12-07-02

CATHERINE MILLET  in English

The sexual life of Catherine M.

Pages sur Catherine Millet dans ce site:

Extraits du livre

Reviews of the book - Portugal, France, Germany

Critiques du Livre - France, Royaume Uni

Interview in the Playboy of Brasil (portuguese)

Reviews of the book - USA, U.K., Germany

The double life of Catherine M

By day she was a sought-after curator and well-respected member of the French intelligentsia; by night she was an insatiable hedonist whose passion was indiscriminate sex with anonymous men. And now she's written a shockingly candid and provocative memoir of her experiences. Jessica Berens meets Catherine Millet

Sunday May 19, 2002
The Observer
 

Her book, The Sexual Life of Catherine Millet, published in France last year, has sold 400,000 copies and is still inciting worldwide debate. 'This has been one of the happiest times of my life,' she says. 'Not just because the book is a success, but because a lot of people understand it.'

Employing provocative precision and embarrassing honesty, Catherine Millet has exposed herself in print with all the conscientious rigor of a Hustler model posing for a photographer. Her memoir details her sex life, from masturbation as a child to an adulthood where she was propelled by a predilection for group sex. She is a visual person and her facility is to convey images successfully. The prose - never silly, never flowery - is as relentless as that of Henry Miller.

'Today I can account for 49 men whose sexual organs have penetrated me,' she writes. 'But I cannot put a number on those that blur into anonymity.'

Catherine Millet felt most at home lying on a table at a club named Chez Aimé, being penetrated by lines of unknown men. Page 18: 'I was sometimes set upon so violently that I had to hold on to the ends of the table with both my hands and for a long time I bore the scar of a little gash above my coccyx, where my spine had rubbed against the rough wood.'

She liked sex and she particularly liked an orgy. Why? She liked the anonymity, the abandonment, the 'delicious giddiness'. As a young woman she was shy - 'awkward', she says, at making relationships. Strangely, she felt more embarrassed with her clothes on than off; not so strangely, she disliked her body. To achieve transcendence through climax was to leave her self behind.

'I was carried by the conviction that I rejoiced in extraordinary freedom. To fuck above and beyond any sense of disgust was not just a way of lowering oneself, it was to raise yourself above all prejudice. There are those who break taboos as powerful as incest. I settled for not having to choose my partners.'

Cemeteries. Saunas. Train platforms. Store-rooms. Art galleries. Fields. Vans. Oral sex. Anal sex. Abortions. Fat men. Thin men. Filthy, naked men that she never saw again. Ringo who was 'wiry', Claude with a 'beautiful dick', Eric who took her to clubs where 'I could make myself available to an incalculable number of hands and penises.'

There is no youth, or lingerie, or televisual pouting. Catherine Millet does not conform to the mould that contemporary culture has created to define (and incarcerate) a woman's sexuality. She is a middle-aged woman who holds a respected position in the circles of Parisian intelligentsia. Now she is saying things like: 'I could gather together a good many anecdotes concerning the use to which for many years I put my anus.' In British terms, it is as if Joan Bakewell had decided to reveal herself as an insatiable swinger.

The book took her a year-and-a-half to write and was published in France by Denis Roche, who happened to be a friend and live next door to her. His Editions du Seuil publishing house has an established catalogue of avant-garde work. 'He didn't think I would go through with it,' Millet says now. Asked whether she kept a diary, she says no, but for certain things, she has ' une mémoire diabolique!'

Seuil started with a small print run which quickly went into reprint as the book attracted, variously, shocked disapproval and loud applause. There were, as Millet puts it, ' beaucoup des attaques'. She was particularly stung by one 'ex-friend' who accused her of a cynical book motivated by money.

Detractors, ever welcome aids to promotion, included the renowned publisher Jean-Jacques Pauvert, who published the Story of O in 1954 and declared that Millet's book was a victim of the fact that eroticism had been killed by its own ubiquity. Perhaps the bottom has fallen out of the bottom market. The critic Michel Schneider commented that writing about sex was neither politically or socially revolutionary. He resented the idea that the author should labour under the delusion that anyone should care about the nature of her sex life.

Jean Baudrillard weighed in with a characteristically opaque point about nudity and truth. 'If one lifts one's skirt, it is to show one's self, not to show oneself naked like the truth,' he sniped in Libération .

Millet says that the book's detached tone arises from the fact that she did not want to write a pornographic book that established an empathy between author and reader. Yet she does not object to the word pornographic. 'There were people who reproached me for not writing a pornographic book which they could find sexually arousing, while others found certain passages very exciting.'

In other words, she could not win as the debate wavered between the stagnant 'what is pornography?' question (American Vogue said it was, Edmund White said it was not) and the issue of whether acts of sexual transgression still have the power to subvert. This last question holds more relevance in France, where the profane writings of libertinage (and underground anti-monarchy libelles ) were political and seen as having a part in the French Revolution. More recently, pornography and erotic fiction have increasingly come under the scrutiny of post-feminist writers and other academics. The late Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault were instrumental in the reassessment of de Sade and the establishment of Georges Bataille as a dissident hero.

'We had found a ready-made philosophy reading Bataille,' Millet notes in her book. She was also affected by Catherine Deneuve's appearance in Belle du Jour, and though she enjoyed daydreams about being a high-class prostitute, she knew that her 'excessive reserve' would prohibit the negotiations of 'mercenary relationships'.

Catherine Millet did not want to speak, she did not want to be seduced, she did not want to be paid, she did not want to become involved in any S&M power game, she did not even want to flirt; she simply wanted to enjoy a lot of penetrative sex and, on the way, 'satisfy my intellectual and professional curiosity'.

The Sexual Life of Catherine M will be published in England next month by Serpent's Tail, an independent and independent-minded publishing house under the aegis of the quietly anarchic Peter Ayrton. He was tipped off about it by a friend in France and 'made a modest offer'. To his enormous surprise, it was accepted.

'Some London editors have made it quite clear that they did not rate the book,' he says. 'Some have told me it is disgusting. But it has been published throughout Europe - the reaction here is merely a reflection of the conservatism of London publishers.'

Ayrton argues that this is an important book - unique as a sexual memoir written by a woman and important against a backdrop that is fast scorning the effects of the sexually liberated 60s. This repudiation is highlighted in the novels of Michel Houellebecq and was best summed up by Joni Mitchell, who recently said, 'There is no such thing as free love.'

'Catherine Millet is not well known in British intellectual life,' says Ayrton. 'So the book will not have the same impact it had in France. It will probably confirm the British stereotypes of the French as a nation of rabbits. But it will be read by voyeurs curious to know what all the fuss is about, it will be read by the art world who know Millet in her role as a leading curator, and it will be given a sympathetic reading by a Sex and the City generation of women whose sexual encounters are numerous and guilt-free.'

Millet wears her new-found fame with a little discomfort. 'I am always embarrassed when people approach me in the street,' she says. She is set to appear at the Hay-on-Wye festival, where the straight brigade will doubtless be disappointed to learn that she no longer practises the sex that she writes about. She is married to Jacques Henric, an avant-garde poet and novelist, and has been monogamous for eight years. 'I would have liked to have had children,' she says. 'But when the moment came nothing happened, and that didn't matter much.'

Henric has written his own memoir of their life together, Légendes de Catherine M, complete with Readers' Wives-style photographs. Henric, a voyeur, enjoys an open-minded liberality that includes sex in parks and in cupboards. His opus did not sell as many copies - 40,000 or so. Did he mind? 'Oh no,' she says. 'He was pleased. He is a novelist, he is used to selling 4,000.'

The emergence of a voracious woman unsentimentally pursuing her own sensual pleasure without recourse to protocol or pleasantry is particularly potent when accompanied by a high IQ and a talent for articulate communication. Page 165: 'I needed affection, and I found it, but without feeling any need to go and build love stories out of sexual relationships.'

Millet could easily be viewed as a post-fem player, much needed on a field cluttered with Bridget Jones clones, narcissistic una-woman celebrities and idiotic chick-lit types who have created a repressive atmosphere where women never see romance for the lust that it is, where questions are no longer asked and progressive political thought is nonexistent.

For a man, one might imagine, Millet would represent a schizoid Eve - welcome since she is always available, terrifying because her appetite can never be satisfied by his performance.

She does not view her sexuality as 'unusual'. 'Many women have fantasies about this kind of sex,' she points out. 'I happened to play them out.'

The essentially promiscuous nature of the female species has been reflected in recent research into semen conducted by the English scientists R Robin Baker and Mark A Bellis, who wondered why a human penis must ejaculate 350m sperm when a man has no (conscious) desire to fertilise 350m women. The theory of sperm competition says that sperm must be prepared to do battle with the sperm of another man inside a woman because of the possibility that she has 'double mated'. Evolution seems to tell a truth denied by civilisation.

Millet had not launched herself from a feminist or political springboard, and her book may well fit into Barthes's 'author is dead' notion where the reader is the creator of meanings. She was not a bra-burner, partly because she did not wear a bra, or any underwear, for that matter. Her feelings about equality were assimilated into Art Press, which seriously addressed female artists before it was fashionable to do so.

She wrote the book, she says, in order to reintroduce the idea of complexity into an area where theories about the nature of sexual liberty, largely manufactured by men, had become increasingly simplistic. Her achievement, she thinks, is to participate in a movement where sexuality is spoken about honestly. The memoir has helped to trigger openness.

'Sexual mores have evolved recently, nevertheless some sexual practices are only tolerated if they are kept hidden. During publication, people came to me wishing to describe their own experiences, which had been secret. Now they feel they can talk about them without being ashamed. I look forward to a democratisation of sexuality where anyone can reveal their true nature without suffering socially.'

So what made Mademoiselle Millet? She was born in Bois Colombe, a petit-bourgeois suburb of Paris. There was no money. Her father, Louis, was a driving instructor; her mother, Simone, suffered from a mental illness which erupted into wild 'episodes' of insanity and ended in suicide. Her mother's condition meant that, in general, Millet became the adult and the carer.

The apartment was cramped.Her parents did not like each other much and were seeing lovers. Millet shared a bed with her mother until she left home as a teenager. At the age of 23, after the death of her brother, she was subsumed by a feeling of ' mal de peau' ('feeling bad within her skin') and went into psychoanalysis.

There is a natural inclination to view misery as the psychic fuel of her promiscuity and thus condemn her enjoyment as an illness - even to see her as a sex addict in need of a programme, but this would be to agree with all those arrogant old medics who spent years causing untold damage to the normal sensate women they incorrectly treated as 'hysterics'. Millet sees herself as a normal person afflicted with an average ration of angst.

'It is evident that sexuality is formed as a child,' she says, 'but what can happen to one person in childhood can have a different effect on another. It is dangerous to think that the taking of pleasure can be traced to neurosis, for this leads to the religious attitudes that demanded the taking of pleasure demanded atonement.'

