence that she doesn't know what has been going on, that her client is just another stressed modern woman in need of a relaxing massage. Catherine M. enjoys the play-acting: 'After all, I was no more the debauched little bourgeoise she must have taken me for than the steadfast one we were inventing.' Because Catherine M., you see, is an intellectual, the editor of Art Press, a respected French art magazine, and even though she spends her nights servicing queues of men in the Bois de Boulogne ('should I count only the men that I sucked off with my head squashed next to their steering wheels, or those with whom I took time to get undressed in the cabins of their trucks, and ignore the relay of faceless bodies behind the car doors?'), she does not like to be confused with a 'debauched little bourgeoise' or, to freely translate, a slag. Catherine M. is more of a Marks & Spencer take-away sushi - the courtesan of snacks.
A slag is someone who will let anyone do anything they want to her, do anything for them, and do it for nothing. She belongs round the back of the bike sheds, her hair is lank, her eyes are usually dull, and she is not expected to be a high-achiever academically. She's dumb and she's easy and she's not just cheap: she's free. But not a free spirit. That's another kind of sexual woman, much more up Catherine Millet's street. Catherine M. will let anyone do anything they want to her, do anything for them and do it for nothing, but no one could say she's thick. I think we're back to the old duality. If sex is just a bodily event, that's slag: if you think or better still write about it, that's freedom. No review of The Sexual Life of Catherine M. fails to mention that by day she lives and works comfortably in the world of intellectuals and that the book is well written. It is suggested that Millet's project in writing about her sexual encounters is related to her intellectual concerns. Writing about pleasure, she says, is a work of art and she anatomises her sexual experiences and responses as a Cubist might the visual field. We are in the thought world of 'paradoxical solitude' among the writhing bodies, of jouissance, and the orgiast's existential desire to achieve 'annihilation of the senses'. There is a problem here in that the translation indicates very little of the clarity and style that Millet's prose was praised for in the original. Either it was done in a great hurry, or the translator has only a passing acquaintance with colloquial English. Phrases such as 'with retrospect' and 'That is, I, as I was want [sic], would jerk my hips rhythmically' don't give you confidence, but often the writing is so muddy that you can only hope it's the fault of the translation: 'But space is only ever an immeasurably large balloon with a hole. If you blow it up too fast, it will readily turn on you and deflate just as quickly.' Even with a dictionary and a lot of thought I can't understand 'Is it because people were less interested in my bosom that it is more lymphatic by nature?' And can you work out this shot of Catherine M. on video? 'Later, on the screen, I will see myself taking on the shape of an upside-down vase. The base is my knees which I have brought up to my face, my thighs are squeezed up to my trunk forming a cone which gets wider as it reaches the buttocks, and then narrows at the neck after flaring widely on each side - would that be the curve of the iliac bones? [Christ knows] - leaving just enough room for the plunging rod.' It would be hard to take Millet's effort seriously, if you weren't sure this was a bad translation.
To be clear: Catherine M. began at the age of 18 to have sex with multiple partners when her first lover suggested it, and has continued to make herself available to groups either at private encounters or in public places, as arranged by her current lover. In between the organised gang-bangs she is prepared to have sex with anyone (preferably male) who suggests it. Her sexual encounters have been innumerable, but she declares that there are only 49 men whose faces or names she could recognise. At some orgies there were 150 people and she 'would deal with the sex machines of around a quarter or a fifth of them in all the available ways'. In such circumstances, you don't ask for a formal introduction. She has both personal and doctrinal reasons for her activities. She has always been socially awkward, she says, and finds the usual ways of getting to know people excruciatingly embarrassing. What she calls the preliminaries, the flirting and the banter that precede most sexual encounters are, apparently, beyond her. Getting straight down to sex avoids the social encounter at which she is so inept. But she is also contemptuous of preliminary rituals. She expresses great moral disapproval of one group who insist on dining at a restaurant before they get down to the serious business of sex, and she thinks it 'obscene' to tell salacious stories at an orgy. She deplores play-acting and delay. She prefers the 'soirées curated by Eric and his friends . . . the inflexible sequence . . . their exclusive goal: there were no outside factors (alcohol, demonstrative behaviour . . .) to impede the flow mechanics of bodies. Their comings and goings never strayed from their insect-like determination.' Catherine M. has very decided views on how a sex object ought to behave. At one orgy a young woman waves her arms and legs around under her heaving throng of men and makes a lot of noise indicating her pleasure. 'I observed this sort of extrovert behaviour with placid indifference. One of the participants expressed their admiration, saying she was "really going for it", and I thought this was stupid.'
As a 'Sixties' libertarian expressing the ideal of freedom with her body, transgressing norms, despising the bourgeois evasion of desire, Catherine M. is perfectly understandable. She takes her radical philosophy from Bataille, and admires Pauline Réage's über-underling O for her perpetual readiness for sex, her propensity for being sodomised and her reclusiveness. She is an absolutist, despising those opportunists who take time out of normal life for a little promiscuity. 'I believed that fucking - and by that I mean fucking frequently and willingly whoever was (or were) the partner (or partners) - was a way of life. If not, if this thing were only permitted when certain conditions were met, at predetermined times, well then it was carnival!' Certainly she is a very rigorous, not to say humourless, libertine. She acts out her paradoxical freedom paradoxically by being completely available, by refusing nothing and seeing herself as a heroine of abjection. Feminism is rejected as another subset of morality, as a drag on the will. But even the will is a drag on the will. What she wants or does not want is subsumed in absolute indifference and the great overarching project of finding the perfect negation of ego. Numbers are only part of it; where and how she is used and in what part of her person must also be a matter of sublime indifference. Everything is permitted and pleasure is not in itself a goal. 'I paid no . . . attention to the quality of sexual relationships. In cases where they didn't give me much pleasure, or they even bothered me in some way, or when the man made me do things which weren't really to my liking, that wasn't reason to call them into question.' She will admit to an inclination for self-abasement but true freedom must go beyond disgust for Catherine M. Disgust raises one 'above prejudice', breaking through taboos to the clear air of unmediated liberty. This is what she sees herself as primarily doing, but it is hard to read her account of providing anal relief for a man she depicts as 'dirtier than is usually acceptable for intellectuals who often neglect their physical appearance' without feeling that her inclination towards self-abasement has the edge over her passion for putting radical philosophy into practice.
Contradiction abounds in her account of herself. As well as being a fighter on the barricades for freedom, she describes herself as a resolutely passive woman, never having any goals other than those set for her by other people, but being absolutely dependable and unwavering in the pursuit of those aims. She insists that this is her character, that even in the world of work she gets on with the job 'more like a driver who must stick to the rails than a guide who knows where the port is'. So she has no ideals, she says, in work or love, only obedience to the will of others. Her lover (Claude, Eric, Jacques over the years) set up the venues and kept watch as men held her splayed against walls or on floors while they made use of her. She consciously performs - is performed on - for the pleasure that her lover takes in watching her being used and for the delight she takes in feeling herself become nothing more than an object. But there is pride in this, and, of course, a sense of power over the men who are physically beholden to her and the watching man who depends on her submission for his pleasure. She is at one and the same time a passive masochist, a powerful enabler, a victim of her pathology, a seeker after unbridled freedom of spirit. Even in its insect-like formulations, sex is a complicated business. There isn't one story to tell and though I suspect she would like to keep it simple, Millet either doesn't or can't.