Despite the clear honesty with which she presents her sexuality, the Millet of the memoir remains an enigma because she is created by a collection of conflicting paradoxes that serve to brook no definition. There is the dislike of her body, but the comfort with nudity; there is the excessive reserve and the wild exhibitionism; there is the woman who enjoyed hard-core casual encounters from the age of 18, but it was not until the age of 35 that she realised, 'My own pleasure could be the aim of a sexual encounter.' And there is the Catholic girl with the clap.

Is her book an honest representation of herself, I wonder. 'Within the limits I prescribed myself,' she says, 'I believe this is a true account of my personality. But as one learns in psychoanalysis, one is not necessarily accurate about who one is.'

Memoirs of a Bare Naked Lady

French feminist gives new meaning to the tell-all book

By Susannah Meadows

May 27 issue — When you meet French author Catherine Millet, you would never guess that she’s had sex with a hundred men—in one night. Or starred in pornographic photos. Or attempted prostitution. Or picked up strangers in a Paris park. Or engaged in a raft of other activities that cannot be mentioned here. But then, would you guess this about any editor of a highbrow art journal?

MILLET’S MEMOIRS “THE Sexual Life of Catherine M.” is an extraordinary story no matter whose it is. An eloquent, graphic—and sometimes even poignant—account of a life lived like a porno flick, the book arrives next month in the United States after a sensational publication in France. More than 300,000 copies have been sold there, but not because of the reviews. Le Figaro dismissed her as not just a nympho, but a boring nympho. The scandale was actually quite tame considering Millet, the longtime editor of Art Press magazine, is a prominent member of the Paris intelligentsia. Millet, who was in Montreal to speak at a literary festival, says she’s offended by a psychological diagnosis from someone who doesn’t know her, but adds, “I couldn’t care less if people think I’m a nymphomaniac or not. I don’t think I am. For me sexuality is a way of life.”

No argument there. Just weeks after Millet, who was raised as a Roman Catholic, lost her virginity at 18, she participated in her first orgy. “Somebody suggested that we should all take our clothes off and jump into the big pond. I heard André’s voice saying his girlfriend wouldn’t be long joining in, and his words sounded a little muffled because I already had my T-shirt over my head,” writes Millet. Here’s the next sentence: “I forgot when and why I stopped wearing underwear.” Ever the critic (she’s published eight books on art), Millet is less interested in a narrative arc than she is in themes, which is how she divides her book into chapters: Numbers (of partners), Space (for action), Confined Space (more action) and Details, including her favorite body parts (as they relate to action). But doesn’t sex, sex, sex get boring, you may be wondering? Not with Millet’s amusing, frank narration. She compares her pre-orgy anxiety about the energy and concentration that will be required of her to the jitters she gets before giving a lecture. Millet did not intend for the book to be erotic: descriptions are more clinical than steamy. “But of course,” she says, “I cannot stop a reader from seeing certain pages as pornographic or erotic.”
        Millet has been married for 10 years to the same man who stars in many racy scenes in the memoirs. But they haven’t quite settled down: he just published his own book—a collection of naked pictures of her. Apparently, she’d rather be nude than dress in slinky clothes—tonight she’s wearing a prim blouse, and her vibe in person is more maternal than sex kitten. At dinner following her literary-panel discussion, Millet says the attention has been a little too much: she prefers being the observer rather than the observed. But isn’t that the idea of an orgy, you ask as you pass the calamari. “I may have been the center,” she says. “But I wasn’t seen.” You wonder, then, why she’d write the book. She says she hoped it would encourage people to be less repressed: “I have a fantasy that sexual relations could be possible with the entire scope of the human family, that it can be just as easy and generous as offering one’s seat to an elderly woman on the subway.” Millet herself sometimes blushes when talking about sex, so you wonder if overcoming her own shyness isn’t part of the fantasy.

  Speaking of awkward, aren’t orgies sometimes too logistically challenging and a little silly? “Difficulties most often concern finding a spot that is sufficiently safe and large,” she says soberly. “Awkward? No more than [it is] occasionally between only two partners!” For Millet, the more emotional the territory is, the more indiscreet. She keeps the truly revealing details—her feelings—pretty much out of the book. It makes for a clean and blessedly unsentimental read, but it also leaves you wanting more explanation. Here’s a question: what goes through your mind during an orgy? “Nothing is purely sexual,” she writes in an e-mail later. “The satisfaction I obtained from an orgy? The feeling of setting out on an adventure. Of losing myself in the contact of others and at the same time finding myself in a position that greatly satisfied my narcissism ... The kindness. The pleasure of pleasing. Etc. ... Etc. ... Etc. ...”
        Coming from this mild, sophisticated woman it all sounds so normal—though Millet no longer participates in orgies. (Achieving professional recognition as an art critic lessened the need to demonstrate her sexual excellence, she says.) But the book is still a fascinating romp. Millet wouldn’t have it any other way.
       

Tales of the City: introducing la shagmonster Française

John Walsh

10 April 2002

You may have heard of Catherine Millet, the lady who is scandalising all of France with her super-explicit memoir, The Sexual Life of Catherine M. (published in June by Serpent's Tail). In its 186 pages, she chronicles, with admirable matter-of-factness, her thousands of sexual encounters in beds, trucks, washrooms, the Bois de Boulogne, the Chez Aimé swingers' club, where she enjoyed 20 partners in an evening, a car bonnet somewhere up the Avenue Foch (30 lovers), the terrace of a sports stadium at Vélizy, a workman's shed on a building site (100 labourers, paying five francs each – oh no, sorry, that was just a fantasy).

Due to the positions she likes to adopt, Ms Millet can only identify 49 of her past lovers with any confidence (the ones whose faces she could see); the rest pass her by in a blur of suction and frottage and clasping and invasion and sundering. Remarkably, she says she has rarely indulged in any seductive behaviour, never gone out on the pull, and only once tried prostitution (but she couldn't cope with the conversational side of it).

It's a remarkably passive book to come from such a shagmonster as Ms Millet, a little unsmiling and relentless about the multiple encounters she describes, as if her enjoyment of being pleasured by every itinerant male in France was something she barely noted, a detail among other details. But you look at the pictures of Ms Millet, jeune and slightly more vieille (she's 54 this year), and wonder: how did she get like this, where she cannot pop out to the local supermarché for some milk and bananas without ending up, replete, collapsed behind a skip, with gallons of sperm in her hair? The answer comes at the start of the book: as a child she would wonder about the multiple identities of God and his son – the Christmas baby, the dead victim on the Cross, the thundering voice that makes men obey – and she wanted, so to speak, all of them.

So French. Ms Millet will be in London in June. I'd like to meet her, but how odd it would be to meet someone whose perineum you know more about than the back of your hand.

The Sexual Life of Cathérine M, Cathérine Millet, translated by Adriana Hunter

This wild erotic memoir puts Deborah Levy in mind of the spirit more than the flesh

25 May 2002

Rammed up against a wall by the gates of Paris, Cathérine Millet, curator and art critic, takes off her raincoat and has sex with a number of men. All the while, as agreed between the couple, her long-time lover watches her "nailed by their pricks, like a butterfly".

The most interesting part of Millet's memoir of her sexual encounters with strangers and groups of strangers is that she does not present herself as a seductress. Almost from the moment she loses both her virginity and her Catholic faith at 18, she is completely sexually available to men, preferably lots of them at the same time. More confident naked than clothed, her body seems to become a sort of machine as she attempts to fill the "vacancy" left by the death of God. It is as if the enigmatic Cathérine has stepped out of the novels of Georges Bataille or the films of Luis Buñuel, and into the car parks, offices, museums and singles bars of contemporary Paris, to prove once again that Catholicism and filthy sex go together like salt beef and rye.

The Sexual Life of Cathérine M, with its ironic homage to The Story of O, is really existential pornography – something the French seem to do so much better than the rest of us who are checking in to the Holiday Inn this weekend. Millet's achievement is that she curates or, more accurately, catalogues her sexual adventures with no sense of shame or remorse. She writes about sex as if it were an autopsy, finding time between positions and partners to throw in the odd philosophical insight on landscape, atmosphere, time, space, dirt and numbers.

In cool, spare and formal prose, she states that her place in the world is "not so much amongst the women, facing the men, but alongside the men". I think that what she means here is that her partial sexual taste is for nameless, loveless, faceless sex – although in interviews she has said that she thinks women attach less importance to the sexual act than men do.

Unlike the erotic short stories of Anaïs Nin, which nearly always involve a dance between men and women, the latter revealing, concealing, playfully luring the object of desire into their perfumed webs, there is very little narrative foreplay in Millet's descriptions of her encounters. More interested in sensation than emotion, she lets the nerve endings on the surface of her skin do the talking. When she's aroused, her lips go cold – an observation that excited me more than the eye-watering positions she describes so graphically, and often boringly. In fact, if there is anything that is taboo in Millet's uninhibited memoir, it is emotion. The only thing that is private about her is her inner life.

Yet if her compelling, cool and stylish memoir is about the life of a female body, it is also about a disembodied female body, a number of orifices, genitalia, limbs. In a sense she has less in common with the poetic sadism of de Sade than the often comic masochism of fakirs: those who do weird stuff to get to extreme spiritual states, walking barefoot on hot coals, lying on shards of glass, being buried alive, holding their arms above their head for years at a stretch.

This is supposed to be to do with bodily privation rather than pleasure, but there is also privation at the heart of this sexual memoir. Millet, in my view, does not come across as a transgressive woman who reverses "the classical power game in which men take the lead and women submit", as some critics have asserted.

She comes across as unloved, numb, passive, hungry for male approval, exhausted rather than energised by fantasy. If there is anything transgressive about Millet's memoir it is her admirable lack of disgust at the human body and her refusal to psychoanalyse her desires when she knows full well we want her to.

I respect her refusal to do so because no one ever asks men – such as Henry Miller, never mind Peter Stringfellow – to give us a Freudian take on their sexual appetites. Yet this refusal leaves a hole, and this of course might be the point, at the centre of her story.

What is it we want to know when we read her book? Insatiably to pursue sex for its own sake, and declare it has no other meaning, is a stance I just don't find at all convincing. It would be like saying someone pursues anger for its own sake and it has no other meaning. I'm thinking of Millet, swinging in 1968, refusing to partake in the bourgeois institutions of marriage, monogamy and children, hanging out with the philandering guys of that generation, apparently feeling empowered, expressed and free. In my experience, all those guys eventually married, had babies and suddenly discovered they needed some rather stern sexual boundaries with their partner.

So where does that leave those brave gorgeous girls who wanted to line up alongside the boys? In Millet's case, with a husband who organises and enjoys watching her sexual adventures with other men. Is this a match made in heaven or in hell?

Millet does briefly tell us that, unlike so many girls, she had no idealised notion of love, no expectations of what it might mean. Now that is really interesting, and its examination would have given this strangely detached memoir a bit more substance. But I will say one thing: Cathérine Millet has more fun at the dentist than I've ever had. If you want to know more about how to liven up root canal treatment, buy this book immediately.

Deborah Levy's 'Plays: 1' are published by Methuen.

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.

- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Stephanie Zacharek

May 22, 2002  |                                See this review here

From Volume 24 Number 14 | cover date 25 July 2002

Hang on to the doily

Jenny Diski

The Sexual Life of Catherine M. by Catherine Millet. trans. Adriana Hunter | Serpent's Tail, 192pp., £12, 6 June 2002

  Read this review here            

DOING IT IN THE ROAD

by JUDITH THURMAN

A Frenchwoman reveals a life of sexual excess.

                                                                                          Read this review here

BOOKS OF THE TIMES | 'THE SEXUAL LIFE OF CATHERINE M.'

Sexuality on Display, Repeatedly

By JANET MASLIN

May 23, 2002  

THE SEXUAL LIFE OF CATHERINE M.
By Catherine Millet
209 pages. Grove Press. $23.

Catherine Millet has made herself a conversation piece in France by publishing a volume of anecdotes, memories and analyses based on her widespread experiences. It's safe to say that her life story would not have excited such interest had she spent more time with her clothes on.

But the 53-year-old author, an art critic with a "Belle de Jour"-style appetite for debasement, has written this book almost exclusively about sex. Her self-promoting, heartily pornographic memoir is as blunt as possible in recounting her tireless adventures.

As a woman who can think back fondly to spending a long time on the hood of a car, Ms. Millet would seem to have bravado on her side. Yet "The Sexual Life of Catherine M." is as ponderous as it is heavy-breathing, which is saying a lot. As the author pursues "fornicatory communion" as frequently and publicly as possible, and as she approaches her mission "with the application of a musician composing a fugue," she totes her critical acumen to places where it is not entirely useful. Her book lurches to and fro between the frankly obscene and the absurdly high-minded.

So for every time when the author is naked, there seems to be a time when (as she puts it) the atmosphere that embraces the vastness of the world adheres to her skin like myriad tiny suction cups. There is lofty reference to "ludic spirit" but also frank reminiscence of childhood, when Ms. Millet used to think up hot tricks for her Ken and Barbie dolls.

In this book's high-low scheme of things, the art critic in Ms. Millet delivers observations like, "While the flickering pixels blur boundaries so that the space they delineate becomes almost an extension of the space you are in, the window at a peep show is a hiatus that substantiates the separation between two symmetrical parts, one that can be crossed but remains tangible." In terms of interest, these hold no candle to her frequent and repetitive accounts of how, in effect, she took on the whole football team.

Now imagine that the football team is French. The author's favorite stories are full of nonchalant multiple partners.

And she often appreciates the savoir-faire with which one man passes her on to another. She describes one daydream as distinctly Parisian: she imagines raising eyebrows (and her skirt) while on a Metro car, then having the male passengers divide into factions and argue about her behavior. She describes a parade of men who arrive in droves and do not engage her on the conversational level but provide an eroticism conducive to elaborate, leisurely reveries. The tone is Proust-wannabe, the behavior suggestive of a sexual attention deficit disorder.

In the midst of artful, female-centric erotica of the moment, like the films "Unfaithful" and "Y Tu Mama Tambien," Ms. Millet's stories seem all the more artlessly crude. Four-letter words are great favorites, even when they make her sound like a boastful teenage boy trying to impress a Letters to the Editor column. Suggestiveness runs to thoughts like "and the hotel manager will bring his dog," and the otherwise try-anything author points out that she has avoided pets. Humor is unprintable, not to mention unfunny. A man writing a comparable book would not be celebrated as one of what Ms. Millet calls "the valiant warriors of sexual liberation."

She describes herself as a formalist and arranges her thoughts in seemingly abstract categories ("Numbers," "Space," "Confined Space" and "Details"). But this is a book whose author describes trading sex for extensive free dental care, so it also has a distinctly mundane side. Too often, even when the storytelling is nothing but raw, the book's remarkably humdrum side still remains apparent. Clumsy transitions in the writing of "The Sexual Life of Catherine M." underscore its slackness. Nobody ever held a reader's attention by writing, "Putting all these episodes together reminds me of another."

For all its hot, banner-waving libertinism, Ms. Millet's book intermittently succeeds in drawing interest to the cerebral. As befits her background in art criticism, she goes to some lengths to examine the relationship of visual imagery to physical action. Stepping back from the business at hand, she is capable of regarding the broad strokes of her behavior with detachment, even if its underpinnings might as well not exist. Readers of this confessional will learn more than they wanted to know about Ms. Millet's body and nothing comparably revealing about the exhibitionist's mind. But the book is too verbose to suggest that she wasn't trying.

"I abandoned myself to the hydra," she proclaims melodramatically at the beginning of this account. And the X-rated nature of that hydra is guaranteed to prompt some major browsing.

But "The Sexual Life of Catherine M." is finally as melancholy as it is graphic, if only for the unappeasable desperation on display. Though she writes with histrionic pride about her imagination and courage amid countless lovers, her book tells a sadder story.

June 16, 2002 

 THE CLOSE READER

A Woman Walks Into a Bar . . .

By DAPHNE MERKIN

When is pornography not pornography? What are the standards by which a smutty novel or memoir acquires sufficient gravitas to propel it into the category of literary erotica, or even of the sexy masterpiece? Does the judgment hinge on artistic intention or is it the level of execution? Is there some sort of unspoken system of contextual accounting, some accepted ratio of heady rumination to carnal activity, that redeems, say, a Leopold Bloom or a Humbert Humbert?

We live in a radically altered cultural landscape, one in which the loud gaveling of censorship has been reduced to near silence. The work of Joyce and Nabokov is now recognized as owing more to the imperative of talent than titillation. At the same time, the once pseudonymous author of ''Story of O,'' which used to be the ne plus ultra of consecrated soft porn, has been routed out of her hiding place and acclaimed. Ours is a period of maximum exposure and minimal shame, in which the old rules of decorum have long since bitten the dust.

It would be reassuring to think that one of the benefits of living in such an age is that literary judgments about what constitutes the sort of reading material best kept under brown paper cover, lest you provoke lewd looks on the subway, as opposed to the sort of classy erotica that immediately signals that you are a person on whom nothing sexually sophisticated is wasted, had become a matter less of subjective taste than of clear-cut distinctions. But the truth is that these assessments remain as murky as ever, eluding a consensus, if only because our fantasy lives remain as idiosyncratic as ever. Anais Nin, for instance, is my idea of a navel-gazing, hyper-sexed bore, but there are many people for whom she is a velvety turn-on. And while a little Henry Miller goes a long way as far as I'm concerned, for many readers he remains the gold standard of plain-spoken sexual candor.

Which brings me to ''The Sexual Life of Catherine M.,'' the much-touted and unremittingly salacious memoir by Catherine Millet, a bona fide Parisienne intellectual who edits the magazine Art Press. The book was a publishing sensation in France (it sold 300,000 copies) and of late has been making a good deal of noise in England as well. Although there have been the requisite comparisons to Henry Miller and Sade, with a few eggheads like Georges Bataille and Michel Foucault thrown in, Millet's torrid tale, starring an unfettered and voracious libido as the main character, has been applauded as an unzipped performance without equal. While there have been a few dissenters (including a daily critic for this paper), most readers have been transfixed by the narrator's avid and explicitly described pursuit of ''vigorous and precise'' intercourse, her pleasure at being penetrated by anyone, anyhow, anywhere -- be it one man, or two men at a time, or whole armies of men who take turns having their way with her. ''There were some particularly frenetic summers,'' Millet notes in her cool, affectless style, ''defined by the incessant traffic between sexual partners, sporadically united in little orgies under the sun behind the low wall of a garden that overlooked the sea, or at night in the comings and goings between the many bedrooms of a villa.''

Her memoir has been described by one bowled-over male critic as ''refreshingly unapologetic in its enthusiasm for the sexual wilderness.'' And it's not just a guy thing, in case you were wondering. A female reviewer for Salon, who apparently shares my dislike of Nin's ''erotic burblings,'' is so enamored of Millet's brazen confessions that she declares, ''Millet's book reads as if it couldn't have been written by a woman -- at least, no woman we've yet met.'' I myself can think of no better way of describing the book than to say that if it were a radio station, its motto would be ''All sex, all the time.''

What has to be factored in right from the start, of course, is that the French have always had sex on the brain. Theirs is a long tradition, steeped in Cartesian logic, of trying to convert primal, pheromone-charged experience into numbingly abstract discourse. Roland Barthes, who had a naturally flirtatious mind, was particularly adept at giving us the frisson of flesh-on-flesh -- the rustling of sheets and sharp intakes of breath -- through ''the keyhole of language,'' as he called it in ''A Lover's Discourse: Fragments.'' For years now the French have been exporting their cinematic and literary meditations on the erotic -- ranging from Annie Ernaux's ''Simple Passion,'' a pared-away memoir of erotic obsession (which was also a best seller in France), to Catherine Breillat's graphic film ''Romance,'' which, depending on your perspective, is either an erotic art film or a gussied-up porn flick.

What Millet's memoir has in common with those books and movies is a fervently antisentimental bias, a conviction that emotions can be kept in line as long as they can be made to fit into the right phenomenological category. Millet spends a lot of time theorizing, for example, about the finely honed differences between taking on a gang of men outdoors as opposed to indoors, between performing fellatio in a bucolic setting and in an urban location. The effect is so bizarre as to produce a sense of cognitive dissonance -- as though Simone de Beauvoir had wandered onto the set of the Robin Byrd show.

Perhaps the most curious aspect of this book is how boring it is. For one thing, the author is without a scintilla of humor, unless you find her giggle at being urinated on by a lover sublimely comic. And it goes without saying that anything as puny as the idea of love, much less the pressure to connect with another human being, is nowhere in evidence; Millet is so turned in on her own ''vast plain of . . . desire'' as to suggest a kind of emotional autism. She is imbued with a kind of narcissistic braggadocio that began reminding me of the tiresome Brenda on ''Six Feet Under,'' forever on the prowl for another round of brutally casual sex. I found myself longing for a trace of 19th-century inhibition, for the sort of constricted passion that produces images like the one in ''Madame Bovary'' when Rodolphe is walking in the woods behind a fully clothed Emma Bovary and ''glimpsed -- just between that black hem and the black boot -- the delicacy of her white stocking, like a snippet of her nakedness.''