In fact, the great open space of sexuality permits all the possibilities of abjection, power, narcissism, pleasure-seeking, dour determination, creativity and mechanisation. It would be very hard to devote such a great deal of life and thought, time and effort to it as Millet does without getting it all pretty much confused. Everyday pornography is linear in order to keep a single idea afloat in an ocean of polymorphous potential. Sexuality gets out of hand, it runs rampant with meaning unless you keep to a very firm remit. The sexual story can transform from pumpkin to princess to swan with injured wing and back again in the blink of a thought. It is a nothing, an empty arena, that might be everything. And everything is more than we can cope with. The obsessive, fetishistic, single account that pornography provides is what keeps sexuality within bounds. Here is the danger of writing the sexual life: you lose the boundaries unless you steadfastly restrict yourself to the detail. At times Millet seems to be attempting to do this, but again and again, like a painter who writes explanatory notes over her picture, she tries to explicate, to flesh out the doing with her intellect, and then the sexual life is shown up for the kaleidoscopic and random playground of ideas it is. She has complained because reviewers have not seen that The Sexual Life is not the entire life, but she herself spills over her own boundaries. Ideally, the sexual life of Catherine M. would have been just that, but the person behind the sexual life can't manage it. On the one hand, she tells us: 'I have always thought that circumstances just happened to mean that I met men who liked to make love in groups or liked to watch their partners making love to other men, and the only reaction I had . . . was to adapt willingly to their ways.' If this is ridiculously disingenuous, it's not unusual for determined erotica. But she cannot leave it there. She needs us to know about the world beyond the sex, she has to give us the sexual life in relation to the social and psychological life:
Given that, in other ways, I obviously had to comply with all sorts of constraints (a very demanding and stressful job, a destiny determined by poverty, and, the worst shackle of all, the baggage of family conflicts and rows in relationships), the certainty that I could have sexual relations in any situation with any willing party . . . was the lungfuls of fresh air you inhale as you walk to the end of the pier.
Out go purity and freedom, in come consequence and motivation. The smallest injection of reality opens the account of Millet's sex life to questions that a mythic pornographic depiction would not stir up. Perhaps the Catherine M. of the title might not be precisely the Catherine Millet who wrote the book. You begin to doubt the prodigious numbers, and one woman's capacity to withstand exhaustion, and her tolerance for pain and discomfort, and her uncommon resistance to any sense of either despair or the ridiculous in these endless anonymous copulations. You have to question her assertion that she has never suffered any kind of clumsiness or brutality, and wonder at the absence of unpleasant diseases. Of course, you wouldn't if it were a fiction: the purely sexual story would be enough. But the documentary nature of Catherine M.'s account of her sexual life raises huge questions about how much the human spirit can tolerate and how far the boundaries of the self can be stretched before the individual explodes.
Perhaps it's sentimental to assume that the source of the self is so frail that it must be damaged or deranged by such copious invasion. I suppose it's sentimental to suppose even that there is a source of the self. But Catherine M.'s notion of the annihilation of self sounds in reality too much like a psychic retreat from violation. She never feared being found by the police in public places:
I would only have been put out if I had been caught in the act of exhibiting myself on the public highway. The body discovered by the representative of the law would have been no more or less than the body penetrated by the stranger in the Bois, not so much an inhabited body as a shell from which I had withdrawn.
Later, she explains how she endures all the risks of coitus . . . the eccentricities of each partner and the minor physical discomforts. This can be put down to an ability to programme the body independently of physical reactions. A body and the mind attached to it do not live in the same temporal sphere, and their reactions to the same external stimuli are not always synchronised.
Which suggests not so much nirvanic ecstasy as closing her eyes and thinking of France. And when she tells us that 'for a large part of my life I fucked without regard to pleasure,' and concedes that 'for someone who has known so many partners, no outcome was ever as guaranteed as when I sought it alone,' you begin to wonder if you are not reading an old-fashioned morality tale after all.
What is exhilarating about Millet's book is her impeccable lack of guilt. In spite of a Catholic upbringing and her reading of Lacan, she claims to be quite free from sexual (as opposed to social) anxiety. You cheer her on and hope it's true. It would be nice if someone had got away scot-free. But there is nothing Dionysian about this freedom. Her project is to write about her sexual activities as plainly as if she were a housewife describing her domestic round. In this she succeeds perhaps too well. It's perfectly true that sex can be humdrum, and it is sort of heroic of Millet to devote her life to proving it. Certainly the book is not pornography. It sets out to make sex smaller than it seems to be, whereas what Susan Sontag calls literary pornography contrives to do the opposite. In Story of the Eye, as in most erotic work, there is an underlying rage against inescapable loss, a nihilism that comes from the knowledge of the impermanence of flesh and consciousness. Fetishism and grim repetition battle against the necessity of decay and destruction, and entropy always wins. The structural movement that gives us sex but reminds us of something else is entirely lacking in Millet's book. There is no real sense of transgressing anything more than a few social rules, no battle with the way things are and have to be, and as a result her freedom is dowdy in comparison with Bataille's ability to shimmer the absurdity and despair of being human through the limited possibilities of the flesh.
Jenny Diski's new book will be Stranger on a Train, about crossing America. Her eighth novel, Only Human, is out from Virago.
BOOKS . TWIN CITIES READER SUMMER BOOKS ISSUE . VOL 23 #1122 . PUBLISHED 6/5/02
French Tickler
Catherine Millet remembers yesterday's orgies; Dennis Cooper brutalizes today's teens
Catherine Millet
The Sexual Life of Catherine M.
Grove Press
Dennis Cooper
Thread
Canongate
Now here's what I call erotic: good ol' Lisa "Suckdog" Carver, of Rollerderby fame, creaming in these pages over sharks a few months back---bringing it hard, and funny, and sweet:
When sharks have sex, they rip each other to shreds. They writhe against one another, wrapped tight in a blood blanket that slowly drifts away on a current when the act is done. Sometimes you want more than a handsome face and smooth moves... nature is always vicious and terrible and glamorous.
Compared with this, 54-year-old Catherine Millet's bestseller The Sexual Life of Catherine M. reads more like Rousseau's Confessions than steamy herotica. Like the escapist smash film Amélie, La Vie--as it's called in its native France--has been all the rage on the Continent. Though not without detractors, Millet's demure, Proust-paced dissection of her own libertinism let the middlebrow masses eat cake without feeling too depraved.
One major component of the mystique is Millet's intelligentsia cred: This isn't just some logbook of a common slut, no no no. Book clubbers are put at ease by class-courting lines like "We had constructed ourselves a solid philosophy by reading Bataille." Even more important, Millet is the editor of the Parisian magazine Art Press, which was characterized unwittingly by one shocked La Vie objector as an "upstanding organ." Could be, but as we learn, for Millet, it's just been one of several hundred.