I suppose there is a sense in which ''The Sexual Life of Catherine M.'' might be perceived as an erotic breakthrough, a daring leap into a place where no woman -- or man, for that matter -- has gone before. But that immediately raises the question: Is this really a place worth getting to?

Daphne Merkin, the author of ''Dreaming of Hitler,'' is working on a book about depression. Judith Shulevitz is on leave.

Catherine Millet: Sex Obsession by the Numbers

By LESLIE CAMHI

June 22, 2002

Contrary to all appearances, Catherine Millet considers herself no libertine. Being French and an intellectual, however, she has a particularly precise definition of that term. "I don't think I am a libertine in the literary, 18th-century sense of the word," said the 54-year-old author of "The Sexual Life of Catherine M.," a surprisingly dry memoir, given its clinically detailed descriptions of group sex and seemingly innumerable affairs energetically pursued over the course of two decades by Ms. Millet, the editor in chief of the highly respected monthly French art magazine Art Press.

"I'm not like the characters in Laclos's `Dangerous Liaisons,' who risk hurting people in order to give free reign to their instincts," she continued. "I'm not much of a sadist, finally. I've never made the realization of my sexual desires my primary motivation to which all others must be subsumed."

As the author, in novelist Edmund White's estimation, of "the most explicit book about sex ever written by a woman," Ms. Millet comes across as remarkably reserved as she sits over lunch in a Midtown restaurant. Were it not for her keen, fox-like features, this modestly dressed, petite woman in a tweed suit and low heels might be considered borderline frumpy.

In fact, she writes, it was to overcome an overwhelming shyness and malaise in social situations that she learned to take off her clothes and single-mindedly search out, if not her own pleasure, then that of countless men — in the chic salons of haute bourgeois Parisian apartments and the dark, leafy enclaves of the Bois de Boulogne, in the cabs of tractor-trailers and the back corners of museum storerooms, on the hoods of cars and beneath the bleachers of soccer stadiums (where throngs of strangers enjoyed her), and even, most amusingly, bent over a rocky prominence while contemplating the picturesque beauty of the village of Latour-de-France, during one of many outdoor excursions with her husband, the writer and photographer Jacques Henric.

This strange book, in which the most exotic sexual experiences are tinged with a reassuring mundanity, has sold an astonishing 350,000 copies in France and been translated into 26 languages. Critical response, at home and abroad, has been mixed. In Le Monde, the influential critic Philippe Sollers praised the author's almost religious devotion to her cause and rapturously proclaimed that "the famous `dark continent' of feminine sexuality has been illuminated." Some reviewers in the United States, where the book has just been published by Grove Press, have been less kind. In a critique in The New York Times, Janet Maslin accused her of "hot, banner-waving libertinism" alternating with dull self-promotion, and in The New Yorker recently, Judith Thurman declared Ms. Millet's favorite orgy to be "a brag-fest."

Ms. Millet maintains that she wrote her book in a spirit of demystification. "The first motivation was personal," she said over lunch of steamed halibut. "There came a moment, toward the end of the 1980's, when I began to abandon a certain number of sexual practices and at the same time to question them. I also became annoyed at the very positive discourse I was hearing around me about sexual liberation. I wanted to add nuance to the debate, to present the testimony of someone who had lived their sexuality in a very open manner, yet had experienced good and bad things in their life, like everyone."

As a Catholic schoolgirl growing up in Bois-Colombes, a petit-bourgeois suburb of Paris, Ms. Millet writes that she was obsessed by numbers. How many husbands could a woman reasonably expect to have and how many children? Jumping forward to the weeks after the loss of her virginity at 18, she recounts that she was drawn into group sex with the same composure that led a friend years later to note in his diary, "Catherine, who deserves the highest praise for her calmness and malleability in every situation."

Are the roots of her former promiscuity to be found in what she describes as the pressure-cooker ambience of an unhappy childhood? "I don't think so," she said with the absence of pathos that characterizes her entire enterprise. "Stop anyone on the street and you'll hear a similar story. The people who don't have hysterical mothers, unfaithful fathers, abusive grandmothers and brothers who die in car accidents are the exceptions." Actually any degree of psychological insight would appear difficult to maintain in the face of repeated group sex with anonymous hordes, physical trials that she seems to have traversed (and scrupulously recounted) in trancelike states similar to those in which 19th-century hysterics or medieval saints underwent their self-abnegations.

The book largely avoids giving a chronological account of her encounters, she says, because that would have necessitated revealing the evolution of her sentimental life, including her relationship with Mr. Henric, her companion of 22 years, and the only partner whom she fully identifies in the memoir. (His book of nude photographs of Ms. Millet interspersed with critical reflections appeared in France at the same time as the novel, prompting some accusations of conjugal exhibitionism.)

Of course, "The Sexual Life of Catherine M." joins a vast French tradition of pornographic literature, to which it has been compared, at times unfavorably, as lacking De Sade's philosophical density, the elegant remove of "Story of O" or the social dimension of Michel Houellebecq's novels. (Curiously, the model Ms. Millet refers to in her preface to the new French edition is the erotic English diary "My Secret Life" by an anonymous Victorian gentleman.) At the same time, the book taps into a more recent trend. Ms. Millet is one of a number of Frenchwomen currently pushing the boundaries of sexual representation. Their works run the gamut of taste: from the film director Catherine Breillat's light and farcical "Sex Is Comedy" to Virginie Despentes and Coralie Trinh Thi's crudely manipulative film, "Baise-Moi," to the novelist Annie Ernaux's beautifully written exploration of the nature of spent desire in "Passion Simple."

Ms. Millet's memoir bears the imprint of her training as an art critic. (She has written eight books on art.) Perhaps the book's most striking feature is its vivid descriptions of corporeal realities and sensations. Ms. Millet's visual memory is intense, and she maintained the habit of keeping her eyes open even in the strangest positions. "The book's literary merit is linked to these powers of observation and description," Mr. Sollers said by telephone from Paris. "There's a very acute awareness behind it, which is the opposite of that which goes into pornographic fabrication. It has that scientific quality one finds sometimes in the novels of Flaubert, for example. But how Madame Bovary has changed!"

In her preface, Ms. Millet writes that women were her imagined readers. And in France at least she seems to have hit her mark. "The booksellers and representatives of publishing houses tell us its mostly women buying the book, the young and the less young, grandmothers, bourgeoisie and others," said Denis Roche, the editor at Éditions du Seuil, who published the memoir with an initial run of 6,000 copies.

As Ms. Millet explained, "There are fantasies or physical sensations in it that all women may recognize."

Yet her own conclusions about sex are much more mundane. "For a long time, people said that procreation was the point of sex," she said. "Today people tend to think that the point of sex is pleasure, orgasm. But sincerely, I don't think there's any point to sex at all. People think there's some secret they'll discover in that black box of sex, which will help them to live better or make them happy. And in fact there's nothing, nothing, nothing there at all."

‘TIS A PITY SHE’S A BORE

Catherine Millet is an intelligent libertine who had sex with thousands of men. So why is her memoir so dull?

 Stacey Richter

I once heard a story about a woman who visited a sex club in California. She did it out of curiosity, to witness something decadent and intriguing, to have a bad-girl moment. But when she stepped, fully clothed, into the club's "heterosexual area," she realized that she was the only woman in the room. Almost immediately, she was surrounded by a group of pimply, masturbating men lumbering toward her, penises in hand, panting, cloudy-eyed, like a mob of semen-spurting zombies. She fled in horror.
     But what if she hadn't? What if she had said to herself, "Oui, this is for me, you marvelous herd of penises. This is a life without barriers! Give to me now incessant and slightly painful hours of use!" And then, what if she had closed her eyes, spread herself out on a table, and let all those creepy guys fuck her and fuck her? Then we would probably be somewhere in the interior world of Catherine Millet, author of The Sexual Life of Catherine M., a brittle, distant memoir of a voracious and oddly passive erotic life filled with orgies, swinging and various other forms of sex al fresco. [A note of context here: Millet is the editor of France's noted Art Press magazine; an American equivalent to her confessional would be Charles McGrath, editor of The New York Times Book Review, admitting that he's secretly into sploshing.]
     Millet has screwed thousands of men, but she can only remember the names of about forty-nine. She achieved this by attaching herself to men who would escort her to sex clubs and to various parks in Paris where anonymous gang bangs were organized. She wasn't much interested in the faces of her partners (in describing one series of encounters, she blithely refers to "the relay of faceless bodies behind car doors"), and all preliminaries annoyed her, especially conversation. To hear her tell it, she liked nothing more than to strip off her clothes and get right down to penetration. On one occasion, Millet jumped out of her car and did it against a cinderblock wall while four guys held her up by her armpits and knees. Later, men lined up outside a van and did it with her one at a time. She did it for hours on "rough-hewn tables" at sex clubs: "Always the same configuration," she writes. "Hands running over my body, me grabbing at cocks, turning my head from left to right to suck, while other cocks rammed into me, up toward my belly. Twenty could take turns in an evening."
     When she wasn't on her back, Millet worked as an art critic, and in this memoir she turns her critical eye to her own life of "absolute sexual freedom," dissecting it, unpeeling its layers, comparing it to various works-on-paper. She's fond of the color field paintings of Barnett Newman and Yves Klein, who simultaneously "open space up" and then "seal it again" — which apparently is a lot like having sex outdoors, if you think about it really, really hard. Millet likes to think about such things really hard, but she tends to pick up ideas and drop them as quickly as sexual partners. Consequently, despite her high tone, she ends up arranging her history according to the standard categories of truth-or-dare — virginity lost, numbers of men, places, guys from foreign lands, encounters with women, and so on.
     At least Millet seems sincerely intent not to leave anything out. For example, she doesn't hesitate to tell us how, during one lesbian encounter, "I stretched my tongue so far I almost tore its root, the better to dive into the extraordinary softness of her opening." And what could be more fascinating, at least in theory? An articulate libertine bedding thousands of men, including unwashed fat ones, sometimes under trees, or on the floor, or in an empty soccer stadium, and then turning her finely honed critical mind to these endeavors?
     But the truth is that this book is painfully boring. I own a manual that illustrates the artificial insemination of dogs that is hotter than this. The Sexual Life of Catherine M. is afflicted by all the worst aspects of porn: it's repetitive; it lacks humor, narrative, characters and graceful language. The translation, provided by relative newcomer Adriana Hunter, is deadly; it may be that Millet's original French is convoluted as well. In any case, Millet's analysis of her sexual awakenings has all the spice of a discourse on Vulcan mating practices. The only way to decipher some of these sentences is to recite them in a robotic monotone: "When I was better informed about what sexual acts might entail, I integrated them into my imaginings, but coitus achieved did not preclude passing from one partner to another."
     There's an unsettling disjunction here between the fevered, humid activities being described and Millet's dry, academic prose — her writing style has the removed quality of an accident victim's account to police, or at its very best, a well-organized school report: "I could gather together a good many anecdotes concerning the use to which, for years, I put my anus and, as frequently, if not more so, my vagina." Things get more intriguing when Millet stops thinking and recalls specific orgy scenes — this is her oeuvre, after all. But these passages fly by with such scant embellishment that they have the staccato feel of an outline: "I formed a bridge between the two men. After a few minutes they changed places. They both came, one in my cunt, the other in my mouth." Millet tells all in such isolated bursts, periodically swerving into overheated, faux intellectual vagina-speak (" . . . the atmosphere that embraces the vastness of the world adheres to the surface of my skin like myriad tiny suction cups") that even though page after page describes her being plugged in every orifice, coated in ejaculate, writhing, fantasizing, licking unwashed crevices, the effect is that somehow there is just not enough sex. Reading Millet's memoir is not like plunging into one woman's complex erotic mind; it's like listening to someone with Attention Deficit Disorder tell a fairy tale.
     It doesn't help that even her steady sex buddies — the guys who set up the orgies — are frequently named but rarely described. Appearing at irregular intervals are a Claude, an Eric, a Gilbert, a Paul. They have penises that are "well-proportioned," "sturdy," or "the tool of a giant," but the author gives us so little above-the-waist detail that it becomes difficult to match the member to the man. "Ringo's dick was more like Claude's, the shy boy's more like André's, the student's belonged to a category that I would recognize later: those that, although not necessarily larger, are covered in a thicker outer layer, making them feel immediately more substantial in the hand."
     Ultimately, it's Millet's weird fuckdoll passivity that drains the last bit of spark from this memoir. There is no desire lighting up the page, zero lust — she's almost pathologically disinterested in her sexual partners. "I liked it if a man was introduced to me by another man," she writes. "I would take my cue from the relationship one had with the other, rather than having to think about my own desires and how to satisfy them. In fact, feeling desire and having sex were almost two separate activities." Unlike modern sex-positive heroines like Annie Sprinkle, the plucky porn star Nina Hartley or even the cartoonishly voracious Samantha of Sex in the City, Catherine Millet abdicates all responsibility and sexual choice to her male protectors. It's this spineless, childlike portrait that Millet paints of herself, coupled with her odd inability to conceive of other human beings as anything more than a collection of parts, that makes The Sexual Life of Catherine M. feel so remarkably disjointed and flat. It's more a series of sexual fragments than the depiction of a full and true sexual life. Ultimately, Millet proves that she isn't just easy — she's lazy.

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Biography
Pelvic flaw

Adam Begley finds out how Catherine Millet has managed to make orgies boring in The Sexual Life of Catherine M

Saturday June 22, 2002
The Guardian

The Sexual Life of Catherine M
by Catherine Millet, trans Adriana Hunter
186pp, Serpent's Tail, £12

The word "partouze" pops up often in La vie sexuelle de Catherine M ; in this English edition, it's translated sometimes as "group sex," sometimes as "orgy," which is what Catherine Millet's memoir is about: sex and more sex, often with many partners, dozens at a time. "Partouze" is a peculiarly evocative word, nearly onomatopoeic: if you happen to know both French and English it sounds like a coupling of partout ("everywhere") and "ooze" - Millet's preference exactly. But the book is an oddly joyless exercise: explicit without being erotic, stuffed with sex but not sexy.

Catherine Millet is an art critic and the editor of a French journal called Art Press. She presents herself as an intellectual, alludes to her "cerebral nature", and lards her account of staggering sexual promiscuity with references to contemporary art, metaphysical musings on the nature of perception and aesthetic theory. She also spent time in psychoanalysis ("heading for a couch three times a week not to fuck but to talk about it"); psychobabble is sprinkled in with the artsy flourishes and the gangbangs.

Millet lost her virginity at 18 - and her first partouze came just two weeks later, when she had sex with three men and another woman. At 21, the "regime intensified": she participated in orgies at which there would be perhaps 150 men and women present; she estimates that on those occasions she would have had sex with "a quarter or a fifth of them". She cruised the Bois de Boulogne as well, offering herself up for free in a place where, famously, professionals were trying to earn a living.

The Sexual Life of Catherine M has been a huge hit on the continent: more than 350,000 copies sold in France, more than 150,000 in Germany. The easy explanation for its popularity is the prurience of readers snapping up a notoriously dirty book. I don't believe it: pornography is everywhere these days; if titillation is what you're after, why waste time and money on a book decorated with highbrow filigree when you can download pure porn at no cost?

This kind of sentence, for example, almost guarantees detumescence: "I feel a need to suture the cut between the interior and the exterior of my body, and, without going as far as a frank anality, a facility for finding appeasement in filth: some of the traits of my sexual personality support slight regressive tendencies." (The French is just as clunky.)

But the book is certainly subversive. There's nothing Millet won't describe about the mechanics of sex. She's not ashamed, and, more important, she makes no attempt to justify her behaviour. She doesn't feel constrained to insist that she's enjoying herself - at times she's almost grim ("You don't have to be a great psychologist to deduce from this behaviour an inclination for self-abasement").

There are things she leaves out. The word "condom" appears once, about two-thirds of the way through. Her first partouze earns her a dose of the clap, but that's the sole mention of sexually transmitted disease. We learn that she had an abortion, but nothing else about it. There's no chronology, no sense of history- the revolutionary ferment of the 1960s, for example, is never mentioned; the feminist movement is essentially ignored.

But what I missed most was storytelling. Millet's sexual activity is presented in truncated anecdotes, shapeless and inert. At no point does she stir up narrative tension. Millet calls herself "a gifted fabulist," and there are hints that some or most of her exploits are made up ("in this book I am bringing together fact and fantasy"), but she is perhaps too submissive to take charge of an unfolding story, to shape it so that the reader is carried along.

Near the end she reveals what one half-suspected: "I wouldn't be exaggerating if I said that, until I was about 35, I had not imagined that my own pleasure could be the aim of a sexual encounter." She repeats this confession a few pages later: "For a large part of my life I fucked without regard to pleasure." So it was no picnic after all to have a posse of strangers hammering her pelvis in a car park. Quelle surprise!

· Adam Begley is the books editor of the New York Observer

 

From Thursday Style
The Story of Oh, My!
'The Sexual Life of Catherine M.' by Catherine Millet

By Jonathan Yardley,
whose e-mail address is yardley@twp.com
Thursday, June 20, 2002; Page C02

THE SEXUAL LIFE OF CATHERINE M.
By Catherine Millet
Translated from the French by Adriana Hunter
Grove. 209 pp. $23

This is by any reckoning one of the strangest books in many a moon. Its author, Catherine Millet, is the editor of the French magazine Art Press and an art scholar of some renown, the author of eight volumes of well-regarded art criticism. She is a lucid, elegant prose stylist, strongly opinionated and capable of marshaling forcible arguments. All in all, a most impressive person.

Still, to say that Millet primarily leads the life of the mind would be a joke. As she documents in stupendous detail in "The Sexual Life of Catherine M.," she is sex-obsessed to an extent that few of us are likely to be capable of imagining. She is able to remember, she says, the faces of exactly 49 men with whom she has had sexual encounters of one sort or another. The rest -- and if one accepts her account at face value, their numbers must run well into the thousands -- are simply a blur, beyond the reach of memory.

Not surprisingly, "The Sexual Life of Catherine M." was a smash bestseller in France upon its publication there last year. While I was in Paris last fall it was all over the papers, both French and British, in breathless news and feature stories that helped make it what her American publisher calls "the most controversial book on sexuality since 'The Story of O.' " Inasmuch as there is a long history of French bestsellers and Prix Goncourt winners coming a cropper in the United States, it is difficult to predict what sort of readership it will find here. But its subject matter, Heaven knows, has made for plenty of American bestsellers in the past.

Millet sees herself as "the active spider in the middle of her web," though perhaps queen bee is the more apt metaphor. Taking her ease, with surprising passivity Millet welcomes her endless parade of partners -- "lovers" scarcely seems the word -- who service her, and whom she in turn services, in a variety of ways, some of which will strike many readers as outré in the extreme. There is an odd distancing taking place here:

"I can no longer really pretend that I believe in God. It's highly possible that I lost this belief when I started having sexual relationships. Finding myself vacant, then, with no other mission to fulfill, I grew into quite a passive woman. . . . I sought no more ideals in love than I did in my professional life; I was seen as someone who had no taboos, someone exceptionally uninhibited."

To the same point she says later: "I was reticent in social relationships and saw the sexual act as a refuge into which I willingly abandoned myself: it was a way to avoid looks that embarrassed me and conversations for which I was ill prepared. There was, therefore, no question of my taking any initiative. I never flirted or tried to score. On the other hand, I was completely available: at all times and in all places, without hesitation or regret, by every one of my bodily orifices and with a totally clear conscience."

As both of these passages suggest, the temptation to subject Millet to amateur psychoanalysis is extreme but must be resisted, not least because she practices so much of it on herself. Since childhood, she has been an active fantasist, and she says that "the fantasies forged in my earliest youth predisposed me to widely diverse experiences," which is putting it mildly. She "had a powerful imagination, and this gave me a well I could draw from"; indeed, "I had long fantasized about being a high-class prostitute," a fantasy she never really tried out in actuality. A life of what can fairly be called extreme sexual activity gives her, Millet writes, "the illusion of opening myself to innumerable possibilities." The reader can be pardoned for wondering how many of the possibilities enumerated in this book were merely that -- fantasies -- and how many crossed the border into fact. It is impossible to know the answer to this, but it is reasonable to assume that essentially "The Sexual Life of Catherine M." is a memoir more than a fantasy.

Certainly it is difficult for anyone of more conventional mind -- mea culpa -- to imagine that someone of Millet's position and professional reputation would invite the gasping and winking and nudging this book has aroused except to tell the truth as best she understands it. Obviously she sees herself as living a free, unencumbered sexual life, and perhaps she hopes to persuade others by the example depicted herein. Those of us who believe that sex is only of deep consequence when it is an act of love will not be convinced, but no doubt others will regard her as an exemplar.