Introduced to group sex at age 18, the self-proclaimed plain Jane soon found herself the guest of honor at frequent consensual gang bangs, sometimes spending hours pinned on beds and car hoods, under bridges and on the velvet cushions of backroom sex clubs like Chez Aimé. Passively escorted by male friends, who served as protectors and intermediaries, she was whisked through the looking glass, behind the green door, and into a starring role as the belle-laide blowjob queen.
As raconteur, Millet affects the earnest discernment of the scientific researcher, albeit one who's taken a seminar in Barthes. Eschewing soft focus, she wipes the Vaseline off the lens and describes experiences of multiple penetration, aggressive anal sex, eclectic ass love, and outdoor exhibitionism with matter-of-fact precision. Though she tends to be a mite too convinced of our interest, the net effect of her musings on various positions, body types, and techniques is the always-welcome glow of sex-positivity.
Yet for all the tasty exploits, Millet's prose is never hotter than gazpacho. Her clinical take on technique can be as much fun as watching Mr. Potato Head play Operation. "It is not unusual, at an orgy," she writes, "for a man occupying a pussy well-reconnoitered to worry about the effect his predecessors might have had....'He's got a big cock, hasn't he?'" But there's something truly affecting about her attempt to tell, not titillate, that ends up bolstering your readerly resolve to fantasize more guiltlessly, and maybe act out more roguishly. Millet is for the most part aware of the pitfalls of her tendency toward submission, describing the expansion of her own repertoire for sexual satisfaction over time, and her happy discovery of successful self-pleasure.
Most compelling though, is her account of negotiating boundaries with her primary lovers, creating special activities reserved for these relationships, especially within her marriage. There is a rueful humor in her admission that while "during an orgy, my tongue could easily sweep around a pussy that had just been ejaculated into by a man who had first aroused himself with me," the thought of using the same towel as her husband's lover horrifies her "as much as an epidemic of leprosy."
In My Loose Thread, another linguistic Spartan, cult novelist Dennis Cooper, remains in thrall to the teen-sex brutalism of his recently completed five-part semiautobiographical cycle of short novels. His newest slim trip is a roman à clef of sorts, his characters a gruesome mix of the Columbine duo, Kip Kinkel, the Menendez brothers, and Matthew Shepard's murderers.
In Cooper's dim, suffocating spaces, words combine to form an acid spew, motivations blur, and scenes lurch from sluggish to savage. Our protagonist, Larry, is a ninth grader involved in a mutually abusive homosexual relationship with his brother. His disgust at his own actions leads him to various bloody conclusions. Through his psychotic smear of words, we meet a neo-Nazi, a boy who asks to be murdered, a tree-house drug dealer, a gay-bashee, and a guy who watches his girlfriend having sex to amp up his rage. There's a lot of talk about killing, some actual killing, guilty sex, and sundry rapes.
Cooper's internal monologues bear little resemblance to high school patois. They are, instead, laconic raps like this one: "I can't help it. I want to kill Jim then kill myself. If I'd been Rand, I would have killed Jim and me. But I killed the boy instead of us, because that's more how I am. I never do what I want." As you can see, Cooper is not big on slang or detail. Compare his spare presentation to the relative baroqueness in conflicted homophobe Eminem's new song, "Sing for the Moment": "His thoughts are wack/He's mad so he's talking back/Talking black/Brainwashed from rock and rap/He sags his pants/Do-rags and a stocking cap/His stepfather hit him, so he socked him back." Cooper isn't going for Russell Banks Rule of the Bone-style vernacular. Where Banks and Eminem are stylizing the real, Cooper is personifying the id.
Without bric-a-brac and orienting clues, only raw action and psychological perforations remain. We've zoomed in so far that all we see are the individual pixels. Consider this passage, where Larry recalls a car-radio blare: "I have it set on a station I liked before Rand died. It plays loud punching songs that used to help me get angry when I couldn't." No band names, no lyrics, just a demi-urge.
Thread isn't really about kids or the Quake sand of modern adolescence as much as the general rage against one's own desires. The naked flipside of the well-decorated characters in Wes Anderson's The Royal Tenenbaums who wear their neuroses as clothing, Cooper's agents are moving bundles of miswired circuitry. And his purported stab at transcribing the isolation of kids like Kinkel and Klebold is best read as a dispatch spat from the killer inside.
Books
Laurie Stone
The Sexual Life of Catherine M.
In 224 exacting and lucid pages, Catherine Millet, a noted French art critic, scrupulously details her erotic activities during the past 35 years in The Sexual Life of Catherine M. (translated by Adriana Hunter; Grove Press, 224 pages, $23). She had seemingly thousands of men and a smattering of women in scores of settings. Routinely, she had sex with dozens of men in a single gangbang or mingled with more than that number as part of an undulating orgy blob. She fucked in the Bois de Boulogne, on roadsides and at truck stops, in apartments, her dentist’s office and the closet of her office at Art Press, the influential journal she cofounded and edits. Regularly, and with the knowledge of her husband Jacques Henric, she attended free-form parties, known in France as partouzes, with fellow seekers of bulk sex.
When this memoir was published in France last year, quickly becoming a bestseller, it was accused–mostly by males–of carrying the American taint of confessionalism and of polluting the public sphere with personal disclosure. Jean-Jacques Pauvert, who published Story of O, damned Millet for being unerotic. Sociologist Jean Baudrillard found her simpleminded because, in his assessment, she equated exposing herself with revealing "truth." She makes no such claim. She doesn’t generalize from her experience. Like all narrative with the power to suck people into its web, the book remains focused on specifics, a catalog of behaviors and responses.
The memoir will probably stir similar controversy in the U.S. Western women don’t get stoned to death for inserting their uncovered bodies into public space, as law decrees in extremist Islamic theocracies, but candor about female sexuality hasn’t exactly been welcomed. Baudrillard, in contrasting covering skin to revealing it, called the veiling of women "an excess of secrecy" and Millet’s performance "an excess of indecency." Artists who’ve enlarged the female sex memoir and dealt intimately with the female body–Hannah Wilke, Carolee Schneemann, Holly Hughes, Karen Finley–have all, at some point, been called dumb sluts.
Millet belongs amid these Pandoras, though she doesn’t crusade on the page. She doesn’t explain her reasons for writing the book, and there are maddening aspects to her detached and sometimes naive tone. She claims never to have been interested in sex as a subject, only in her own behavior, which is a weird revelation in such a book–not because it’s unbelievable but because you’d think she’d have boned up a little on the field, let’s say dipped into Krafft-Ebing, Kinsey, Masters and Johnson or Hite. Maybe then, writing about her tendency to fantasize about cocks in her head while being impaled by the fleshly kind, she wouldn’t have assumed the practice was just her thing.
Millet hides from questions about her motives, however much she’s willing to strip off her clothes for strangers and strip off her privacy for the world. She soft-pedals the risk of disease and other physical costs of her activities, including a bad beating she received against her will and a razor slash at the hands of a jealous lover. She holds much else in reserve, and although at times her voice comes across coy, at others the attitude is: Look, I’ll tell you what I want to tell you, and that’s as far as it goes; it’s all going to be on my terms. Fair enough. With slippery compression, she did tell an interviewer who asked why she’d written the book, "Because it was missing."
Indeed. Millet has much to say that the world needs to contemplate. Her book talks about what is, not what is wished for, and challenges all kinds of romanticized beliefs about what sex should be. She does have one romantic rap of her own: she admits to a taste for self-defilement–she likes being depersonalized, being handed off to men by other men, surrendering her will to anyone willing to steer it, being submerged in a communal heap of body parts where her face isn’t distinct. She sees this preference as stemming from her early, devout Catholicism, which was jettisoned at 17 when she began having sex. She depicts her energy for lapping smelly assholes and for being used as a toilet as a form of ecstatic martyrdom, where pleasure flows more from ideas than direct physical sensation. No problem with this interpretation. It’s that sometimes Catholic girl gets control of the reins and the narrative goes trotting off Chez Bataille, where Millet prettifies her actions as forms of sacrifice and spiritual longing. As with any romance, the dreamer is jammed from imagining other influences on the story.
Mostly, though, Millet delineates trance states rather than speaks from inside them. She doesn’t divide sex girl from culture girl. In her book, culture girl wrote about sex girl as much as sex girl did. Millet refuses to keep these parts of herself in different rooms–that’s one significance of her going public. But she presents an even larger gift by refusing to judge herself and sexual activity in general, by creating an atmosphere where new thoughts and perspectives are permitted to fly. This freedom was hard fought for by Millet, and in a way sex served as her charm. She depicts herself as having started out shy, paralyzingly so, a woman embarrassed not only by being embodied but by being Catherine. She didn’t think she was pretty, and it pained her. When she leaped into sex, she felt she was entering the world. She was able to be with people, including, soon, denizens of the art world with whom she would make her life. She felt empowered by being desired, although, dreading rejection, she found a context in which–given her infinite eagerness and ideally carved ass–she was unlikely to experience it. Sex itself, not particular acts, functioned as a fetish object, making her feel, just by rubbing against it, that missing parts were being restored.
Though Millet often writes about herself the way a naturalist depicts specimens in a tide pool, she regularly tosses aside her notebook and sings arias to sucking and poking–the most robust one to anal eroticism. She likes having all her orifices consulted (who doesn’t?), but the door that leads to her casbah is the anal sphincter. She’s reduced to a puddle by giving and receiving analingus. She becomes a vapor when the region between her anus and labia is granted so much as a feather touch. She confides to liking Story of O because the heroine is taken as frequently in the ass as the cunt. In presenting her ass first, Millet is putting forward her best face, as she may conceive of it, and there is merit in this view, considering the melonesque perfection of her tush. A full frontal shot of it adorns the cover of Légendes de Catherine M., a collection of nude photographs taken by her husband. Millet is touching in her vulnerability. She isn’t boastful or preening on the page. Rather, she’s scrupulously uncensored and especially brave in her admission that she’s often felt little pleasure in sex.
It may be hard to believe, but until she was 35, Millet never thought sex could provide anything like the pleasure of masturbating. She didn’t assume that bodily gratification was what she should expect. The inclusion into her sex story of sadness, deprivation, ignorance and dumb repetition–though absent grievance or a sense of herself as a victim, which she wasn’t–may be her riskiest transgression. The book doesn’t allow the reader to enter a pornotopia, where the sheets are always fresh and the skin miraculously healed of scars and bruises. Millet’s boudoir is more fetid, more bleak and boring, at its center a drama that needs repeating over and over, because part of what is desired–to be wanted and known–can’t be found with strangers. There’s much to be said for women exploring the menu of male bodies and appetites, but Millet isn’t on a quest to know men. Mostly her partners are mere instruments. Of the thousands of cocks she’s met, she knows the names of only 49 of their carriers. Never in her book does she wonder about the motivations of her consorts or what they might have been feeling as they rammed into her flesh.
Millet doesn’t edit out her frustration and her own smallness because she thinks they are parts of sex. She doesn’t think in terms of "good sex" and "bad sex." She doesn’t classify her sexual expressions as perverse or normal. To her those terms are as fitting as dressing up runaway horses in evening clothes. Her memoir aids in the rescue of sex from pathologizers–the medical establishment that snatched sex from religious moralizers only to paint smiley faces on some acts and cast furrowed brows at others. To Millet, sex is an immensity in which manifold dramas are enacted, not all of them sweet-smelling or tenderhearted or even aware of themselves as sexual. To Millet, inside women as well as men, libidinal response wears an infinite array of costumes.
17-06-2002
The Sexual Life of Catherine
M.
By Catherine Millet
The Sexual Life of Catherine M.
is not the continentally suave, madly risqué celebration of female sexuality
some other reviewers have suggested. It is, rather, a cry for help. One of the
most disturbing, depressing, and sexist (the word is "sexist," not "sexy")
documents I've ever read, Catherine Millet's sexual-adventure memoir was written
by someone who clearly hasn't spent very much time analyzing why she does what
she does.
And she's done a lot. (I didn't even know doing this much was possible. She makes doing it look like a full-time job.) While masquerading as the deep work of an intellectual (the chapter headings are, preposterously, "Numbers," "Space," "Confined Space" and "Details"—are you headed for the door yet?) this pretentious, ridiculous book is all surface, all exterior. She has sex, from what I'm able to glean, to feel wanted by men. It is a world of men, Millet's world, because men have all the power. They have it because she gives it to them. Millet has the unsettling habit of sexualizing herself; that is, writing about herself as if she's writing about someone else. As if she's being seen by someone else (a man): "I am of average height and I have a flexible body, you can catch hold of me and turn me every which way."
I am, however, forced to give Millet the following points: 1) She's generous with her assessments of other people, physical assessments especially. 2) She seems to be entirely comfortable with her body, and rarely mentions her age. But what is there to recommend about a universe in which there is only sex without meaning, only sex without love? What's the point? Why bother being alive? I'm also left with the following questions: 1) "I masturbate with the punctuality of a civil servant" is supposed to be funny, right? 2) Does anyone know what "I abandoned myself to the hydra" means? 3) Can anyone really be this desperately unhappy and not seem to know it?
—ADRIENNE MILLER
Adrienne Miller is Esquire's literary editor,
In bed with the Millets
The sexual life of
Catherine M by Catherine Millet (Serpent's Tail, £12)
Reviewed
by Ron Butlin
I
BLAME Descartes for the way they do things in France. Ever since that snappy and
oft-quoted one-liner of his -- Cogito ergo sum -- the country's never been the
same. The mind on one side and the body on the other. Of course, the mind always
wins. The French can intellectualise anything -- food and drink, football, being
and nothingness. Pornography must have been a challenge, but Catherine M has
risen to it in a way that will have Descartes encoring from Beyond.