Catherine Millet's sex life

Lisa Hilton

23/5/02

Fragonard with lorry drivers

 
THE SEXUAL LIFE OF CATHERINE M.
Translated by Adriana Hunter
186pp. Serpent's Tail. Paperback, £12.
1 85242 811 2

For Catherine Millet, monogamy is the refuge of the fearful. Unashamedly working in the first person, Millet diverts the tradition of erotic writing by French women such as Pauline Réage and Alina Reyes firmly into the realm of non-fiction, with this account of her sexual encounters, tastes and unconventional morality. As La Vie sexuelle de Catherine M. begins, Catherine feels the stirring of a religious vocation, but her faith is abandoned along with her virginity, overwhelmed by an erotic voyage whose momentum she compares to the dizziness of a funfair ghost train. Her particular pleasure is the partouze , or orgy, and, like a spider busy in her web, she positions herself amidst innumerable men, in parking lots, exchange clubs, the Bois de Boulogne in Paris, or any shrubbery, terrace or picturesque ruin that seems convenient. While the locations vary, the proceedings remain, she concedes, almost banally similar, but the narrative is reflective as well as revelatory. There are some useful tips for the novice partouzeuse , on the technicalities of oral sex or the etiquette of sex with fifteen strangers, but Millet engages this explicitly with her own experience in order to examine her own self-consciously libertine philosophy. Sex is the arena where different planes of experience interact, and the self-annihilation of the anonymous partouze becomes a route to self-definition, whereby the materiality of the physical act becomes an enlargement of psychological space. As the editor of Art Press , Millet is a distinguished writer on contemporary art, and she employs her critical vocabulary to analyse her sexuality, claiming a connection between her own bodily perceptions and the ability of a conceptual artwork to occupy literal and metaphysical spheres simultaneously.

To an English-speaking reader, Millet’s theory might present two problems. Anglo-American feminism has always had an ambivalent attitude to the relationship between pleasure and exploitation (consider the reaction when the author of The Story of O was revealed to be a woman), and it is too easy to assume that Millet’s cheerfully unorthodox tastes are the consequence of trauma. Though not explicitly feminist, her challenge is to present a woman unembarrassed by her body’s capacity to give and receive joy, who revels in the ephemeral communities of the partouze as a relief from the strictures of her social identity. Millet engages honestly with the inadequacy of her own body as measured against the much-derided “norm” of female beauty, but is too sensible to let anything so pedestrian as cellulite interfere with a good fuck. The sincerity of this commitment to her own pleasure is evoked by her writing,deftly captured in Adriana Hunter’s translation, which contrasts a flat, informative voice with an impressionistic layering of remembered experience. Millet writes extremely well, describing her recollections vividly, and investing her physical largesse with a queenly magnanimity. Her sensations are recalled with an artist’s delight in precision; of one encounter she observes that the light above her lover’s bed is retained, butterfly-like, in the flesh of her eyelids. Millet’s sexual aesthetic is a literary one, invoking Sade, Réage and Proust, and she is fortunate in a translator who has contrived to preserve the tension between the explicit and the elegant which is characteristic of French writing about sex, but difficult to render without crudeness into English. The opening of The Sexual Life of Catherine M. is consciously reminiscent of that of “Swann’s Way”, while the use of the description “little band” to describe Millet’s first group of adolescent lovers recalls Albertine and her friends at Balbec; like Proust, Millet attempts to distil sensual materiality into a confrontation with mutability, with the limitations of the physical self in time.

Ideas like this are the second problem with the book, in that the project of eliciting philosophical profundity from screwing unfamiliar lorry drivers seems laughably pretentious. Yet Millet is not arrogantly solipsistic, and claims no universality for her reflections; she merely insists that they are personally legitimate. Quite capable of self-satire, Millet discusses the social delicacy of being introduced to a man to whom one has never spoken, but whose penis is an intimate friend. If sex is a means of trans-cending the subjective self, she suggests playfully, then perhaps it can become as quotidian an activity as housework, and maybe the courtesy and gentleness she has found in the partouze might extend into everyday life.

Why Millet’s own pursuit of sensation should be viewed as delinquent is, to her, the most interesting question. Surely, she suggests, the acceptance of obvious and abject misery which has become a necessary feature of urban life is more perverse than the prospect of consensual pleasure? That this equally signals an acceptance of more exploitative forms of sexual contracts is one libertine’s problem which Millet fails to consider, in neglecting to analyse how her own wealth, class and education free her to try for pleasure’s sake what others experience as subjection. Millet does for fun what other women do for money, and if she can laugh at her own failed flirtation with prostitution, from the perspective of more successful encounters at the opera or in a villa on the French Riviera, it is because she can afford to.

La Vie sexuelle inevitably attracted controversy in France, not least because it is a difficult book to classify, yet it is neither pornography nor her coy younger sister, erotica, but a work of libertine philosophy. “Libertine” is a quaint word, evoking Valmontesque characters disporting themselves in Fragonard interiors, and Millet’s identification of herself as such in a modern context is both startling, and, she concedes, problematic. Is it possible to achieve the necessary abandonment of possessiveness, and in doing so, must we abandon love? Millet’s commitment to absolute liberty has caused her “inexpressible pain” in the form of jealousy, and she finds herself adhering to surprisingly bourgeois values such as the sanctity of the marital bed. It is Catherine Millet’s ideas, not the acts which she performs, which mark her as a true sexual revolutionary, but, as she discovers when an inflamed lover slashes her with a razor, her personal revolution cannot be entirely bloodless.

La grande horizontale
(Filed: 09/06/2002)

Alain de Botton reviews The Sexual Life of Catherine M. by Catherine Millet

Two feelings alternate as one reads this book: either that the author is daringly liberated while the reader must be a prude who should get out and learn to swing a little more - or that the author is not quite all there.

Catherine Millet, who has, for the last 30 years, been the publisher of the respected French art magazine Art Press, sets out to narrate the story of her sex life from infancy to late middle-age. It's an unusual tale. At five, she was masturbating while simulating sex between Barbie and Ken, a few years later she was felt up by a friend's grandfather and much enjoyed the experience and, at the age of 13, she told her local priest that she wanted to become a nun but was worried that this might conflict with her commitment to round-the-clock masturbation (he nonchalantly told her she was too young to bother herself with such a weighty dilemma).

Millet lost her virginity at 18, and from then on embarked on sexual encounters with what must have been hundreds, if not thousands, of men whose names she never knew - in clubs, supermarkets, by the sides of motorways, in art galleries and churches. That she had time to work, let alone to sleep, seems implausible.

Millet was particularly taken by orgies, and seems to have spent a great part of her life on her back (usually on a table) with her legs wide open, while a queue of men formed around her: "I was sometimes set upon so violently that I had to hold on to the ends of the table with both my hands and for a long time I bore the scar of a little gash above my coccyx, where my spine had rubbed against the rough wood."

Apart from accounts of specific sexual encounters, Millet also offers us comprehensive accounts of her general tastes and proclivities. She tells us that: "In general, I feel the need to take a man into my mouth in the first few moments of a sexual encounter . . ." She takes us through her favourite sexual position (lying on her front), her onanistic diligence ("I masturbate with the regularity of a civil servant") and her preferred fantasies (gang rape, with her as a helpless prostitute).

The thought that she could have sex with almost any man at any time is a source of constant comfort to Millet: it is like "the lungfuls of fresh air you inhale as you walk to the end of a narrow pier". All this is narrated in a cool, weary prose that reads like a bad pastiche of the novelist Marguerite Duras (even Millet's title is sub-Duras). She recounts the most extraordinary events as if she were describing common-place experience, the dead-pan style leaving us feeling that there must be something stuffy about us for finding it all rather remarkable.

Millet is up to the old trick practised by second-rate artists of trying to "epater les bourgeois". She has managed rather well: "A blow-job, especially if it is well done, bruises the insides of the lips. . . " and so on and - in graphic detail - so on. Of course all this bears much resemblance to top-shelf material - there are long descriptions of sex whose only purpose can be to arouse the reader. Yet Millet is careful not to allow herself to be pigeonholed as a pornographer. She wants her book to follow in the tradition of works by the Marquis de Sade or George Bataille: dirty books which make a claim to be counted as art, or even as a contribution to radical politics. To achieve her effect, Millet has a tendency to veer off in the middle of a sex scene into entirely gratuitous (and mostly incomprehensible) discussions about an artist, a philosopher or an architect. After all, she seems to suggest, if this really was a dirty book, would there be references to the eminent art historians Andre Chastel and Giulio Carlo Argan?

It might be tempting for an Anglo-Saxon reader to blame all this on the author's nationality and there are some touches that are arguably rather "French": the philosophical digressions, the absence of humour, the determination to see free love as a heroic political choice rather than a personal taste. But clearly the French don't find this book any more normal than the English: 400,000 people would not have rushed out to buy a book that told them only what they already knew.

Millet's revelations were very surprising to the Parisian intelligentsia, who had previously known her only as a publisher and critic - as though A. S. Byatt or Marina Warner had suddenly revealed a life-long history of attendance at orgies.

Given the long, appalling history of men's censorship of the expression of women's sexuality, there is something disturbing in the idea of a male reviewer criticising a woman for being frank about her sexual enthusiasms. But Millet's book is hard to describe as merely an honest tale of one woman's uninhibited sexuality. She leaves a heterosexual male reader in the unusual position of wondering (perhaps for the first time) whether there might be problems associated with a woman who wants sex all the time. Millet brings us up against a fact which, traditionally, women have been far quicker to embrace: that something important gets lost when sex becomes merely a mechanical, anonymous act endlessly repeated.

A kind of sadness infuses these pages. One leaves the book inclined to take seriously the lesson that Christian preachers have taught all along: that sex divorced from any interest in or knowledge of, let alone affection for, the partner can be a dehumanising process. It's strange that it takes a so-called libertine truly to bring this lesson home.

Alain de Botton is the author of 'The Art of Travel' (Hamish Hamilton).

Memoirs of a sexual predator
(Filed: 31/05/2002)

Catherine Millet's new book about how she seduced hundreds of strangers has already taken Europe by storm. She and her husband tell Rebecca Tyrrel how their relationship has survived her past

By page 18 of her book The Sexual Life of Catherine M. dozens of Catherine Millet's sexual encounters have already been described in lurid yet strangely monochromatic detail. So it is a relief suddenly to find lurking here proof that the author is not just an apparently insatiable sex maniac but also something of a successful career woman.

Millet is describing the feelings she experienced when being taken on a familiar car journey out of Paris towards Chez Aime, a well-known swingers' club which she describes as "the very cradle of f-----g". She is anticipating the multiple strangers she will soon be having sex with and the energy she will be forced to expend once there.

"It was a feeling not unlike the feeling one gets before giving a conference," she writes, "when I know I will have to be completely focused on what I am saying while in the hands of my listeners. In fact . . . in between the anxiety of anticipation and the weariness at the end, you are perfectly unaware of your own exhaustion."

This paragraph contains much-needed information about Catherine Millet, especially for the new and possibly already aghast British reader of this quite extraordinary blockbuster of a book (400,000 copies sold in France alone; translated into 26 languages).

It is one of few hints that the author of this infinitesimally chronicled account of a particularly exhaustive - and exhausting - sex life involving hundreds of partners, is something else in addition to being a nymphomaniac of Olympian stature.