With more willies, apertures and orgasms to the page than this humble reviewer has ever counted in any book before, Millet still manages to give her chapters titles that recall the knockabout worlds of French aesthetics and metaphysics. Chapter One (Numbers) begins with a childhood obsession: how many husbands should a woman have and can she have them all at the same time? She was a precocious child, it would seem, and already demonstrating where her adult interests would come to lie. 'In the biggest orgies in which I participated, from that time on (as a late teenager), there could be up to about 150 people,' she writes. Chapter two is entitled Space, then follows Confined Space and lastly the intriguingly named Details.
The Sexual Life Of Catherine M is a kind of autobiography in negative. That is, she misses out all the events of her life that would usually receive most of the author's attention (their work, their family, their background, their hopes, fears and opinions). Instead, she concentrates on those items that are more customarily omitted (how many men she can accommodate at any given moment, her favourite positions, her thoughts on blow-jobs etc). If the French could be said to conduct themselves on the assumption that they invented European civilisation, Catherine M writes with the enthusiasm of one who invented multiple-partner sex even though she no longer practises the intercourse that she writes about. These days Millet is married to Jacques Henric, an avant-garde poet and novelist (who has also published his own memoir of their life together) and has been monogamous for eight years.
Descartes was a dualist -- not a sword-fighter, but a philosopher who believed that the body and mind are quite separate things. Catherine M also keeps the mental and physical sides of her life utterly apart. Indeed, any notion of foreplay in the sense of flirtation or chatting up would seem to cramp her style. As she says: 'Engaging myself in the playful meanderings of seduction ... which necessarily occupies the interval between a chance meeting with someone and accomplishing the sexual act with them, would be beyond me'. Instead, she would prefer 'the thronging crowds at a station or the organised hordes in the metro to accept the crudest accesses of pleasure', commenting that 'I could easily undertake that sort of coupling, like an animal'.
Armchair psychologists -- those who associate couches with talking -- could read this book and happily tick off 101 analytical giveaways to the author's rather unorthodox approach to life. And so what? Catherine M knows her mind, and she knows her body. Like a good Cartesian she is determined to keep them in their place.
She is honest -- the only person she might be deceiving is herself and she seems willing to cope with that. Talking about the varieties of anal sex she had in a flat so squalid it 'revived the childish predilection for sewers,' she remarks that 'You don't have to be a great psychologist to deduce from this behaviour an inclination for self-abasement. But this tendency doesn't stop there; I was carried by the conviction that I rejoiced in extra ordinary freedom ... There are those who break taboos as powerful as incest. I settled for not having to choose my partners.' Indeed, she claims that to go 'beyond any sense of disgust [is] not just a way of lowering oneself, it [is], in a diametrically opposite move, to raise yourself above all prejudices.'
Children are born naive, not innocent. Innocence is something we have to strive for, and not many achieve it. Genuine free-love requires a level of trust and honesty few of us are prepared to bring into our dealings with others. Catherine M might be said to be a genuine innocent.
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'Catherine' strips erotica's scarlet letter
September 12, 2002
By PAIGE WISER STAFF REPORTER
There's a dirty book on the best-seller lists. A really dirty book. The Sexual Life of Catherine M. has some philosophical parts. But mostly it's about sex: at organized orgies, at parks and parking lots and parties.
The French memoir has spent nine weeks so far on the New York Times nonfiction list, and is currently at No. 14, down from No. 7. It's sold more than 500,000 copies worldwide and been translated into more than 20 languages. Not bad for a book by an art critic.
Those aren't author Catherine Millet's only impressive numbers. Consider that art critic's conquests: Of the hundreds of lovers she's had, she can name about 49.
It's been a while since such an explicit book has appealed to so many people--an erotic classic like Lady Chatterley's Lover, for instance, or The Story of O. We'd probably have to look back to 1992, when Madonna's Sex was on the shelves. Then again, that book had pictures.
So what's between the covers of Catherine M. that everyone wants to see? And why are so many looking?
Is it because the book is all purported to be true?
Is it the level of the explicitness?
Or is it just the French thing?
Catherine M.'s success is an exception, says erotica connoisseur Jack Hafferkamp, the Chicago-based editor of www.libidomag.com. It's bucking the recent trend toward niche titillation. Since the '90s, as sexual tastes have gotten more specific, erotic literature hasn't targeted a mass market, he says.
"There are titles not just for women, gays, lesbians and bisexuals, but titles aimed at African Americans, Asian Americans, Jewish lesbians, black and Latina lesbians, transgendered Americans and even gay Pacific Islanders," Hafferkamp says. "There are anthologies on sex toys, goth sex, S&M sex, 'aqua erotica,' erotic fairy tales, erotic travel stories--even 'eroticising the mechanical.' "
It could be the start of a publishing trend, surmises Hafferkamp, and part of a larger phenomenon: "People's desire to know more about and have better sex. I know some people," he says, "like to think of this as an indicator of moral decline. I like to think of it as a very healthy step."
Another thing that sets this book apart is that it's autobiographical. "I can't think of another book that so openly discusses sex," says Cynthia Jean Mudge, who runs the Web site www.thescarletletters.com. Don't count her as a fan, though. She generally endorses more "candy-coated" material.
"It was a remarkably depressing book, I thought," she says. "I found the book really difficult to read--pseudointellectual writing. It's an odd combination--maybe it's the translation--of intellectualism with a real clinical description of sex.
"Catherine M. doesn't talk about the consequences--the disease, the pregnancies. When she was describing some of those scenes, I was thinking, 'Oh, my God, I'd be in so much pain.' I think most of us like to keep fantasy in our fantasy world. There are things I fantasize about that in no way I would want to experience."
Darby Lewes, an English professor at Pennsylvania's Lycoming College, categorizes the book as porn, plain and simple. She's against the entire genre for feminist reasons. It's "potentially dangerous to women," a handbook that teaches men to treat women as objects, and an attitude that is passed down through generations.
"I realize porn's potential as a liberating force," she says, freeing women from ancient demands of chastity. And Lewes concedes that it can be highly entertaining. Still, she says, "I view it with a lot of distrust."
But the public has always demanded it, in varying degrees. "There's been graphic writing, probably, since writing was invented," says Mudge. "Sex has not gone out of fashion. Reading it comes in and out of fashion."
There aren't too many taboos these days to hold it back, says Adrienne Benedicks of the Erotica Readers and Writers Association.
"Erotica has gone the same route as science fiction," Bene-dicks says, "from an underground, little-respected genre to mainstream publishing.
"It addresses a normal but socially repressed human need; it arouses the mind, our largest sex organ. ...There's a lot of reasons people enjoy erotica, but it all comes down to sex, and the pleasures of it."
If this is all a game of strip poker, the ante has been upped by books like Catherine M.
"I do think that writing is getting sexier," says Carol Taylor, editor of Brown Sugar, a best-selling collection of erotic black writing, and its sequel, due in January. "I think this will continue because the publishing industry thrives on trends. Brown Sugar paved the way for at least three other black erotic anthologies. Catherine M. will undoubtedly encourage many writers to explore their sexual selves in print."
Many people seem to have an opinion on The Sexual Life of Catherine M without having actually read it. The debate goes on: Is the author truly liberated, embracing her sensuality? Or has she been cruelly exploited from her first foray into group sex at age 18? For all the talk about this sexy book, there isn't much evidence that the author enjoyed her adventures all that much. "Until I was about 35," she writes, "I had not imagined that my own pleasure could be the aim of a sexual encounter."
So is this a brave new autobiographical brand of erotic literature? Or is it just a dirty book? And what's the difference, anyway?
"Basically there is none--if one is talking about the turn-on factor," says Hafferkamp. "Aesthetically, however, the difference is on the same level as, say, the difference between Raymond Chandler and Mickey Spillane. They cover the same kind of detective turf; one is just a lot better than the other."
A friend of his likes to say that erotica is the feathers; pornography is the whole chicken. Hafferkamp suspects it might be all semantics. "Women prefer to think of their turn-ons as erotica," he says. "Men just think of it all as porn."
Mudge has fashioned a working definition for herself. "It's about respect," she says. "Erotica respects the reader, the audience, the subject, the craft. Porn has no respect. Porn is about money, basically. In some ways, that's its allure. It's so dirty and base.
"Of course, you can't define respect, either. That's why freedom of speech is so important."
This column ran on page 14 in the 6/3/02 edition of The New York Observer.
The End of Eroticism? 300,000 French Readers Say Non
by Vince Passaro
The Sexual Life of Catherine M., by Catherine Millet. Grove Press, 209 pages, $23.
Catherine Millet's astonishing memoir of physical desire, frequent orgiastic sex and rich psychic debasement, The Sexual Life of Catherine M., was first published in France last year as La Vie Sexuelle de Catherine M. It was greeted with praise, shock, anger, droll and incomprehensible commentary by Baud-rillard (always a sign of "making it" in France, akin to being a joke on David Letterman here), and huge sales: more than 300,000 copies. If French critics-that's French and critics; one cannot decide which most deserves the italics-thought Ms. Millet's adamantly frank look at her sexuality was an outrage against morality, against decency, and against some putatively more noble tradition of French porn, well, what are Americans going to think? We don't even have a putatively more noble tradition of porn. We don't have any "tradition" of porn at all; what we have is an endless stream of dull product and, somewhere in Joseph Biden's safe, Clarence Thomas' video-rental records.
Which is to say that to be an American reading the book, slightly in awe of it as well as entertained, is to spend part of one's literary energy rotating around it, looking for, pardon, the proper position.
Ms. Millet is a respected figure in the Paris art scene, a curator, founding editor of Art Press, and author of eight books of art criticism, including one that is reputed to be the "standard" French guide to contemporary art. She begins her memoir with a snapshot or two of what one senses was a difficult Catholic girlhood. As a teenager, she read Hemingway (presumably The Sun Also Rises) and was shocked to find a female character that had many lovers-so shocked that she put the book aside. Clearly, however, the notion stuck with her, for shortly after losing her virginity at age 18 she began a life of frequent group sexual activity, in arrangements both spontaneous and organized. She did it in sex clubs, at what the French call, roughly translated, "dirty" parties, in parking lots, alongside roadways, at the Bois de Boulogne, even in the back of a municipal van with a line of men waiting outside-and to judge by the narrative of detailed encounters, she might at any one of these encounters accommodate from 10 to 20 to 40 men, and sometimes a woman or two as well. Thus it is natural to estimate that she has had some form of sexual congress certainly with hundreds and perhaps even more than a thousand people. But in her memory, she says, she can put a name or some signifier of identity to only 49 of them. The rest are faceless.
From the early 1970's until today, she has lived with the French writer and photographer Jacques Henric, who has published over the years many nude photographs of Ms. Millet.
What is truly extraordinary about her story, however, is how she tells it, the profoundly rattling self-confidence and psychological depth with which she examines her desires, her inclinations, her sensations and her satisfactions. What makes the self-confidence and depth even more striking is that she deploys them in the face of an incomprehensible need, and a vast sense of sadness. She describes minutely, carefully, coldly: What we can tell of her language, through a truly awkward and bloated translation, evokes the painful dispassion, the distance, and the melancholy and grim wit of Nathalie Sarraute and Robbe-Grillet and the films of Godard. There is not a little of the pretentiousness of those figures as well, but one is not certain how much to blame her for that-she is an art critic, after all-and how much to blame the translator, Adriana Hunter, whose tumescent Latinates and grammatical clumsiness must be all her own.
Ms. Millet spends a great deal of time describing the sheer physicality of sex, but through the lens of an erotically tense and desperate imagination: Her body is like a sexual filament, a carrier of electric pleasures, and in sex she sees a vast landscape of personal disintegration, an explosive escape from self that she greatly longs for. She does not apologize for this near-suicidal eroticism, and she is adamantly unashamed. The ultimate liquid animalism of sex, the sense of melting and heat, the stains and drips (which she describes with a particularly loving attention), are for her an integral part of the pleasure of the act: As a result, her descriptions either will strike you as being among the most effective erotic writing you have seen, or you will find them fabulously disgusting. Quite often she walks the line between the two, a zone between pleasure and horror where she has, for many years, and with some unexplored sadness, lived:
"The layout of the bathroom is perfect: while the basin offers a perfect gripping point to brace the shocks to my rear end, I intermittently catch sight of my harshly lit face in the mirror above it, a face that-quite unlike my lower half, which is totally mobilized-is almost lifeless. The cheeks are hollow and the mouth half open like a windup doll whose mechanism has wound down. It could be the face of a dead woman except for the eyes, which are intolerably listless .... Sometimes I bring myself to this peak of pleasure all by myself, as an interval in my bathroom routine. With one hand on the edge of the basin and the other one masturbating, I watch myself in the mirror out of the corner of my eye.
"A particular porn film made quite an impression on me. The man was taking the woman from behind. The camera was facing her so that her face was in the foreground. Thanks to the pressure exerted on her whole body, her face was projected forward and distorted, as things are when they come too close to the lens. You could hear the man's orders: 'Look! Look at the camera!' and the girl's eyes looked directly into yours, the viewer's. I thought he might well be pulling her hair to force to raise her head. This scene has given me a lot of inspiration for the little scenarios that nourish my masturbating. In real life, a man I met only once gave me such intense pleasure that I have very precise memories of the encounter, and this was because with every thrust, he would order me to 'Look me in the eye.' I did as I was told, knowing that he was witness to the disintegration of my face."
The French publisher and writer Jean-Jacques Pauvert, who published The Story of O and Emmanuelle, called Ms. Millet's memoir "the end of eroticism." It is, in fact, the end of a certain kind of eroticism: the kind in which the woman is an instrument of male sexual desire and sexual fantasy; the kind in which the woman's own pleasure is derived in part from her exposure and shame, and in part from the desire a man has revealed to her. Ms. Millet brings into the equation of literary eroticism a modern pathology of narcissism and self-debasement that simply hasn't existed before.