In fact, in France Millet was until recently known primarily as the founder/editress of a highbrow art magazine, Art Press. Evidence would suggest, however, that her mind was not always on her job.

I meet Catherine Millet and Jacques Henric, a writer and her husband of 10 years (they have lived together for two decades) in the cafe at the French Institute in South Kensington, west London. After a few minutes we are led through a back corridor and up some stairs into an elegant reception room with marble coffee-tables and gilt rococco furniture.

I can't help but snigger as we proceed along the back corridor (or passage). Suddenly, it seems, I have acquired a Carry On sense of humour. It must be because I am British, and the British are not supposed to be able to talk about sex without Sid James-y double entendre and sniggering.

So it's going to be hard for me. Very little that is not directly to do with sex gets a look in in The Sexual Life of Catherine M. Her description of childhood is brief and only present as a device for explaining her obsession with numbers - that is, the numbers of sexual partners she was ultimately to have. She writes in the book that she knew or recognised only 49 of them. (Her favourite sexual position was to be taken from behind, which might help to explain why.)

As I follow Catherine Millet up the stairs of the French Institute, I notice that although she has exceptionally good skin for a 54-year-old, and an Anita Harris-style beauty spot over her upper lip, she has rather short, fat legs, and her clothes, while obviously expensive and slightly avant garde, are designer-frumpy and unflattering.

I am being so critical only because I feel I should know Catherine Millet's physical form intimately by now, and this is not what I expected. Barely a page of her book passes without mention of her bottom (or her arse, as she, or the English translator, consistently refers to it - le cul in French). Her genitalia are liberally flaunted throughout the book, as are her breasts, her stomach, her thighs, etc, etc.

The critics are divided as to whether this is erotic or pornographic, but the woman heading rather ploddingly up the stairs in front of me, this rather mousy female, doesn't look like a purveyor of either. I had expected an Isabelle Adjani lookalike, or an elegant Nastassia Kinski type.

Her memoir tells how, as a small girl in the 1950s, living in a Paris suburb with parents who didn't much like each other and who both had lovers, she would lie awake at night worrying about how many husbands it would be acceptable for one woman to have; a few, say five or six, or many more than that, countless husbands?

Once she has got this tenuous link to her sex life over with, just three pages on, she is describing her first experiences of group fornication at the age of 18, on a tall, cast-iron bed, in a house on a hill above Lyon. And so the book goes on, non-stop, from there to swingers' clubs, house parties, saunas, railway stations, store rooms, art galleries, vineyards, lorries, cemeteries, the Bois du Bologne - and, one specific evening, at the porte Dauphine.

This particular encounter is both typical (sudden, spontaneous sex with complete strangers) and rare (there were only two men), and it is perfectly in keeping with the cool, distant tone of the rest of the book. It is also one of the few passages (there I go again) which is reprintable in a family newspaper.

"Our car headlights picked out two very tall black men standing on the edge of the pavement. They looked as if they were lost or waiting, in this desolate backwater, for an improbable bus.

"They led us [she was with Eric, her dentist and friend who sought out men for her] to a place nearby, to a little attic room. The room and the bed were both narrow. They took me one after the other . . . they were like twins. Two gentle, unhurried couplings in a row."

We are sitting now around a marble coffee table, together with a translator. Jacques, the husband, is 10 years older than his wife, not much taller, and is dressed artily in blue serge. The couple, who are childless because Catherine was unable to conceive, look at each other a lot, deeply and with a tangible fondness and familiarity.

They first met when they collaborated on an art book: nothing to do with sex at all. She initially heard his voice on an answering machine, and as they poured over layouts together they fell in love. "I thought, damn, I am falling for a girl who sleeps with everybody," says Jacques.

Did they have any idea that theirs would be a long-term affair? I ask. Surely it wasn't looking good for Jacques back then, at the height of Catherine's swinging days?

Catherine starts to speak, but then silently, with just a nod of the head, defers to Jacques, who thinks for a while, breathing rather heavily as he does so. "I had an intuition that this would be a long-lasting relationship," he says finally, "She, though, didn't think so at the beginning."

"For the first half of our relationship," Catherine intervenes, "I had a sexual life outside my relationship with Jacques, but that has gradually come to an end."

Did Jacques have a sex life outside the relationship? "I was more traditional," he says. "I wasn't into group sex and orgies, but I did have a few lovers."

Are they absolutely faithful to each other now? "It is one thing when you are talking about fantasies," says Jacques, leaning forward and looking intently and, I imagine, hopefully at his wife, "but at the level of sexual behaviour, yes we are faithful."

"Do you think you have more sex than most married couples?" They fall about laughing, giggling and exchanging furtive glances. "I don't know," says Jacques finally. "All married couples exaggerate. Who will admit to having sex only every six months?"

I find it odd to be asking such intimate and ultimately intrusive questions of a married couple, but not surprisingly they seem to be taking the interrogation in their stride.

"I think it is completely normal that people ask me about my sexual intimacy; I have written a book about it," says Catherine. "I don't regard sex as being so intimate. For me, what is intimate is my emotions, my feelings, not sex. The reason I used the name Catherine M, rather than Catherine Millet, was so that I could remain distant from the book emotionally."

Two questions need to be asked: why did she have so much sex with so many different men? And why did she feel the need to write about it?

"When I was little I was obsessed with things like, how many times in the day did I have to think about God and how many glasses of water did I have to bring him," she says, in answer to the first. "It is not about accumulation. It is a sort of obsession with giving a lot. Putting oneself out, as it were."

So she wanted to please?

"Yes. Possibly."

In part answer to the second question, they explain that the book came to be written as the result of a cafe conversation with Jacques' publisher (he has written experimental novels, and books on avant-garde art and photography - including one book of nude photographs of Catherine).

"We were having coffee one day," explains Jacques, "and my publisher said, 'I publish Jacques; when will I publish you, Catherine?' " Was he expecting a book about sex or art?

"Catherine said that there was a book she had been wanting to write for a long time. He said, 'What is it?' and she told him it was the story of her sexual life. He was very enthusiastic, and a few days later he brought the contract round."

Did Catherine ever, in the early days, have a need or desire to keep her sex life a secret? Or was she widely known for her willingness to lie down on a table, "as if I were some sort of board game", while the men queued up? How did she end up having sex with her dentist, for instance? Did the dentist know before the appointment that she would be willing to have sex with him? What were the rules of engagement?

Again Millet defers to her husband. "What should I say, do you think?" "It was only a very small group of people who knew about it," says Jacques. "It was only the people who were involved. We both had a free and easy sex life, and I knew about her because I was in the same milieu. It makes it easier to cut to the chase."

Was there anyone in Catherine's life, a close friend or relative, someone she didn't have sex with, in whom she confided if she had a problem, such as a dose of the clap - "the scissoring pain"? (In the early days she didn't use condoms.) She has no blood relatives left, she tells me. Or, at least, only distant ones.

How about a girlfriend? "No," she says, "I have had very few women friends. There was no woman to confide my sexual doubts or problems to, and there is a point where I write that I have always felt I was on the man's side. I felt closer to men."

I wonder whether people's attitudes towards the couple changed since the book was published. What about the newsagent, the dry cleaner, the baker - the people they meet in their everyday lives? Have they read the book?

"The newsagent would keep for me all the things that were written when the book came out," says Jacques. "And women who bump into Catherine thank her for what she has written. I even got a discount on my watch because the man who sold it to me had read her book!"

When I ask Catherine if, since the book was published, she has found herself being asked advice about sex and relationships, she nods rapidly and says, "Yes, a great deal."

What sort of questions is she asked? "How to deal with jealousy. How to live as a couple and have varied sexual relations without being destroyed by jealousy." Then once again she defers to Jacques. "You can be more objective," she says.

"She is much more jealous than I am," says Jacques. "Paradoxically, non? There was jealousy in our marriage; both of us experienced it, but if it weren't for jealousy a good part of literature and art would not exist. It is the motor of all creation."

When Catherine was jealous what did she do? Was she a violent person? They both laugh before Catherine says, "Yes - I can be very violent, physically violent."

It is still not clear why Catherine Millet decided to write such an extraordinarily detailed and exposing account of her bizarre sex life. She certainly didn't do it for the money (the publisher had planned a print run of only 4,000).

The most obvious answer is that, by envisaging the whole world reading about her preferences, her positions, her lust, she was just indulging another of her sexual fantasies - which, like the ones involving lorries or saunas, she made come true.

I ask if she ever considers being promiscuous again and Jacques interrupts me, rather ungallantly I think, with a mocking laugh at his wife and says, "At her age? Over 50! Well, who knows?"

June 12, 2002

Edmund White calls this the most explicit book about sex ever written by a woman, and by gum, he may be right, says Lynne Truss

Thrills and spills of a life loved to the full
 

The Sexual Life of Catherine M

By Catherine Millet

Serpent’s Tail, £12; 186 pp
ISBN 1 8524 2811 2

Edmund White calls this the most explicit book about sex ever written by a woman, and by gum, he may be right. Catherine Millet, a French art critic and magazine editor, has written a serious, detailed and unquotably vernacular account of her own promiscuous life. Most of us know her alarming Y-shaped story already, from newspaper articles and appearances on Newsnight. Her book has already sold 300,000 copies in France. We know she used to lie in the backs of vans in the Bois du Bouloigne and be taken by anonymous men in turn — men who presumably formed a queue outside. A willing and unapologetic “spunk-bag”, Catherine M did it in car parks and at indoor orgies, sometimes managing four chaps at the same time — yes, four, can you work out how she did that? After reading The Sexual Life of Catherine M, whatever else you think, you can’t escape the conclusion that women really are good at multi-tasking.

I expected to dislike this book. I expected it to resemble that loathsome Eve Ensler show The Vagina Monologues. But while Ensler is the high priestess of the front-bottom shock, spreading phony banshee front-bottom solidarity around the globe, Catherine M talks the talk and (assuming she’s upright) walks the walk. Millet isn’t remotely interested in any political aspect of what she has done, or in any other woman’s sexual liberation. When she once confides to a partner that she can climax two or three times from masturbation, he laughingly explains to her that for a woman this is (if you’ll pardon the expression) no great shakes.

So narcissistic revelation is the only agenda the book contains. As for its structure, one soon begins to realise that, whereas other works of literature are ordered like humdrum sex — from foreplay to third-act climax with possibly a nice cup of tea afterwards — Millet’s rather unusual sexual experience has led her to a different literary form. After all, do you expect foreplay in the back of that van? No! So here we get, on page one, no narrative contextualising at all.

Instead, after a short exciting wait, doors whip open, author climbs in, and from then on you get hours of vivid, eye-popping, vitals-shafting stories in the dark. And when it’s over, you get up rather creakily and go and make your own cup of tea.