Ms. Millet is uniquely feminist. It will be interesting to see how the more desiccated schools of American academic feminism react to her work. Her entire sexual stance, her story, as it were, is an impudent and fundamentally inarguable challenge to the assumptions about female sexuality on which most of the world's social arrangements are built. Back at least to the story of The Bacchae, social convention has feared, detested and suppressed the truly explosive possibilities of female sexuality, with its vastly greater capacity for orgasm and for sustained activity-and, we ultimately fear, with its vastly greater depths of desire. Once these are unleashed, a single man is not capable of fulfilling them. Much that men and women are taught (and come to believe) about sex and courtship, about love and marriage, has been constructed to evade these simple facts.
For this reason, Catherine Millet's book strikes me not only as provocative, but dangerous. In this country, we succeed best in neutralizing dangerous ideas either by ignoring them or by a process of bland absorption: mild approval, a spot on the Today show, and bye-bye idea. So what will it be?
Vince Passaro is the author of Violence, Nudity, Adult Content: A Novel (Simon and Schuster).
WELT am SONNTAG: Frau Millet, die französische Literatur schwimmt auf der Erotik-Welle, und eine neue Studie beweist: Das Liebesleben Ihrer Landsleute ist hemmungslos. Wie hängen Wirklichkeit und Fiktion zusammen?
Catherine Millet: Ich glaube, dass wir als Schriftsteller auf eine sexuelle Volksveblödung reagieren: In der Werbung, im Fernsehen, in Magazinen wird uns ein manisches Erotik-Bild vorgesetzt, an dem normale Menschen einfach scheitern müssen. In dieser Situation sind Romane eine wunderbare Plattform, um den Umgang mit Nacktheit, Sex und Liebe in Ruhe zu ordnen.
WamS: Sie sind also eher Soziologin und Gesellschafts-Therapeutin als Schriftstellerin?
Millet: Es geht mir zunächst um die genaue und weitgehend emotionslose Beschreibung sexueller Szenen. Szenen wie sie, wenn man der Studie glauben kann, viele erleben. Sex ist Grundsubstanz des Lebens. Und der Literatur. Ich wundere mich - selbst bei Klassikern von Balzac oder Dostojewski -, dass erotische Beschreibungen meist dann aufhören, wenn es zur Sache geht.
WamS: Vielleicht hören sie dort auf, wo die Phantasie des Lesers beginnt?
Millet: Sicher hat Balzac die Phantasie seiner Leser kalkuliert. Aber es ist eine ebenso große literarische Herausforderung, die Flut der erotischen Reize in eine neue, explizite literarische Wahrheit zu fassen.
WamS: Literarische Wahrheiten sind problematisch. Ist die sexuelle Wahrheit nicht nur im Privaten zu finden?
Millet: Ich glaube, dass es eine Grundwahrheit gibt. Viele Frauen finden sich in meinen Beschreibungen wieder: weniger an den Stellen, in denen ich erzähle, was ich ausgelebt habe, als dort, wo ich von meinen eigenen Phantasien spreche. Da zeigt sich ein kollektiver Frauen-Traum. Unterschiede gibt es nur in der physischen Ausführung des Geschlechtsaktes.
WamS: Michel Houellebecq gibt sich als Sex-Pessimist, Catherine Breillat begreift den Körper als lyrisches Spielfeld, und für Sie ist die Erotik ein Versuchslabor. Nicht auszudenken, wenn man Sie drei in ein Bett stecken würde.
Millet: Diese Unterschiede sind doch eher eine Form der literarischen Beschreibung. Aber klar: Es kann keinen Schlüssel zur Sexualität geben, da es in der Sexualität gar kein Geheimnis zu lüften gibt. In keiner Studie und in keinem Roman.
WamS: Vielleicht doch: Alle französischen Autoren scheinen ein gemeinsames Problem zu haben. Der Körper sucht Sex und der Kopf will es ihm nicht gönnen.
Millet: Dieses Problem der sexuellen Triebe, die man mehr oder weniger beherrscht, existiert besonders bei Michel Houellebecq. Bei ihm hat der Körper eine ungeheuere Schwere, sehnt sich nach Leichtigkeit. Ich versuche diese Leichtigkeit durch die Distanz zum eigenen Körper zu erreichen ...
WamS: ... und schreiben deshalb über die Erotik wie über eine Chemie-Anordnung?
Millet: Ja. Letztlich verstehe ich meinen Körper in der katholischen Tradition: Er ist eine Hülle, die man eine Zeit lang hat, durch die man geht und die man letztlich wieder verliert.
WamS: Die Studie behauptet, dass die Religion verschwindet und der Sex wilder wird. Sie haben einmal gesagt: Als ich Sex erlebte, habe ich die Religion verloren. Ist das mehr als ein Bonmot?
Millet: Das war ein früher, problemloser Übergang in meinem Leben. Ich habe das Ende meines Glaubens an einen Gott nie als Verlust empfunden. Deshalb ist die Erotik auch kein Gottesersatz. Ich bin einfach nur konvertiert.
WamS: Michel Foucault hat die Auflösung der Grenzen - und damit die Nicht-Existenz Gottes im Exzess, im Orgasmus erklären wollen ...
Millet: Da würde ich eher Lacante zustimmen, der sagt, dass der Orgasmus ein kleiner hysterischer Zwischenfall ist.
WamS: Die Studie sagt, das Sexleben der Franzosen wird freier, gleichzeitig weigert sich eine Supermarktkette bis heute, Ihr Buch zu verkaufen. Hat es die sexuelle Revolution nun gegeben oder nicht?
Millet: Doch, natürlich. Und alle Protagonisten der französischen Literatur haben hier ihre Wurzeln. Wir haben in den 80-er und 90er-Jahren einen Rückfall in die Prüderie erlebt: Unsere Ideale wurden totgeschwiegen, die Ideen zensiert. Nun sensibilisieren Menschen wie Patrice Chereau mit Filmen wie "Intimacy" ein großes Publikum neu und konfrontieren es mit der alten Vorstellung von sexueller Freiheit.
WamS: Aber hat sich diese Botschaft wirklich in der französischen Gesellschaft durchgesetzt?
Millet: Ich glaube, dass sich das sexuelle Unterbewusstsein der Masse noch nicht wirklich geändert hat. Aber ich glaube in guter Freudscher Tradition auch, dass die Sprache - und damit die Literatur - sich auf das Leben und auf die Erotik auswirkt. Wenn es eine Veränderung, eine erneute sexuelle Befreiung geben soll, muss sie als Kampf des Unterbewussten geführt werden. Und die Waffen in diesem Kampf sind die Worte.
WamS: Was kann nach den Orgasmen der französischen Literatur noch kommen?
Millet: Ich glaube prinzipiell, dass alle Grenzen überschritten werden können. Und wenn ein Tabu gefallen ist, wird es ein neues geben. Mit den Extremen - sexuell oder nicht - ist es wie beim Regenbogen: Man findet das Ende nie.
Das Gespräch führte Axel Brüggemann
Criterion
The Baroness Munchausen of sex
by Anthony
Daniels
From The New Criterion Vol. 21, No. 1, September 2002
On street corners a couple of hundred yards from where I write this, prostitutes stand in the hope, and no doubt the expectation, of passing trade. They look as if they had stepped straight from the work of Otto Dix or George Grosz: and they go straight from the age of fourteen, when they start their career, to the age of forty-nine, without appearing ever to have passed through the intervening years.
In like mysterious fashion, Catherine Millet, the author of this memoir of her sexual life that the Kirkus Review found both oddly charming and deeply pornographic, passed directly from first communion to orgiastic group sex without so much as batting an eyelid. As far as can be deduced from her book, she adopted what she generously calls the ‘philosophy’ of making herself available to any man, any place, any time, quite arbitrarily, without any reflection whatever. If ever she were to write a Bildungsroman, it would be less than a paragraph long.
The point of this book is her repeated, detailed, and mechanical description of her sexual encounters and activities. These were so compulsive and so many that one has to pinch oneself to remember that she has a sideline in art criticism as well. The mercifully brief reflections that interrupt her agonizingly long descriptions (narrative would imply a degree of organization that is absent from this book) are pseudo-intellectual banalities expressed with imprecision and disguised by a certain portentousness:
There must be a fairly intrinsic link between the idea of moving in space, of traveling, and the idea of fucking, otherwise the widespread expression “getting off” would not have been invented.
Compared with this, basketball commentary on television is profundity itself.
When it comes to the facts, her veracity must surely be in doubt. Could she really have had sex with thirty men in quick succession in an underground car park in Paris? (This gives new connotations to the words subconscious and subterranean.) At her first meeting with her dentist, he is interested in her mouth more as a receptacle for his genitalia than as an object of dental treatment—and he proceeds to have sexual encounters with all the other women in his waiting room. Waiters in a Moroccan restaurant make explicit sexual contact with her, despite the fact that she is in the company of another man. There are also internal contradictions: a few pages after she claims to have had sex with only one man younger than herself, in all her thousands (or is it millions?) of sexual encounters, she is talking of affairs she has had with younger men. I suspect she is the Baroness Munchausen of sex.
Millet’s book is so bad—it is to eroticism what a minutely detailed account of bulimic binging and self-induced vomiting would be to gastronomy—that it is best treated not as a literary, but as a psychological and sociological artifact. Why would anyone have written it? And why would anyone read it (except for review purposes)?
The author offers no clue as to her motive in writing the book. This is just as well, because she is not one for searching self-analysis. Her only explanation for her insatiable sexual appetite is her shyness and inability to make small talk. Finding herself with nothing much to say in social situations, she does not retreat into solitary philately, embroidery, or building model ships: she resorts to nonverbal communication of a certain kind. That is to say, she takes off her clothes and fellates the nearest man who comes to hand, as it were, even if he is an achondroplastic dwarf. If this is shyness, then goodness knows what disinhibition would be: but on her own account, what she really needs is assertiveness training. She has sex with so many, she says, because she lacks the self-confidence to make polite conversation. This is a manifestation of modern gnosticism, in which everything is “really” the opposite of what it seems.
Of course, if much of what is related in the book is not true, she is either a fantasist on an industrial scale, unable to distinguish reality from her imaginings, or a cynically calculating opportunist. If she is a fantasist, her imagination is a deeply impoverished one, an impoverishment that gives to the book its repetitiveness. In a sense, it is quite an achievement to have made so short a book about sex so utterly tedious and unreadable.
Underlying the fantasy, or the reality if that is what she describes, of her life is the wish—one that springs eternal in the mind of humans living under conditions of civilization—to have done with control and restraint, to reach a state in which each desire will be instantly satisfied without the inconvenience of having to wait for, much less forgo, its fulfilment. On this reading of the human condition, all unhappiness is caused by “artificial” restraints placed upon the expression and satisfaction of desire, and therefore a better society—one whose members will be permanently happy—requires the removal of as many controls on personal conduct, both internal and external, as possible. The good life consists of constantly packing pleasurable moments into its brief span, and anything which interferes with this is to be opposed. A perpetual orgy is thus the summum bonum. In having sex with thirty men in her underground car park, therefore, or in describing the event for the public as if it actually happened, Catherine Millet thinks she is helping to build a better world. How pleasant to do exactly as one pleases for the good of humanity!
Alas, ideological hedonism, adopted to defy or scandalize one’s parents or one’s society, is as joyless as the most die-hard puritanism, of which indeed it is but the mirror image. There are places in the world where sexual morality is easy-going because it has never occurred to anyone that it should be otherwise, and such places are often very charming. They certainly do not give the impression of deliberate and determined brutishness that Catherine Millet’s book gives. The combination of earnestness and frivolity (one that is characteristic of our age) is never attractive to behold: and it is no coincidence that the author comes across as humorless, self-absorbed, and very dull. She is a puritan who has undergone a gestalt switch.
Her book has sold 400,000 copies in France alone, which suggests that longing for, or fantasizing about, the abandonment of all restraint has been far from ended by the sexual revolution, even in a country famed, not altogether justly, for its sexual tolerance. The book’s main appeal is to prurience, a prurience that has been given the nihil obstat by literary intellectuals who affect to find virtues in a work that contains innumerable atrocious sentences such as the following, selected at random:
I cannot close this chapter on exchange (which, like a silk worm’s cocoon, covers and constitutes the sexual relationships) without bringing up my only failed attempt at prostitution.
Even allowing for the vagaries of translation, this sentence is an abomination: and if there were any justice in the world, the author would be prohibited from ever publishing another word.
Why have so many critics granted the book the respectful attention it so manifestly does not deserve? The answer, I suspect, is fear of appearing ridiculous, of being sneered at for lack of sophistication. (Indeed, one American reviewer suggested, with implicit superiority of understanding, that the American response to the book was likely to be less sophisticated than the French, because America lacked a literary tradition that included figures such as de Sade: an author whom only masochists could read for pleasure, and only psychopaths for instruction.) Certain categories of books exercise a kind of moral terror over the unfortunates deputed to review them, for example memoirs written by people who are dying of cancer. One has to find them moving and profound, otherwise one is unfeelingly aiming a low blow at a brave author already pretty much down on his luck. Besides, we could all suffer from cancer one day, so that a literary attack on a sufferer is profoundly undemocratic. Moreover, the magical thinking to which we are all sometimes prey suggests that the hubris of unsympathetic criticism will be swiftly followed by the nemesis of the development of cancer in oneself.
The fear that this book has exercised over many reviewers is that of appearing prudish or unfamiliar with human degradation and the seamy side of life, and thus of being naïve and unworthy of attention. To express distaste for the exhibitionism of the life it describes, or fantasises about, or cynically exploits for commercial purposes, is to hold fast to certain (rather minimal) beliefs about how life should be lived and humans should conduct themselves. This in turn requires a belief that truth is more important than one’s status in the eyes of the other members of one’s particular guild. And those who refuse ever to nail their colors to the mast are destined always to discover a few years later that, to their chagrin, the whole ship has sunk.
Catherine Millet’s book has been described, more than once, as subversive. Naturally, this has been meant as high praise. But what it subverts is all subtlety, humor, irony, decency, and finer feeling. There is actually much more fun to be had at a Church of England summer fête than at one of her orgies: indeed, such fêtes have called forth far better writing than hers. And she proves the truth of one of Voltaire’s great aperçus: the way to be a bore is to say everything.