This book has been attacked, of course, for burdening the world with unmediated confessions. Such an intelligent woman writing about sex should be able to raise her eyes higher than the crotch. But what if that’s where her face is buried? Millet is in love with the feel and smell of men’s bodies, and the ways men choose to perform. Of course she is outside the norm, in that she has so willingly embraced degradation (did I mention the dog?). But in terms of sexuality, these are confusing times for women as for men. I don’t approve of The Sexual Life of Catherine M. But I am grateful she has written it.

Lynne Truss reviews books regularly for The Sunday Times

CITY PAGES

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

by Laura Sinagra

See this review here

NEW YORK PRESS

 Volume 15, Issue 22

Books
Laurie Stone

The Sexual Life of Catherine M.

See this review here

ESQUIRE

17-06-2002

The Sexual Life of Catherine M.
By Catherine Millet
 

See this review here

In bed with the Millets

The sexual life of Catherine M by Catherine Millet (Serpent's Tail, £12)
Reviewed by Ron Butlin

See this review here

THE NEW YORK OBSERVER

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.

See this review here

'Catherine' strips erotica's scarlet letter

September 12, 2002

By PAIGE WISER STAFF REPORTER

See this review here

The New

Criterion

The Baroness Munchausen of sex

by Anthony Daniels

 From The New Criterion Vol. 21, No. 1, September 2002

See this review here

Rezension
Pornographie als Lebensform
Von Jürgen Ritte
 
4. Okt. 2001 Dass Frauen Minister werden, Manager und vielleicht eines Tages, wer weiß, auch einmal Papst, das sind Vorstellungen und Realitäten, mit denen im Abendland der domestizierte Mann sich längst angefreundet hat. Aber dass sie nun auch noch das letzte, zumeist verschämt gehütete Réduit seiner maskulinen Phantasien und Phantasmen stürmen und erobern, daran muss man (und vor allem eben: Mann) sich erst noch gewöhnen.

In Frankreich besetzen junge und nicht mehr ganz so junge Frauen zunehmend das Feld der literarischen und auch sonstigen Pornographie. Und sie tun dies in einer Weise, die selbst einen Michel Houellebecq mit seinen Orgasmus-Problemen und seinen, wie er glaubt, elementaren Teilen, Verzeihung: Teilchen, relativ alt aussehen lassen.

Breillat, Déforges, Despentes  

Angefangen hatte es vor Jahren schon mit der damals wenig beachteten Catherine Breillat; ihr folgten, zögerlich noch, die köstliche Alina Reyes (Le Boucher), und dann, in neuerer Zeit, etwa Autorinnen wie die eher laszive Régine Déforges (L'orage) oder die zornige Virginie Despentes (Baise-moi). In diesem Herbst belegen gar Erstlingswerke von Praktikerinnen wie dem Ex-"Escort-Girl" Nelly Arcan (Putain, dt.: Nutte) und der Ex-Pornodarstellerin Raffaëlla Anderson (Hard; deutsche Übersetzung erübrigt sich) gute, beziehungsweise beste Rangplätze in den Bestsellerlisten. Auch der unter Beteiligung von Hélène Bruller entstandene Comic "Le guide du zizi sexuel" ("zizi"=Sie können sich schon denken, was das heißt) hat sich in knapp vier Wochen schon 170.000 mal verkauft.

Französische SchriftstellerInnen (vor allem: -Innen) befinden sich im sexuellen Offenbarungsrausch. Da ist dann von lustvollem Schwanzlutschen und Spermaschlucken die Rede, vom Ficken, von multiplen Penetrationen aller Art, kurz: von allem, was bislang nur im Sex-Shop an Pigalle, im Frankfurter Bahnhofsviertel oder anderen traurigen Orten zu haben war. Wenn man bedenkt, dass Simone de Beauvoir vor gut fünfzig Jahren noch einen Skandal auslösen konnte, nur weil sie im "Zweiten Geschlecht" das Wort "Klitoris" gebraucht hatte... Es wäre interessant, wenn sich Alice Schwarzer einmal zu dieser Form von sexueller Revolution äußern würde. Statt dessen kibbelt sie mit Verona Feldbusch auf den Sofas unserer Talk-Shows. Was sind wir Deutschen doch für ein unschuldiges Volk!

Sex und Porno - ein französischer Exporterfolg

Dabei ist, sobald von Sex oder Pornographie die Rede ist, die französische Literatur offenbar auch wieder für deutsche Verleger interessant. Houellebecq machte den Anfang, und jetzt liegt auch Catherine Millets Sensationserfolg "Das sexuelle Leben der Catherine M." auf deutsch vor. Im Frühjahr erschienen, ist dieses autobiographische Buch der besonderen Art in Frankreich bereits an die 300.000 mal verkauft worden und damit nicht mehr nur ein literarisches, sondern auch ein soziales, ein gesellschaftliches Phänomen.

Gewiss, mancher Kritiker (und nicht: manche Kritikerin!) hat, offenbar zutiefst im Unterleib getroffen, gleichsam zur Strafe gewaltige archivalische Anstrengungen unternommen und hat von de Sade über Bataille bis zum Nouveau Roman, von Dante über Diderot bis Nietzsche alles aufgeboten, um den Kunstcharakter von Sätzen wie „Ich lutsche gern den Schwanz eines Mannes“, „Ich will 'meinen großen Lutscher', das gefällt mir“ oder auch „Hoppla! Wie schön er gleitet! Wie weit er hineingeht!'“ zu demonstrieren.  

Das Gesetz der Serie

Mit Kunst hat die sexuelle Autobiographie von Catherine Millet indes nur insofern zu tun, als die Autorin im Hauptberuf Chefredakteurin der avantgardistischen Kunstzeitschrift „artpress“ ist und folglich Künstler wie Kunstateliers frequentiert. Gewiss, Catherine Millet bemüht zuweilen selbst ästhetische Ordnungsverfahren, wie etwa das der Serialität, um der Schilderung ihrer pubertären sexuellen Phantasien (Sex mit mehreren Männern gleichzeitig) und ihrer sexuellen Praxis (Sex in Swinger-Clubs, im Pariser Bois de Boulogne, in Privatwohnungen, auf dem Brachland hinter Bretterzäunen, und dies mit mehreren anonymen Männern nach- und nebeneinander) eine schriftliche Ordnung zu verleihen.

Bemerkenswert aber ist, dass hier eine Frau ihre - ob außergewöhnlich oder nicht - sexuelle Vita in einem Modus erzählt wie man ihn sonst nur einem Mann zugestanden hätte: Sie bleibt auf Distanz zu ihrem Körper, zu ihrer sexuellen Lust. Sie ist Catherine M. im Bett (oder sonstwo) und Catherine Millet im Büro. Oder anders: Männer, die zu ihrem Privatgebrauch zwischen Liebe und Sex unterscheiden, müssen erkennen, dass Frauen nicht anders verfahren. Das Gros der 300.000 gedruckten Exemplare von „La vie sexuelle de Catherine M.“ soll von Frauen erstanden worden sein.

Entlastung des männlichen Gewissens

So gelesen kann das Buch der Catherine Millet und der anderen Pornographinnen auch eine durchaus libertäre Dimension erschließen. Die Frau ist nicht länger festgelegt auf die Identität von körperlicher Hingabe und Liebe, der Mann kann sein schlechtes Gewissen beim Geschlechtsverkehr mit der Unterhose ablegen. Und wir Kritiker können uns künftig die reichlich verschwitzten Bemühungen um eine Unterscheidung von Erotik (die Kunst wäre) und Pornographie (die männliche Schweinigelei wäre) endlich sparen: wir wollen ja doch, Mann wie Frau, nur das Eine.

Catherine Millets Buch ist ein bedeutendes Buch. Es wird den Diskurs über Sexualität und Pornographie auf eine andere Grundlage stellen. Männer und Frauen werden sich nicht mehr in der gleichen Weise über ihre Geschlechtlichkeit (was für ein Wort!) verständigen. Und: die Pornographie wird nicht mehr das sein, was sie in ihrer männlichen Schmuddelecke einmal war. Trotzdem, oder gerade deswegen, gehört Catherine Millets Buch nicht unbedingt in die Sparte Literatur. „Sachbuch“ wäre angemessener.

Catherine Millet: Das sexuelle Leben der Cathérine M. 272 Seiten Goldmann Verlag, München 2001 DM 38, Euro 21,47

Jürgen Ritte ist Professor für Literatur an der Sorbonne und lehrt an der Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris.

21-4-2002

"Sexuelle Volksverblödung"

Eine Studie beweist: Die Franzosen lieben freizügig. Star-Autorin Catherine Millet über ein Land ohne Tabus

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Different towns, different men

Throughout the first few years of my adult life, my sexual experiences were intimately linked with the need to escape and get out into the open air. That need even instigated them. It was when I ran away from home for the first time that I lost my virginity. I had argued with my parents yet again. Claude, who I did not yet know, had rung at the door of our apartment to let me know that a friend I was meant to be meeting had been delayed. He asked whether I would like to go out with him. In the event, his Renault 4 took us all the way to Dieppe. We set up the tent on the edge of the beach.

Some time later I fell in love with a student from Berlin. We did not make love together (he was a cautious young man, and I had not voiced any desires), but the long sturdy frame of his body lying next to mine and his big white hands sent me into ecstasies. I wanted to go and live in West Berlin. The wide Kudam leading all the way up to the gleaming blue cathedral, and the parks of that great city - even though they were enclosed - fuelled my dreams. And then the student wrote and told me that it would not be sensible for us to be committed when we were so young. Another excuse to run away, again with Claude (whom I still saw) and his Renault 4. Destination Berlin, to talk with the boy who wanted to break up with me. Pathetic attempt to cross the border between East and West Germany because I did not have the necessary papers. So the student came as far as the frontier to talk it out, and my first romance came to an end in a cafeteria on a huge car park hacked out in the middle of a forest, amidst queues of people and queues of cars waiting to pass the wooden sentry boxes.

Unfortunately, I retained this propensity to flee without warning for many years, which was neither fair to the man I was living with at the time, nor to those who had brought me there, or those I had gone to meet, and would abandon to slink back home. This restlessness was partly due to the scatty, kittenish attitude that we had (Claude, Henri, a few others and myself) towards the New World of sex, an attitude which would sometimes make one of us break away from the close-knit group and strike out as an individual. The unspoken law expected this pioneering scout to come back and talk about their adventures. Which, of course, was not always the case, hence the mixture of oil and water which constituted, on the one hand, our disparate desires and, on the other, our libertarian minds. Going away for two days with a man I barely knew, or, as I did for several years, carrying on a relationship with a colleague who lived in Milan, was just as worthwhile for the journey and the change of scenery as it was for the promise of being bedded, touched and shafted in a way I was not accustomed to. If it had been possible, I would have liked to have woken up each morning to the shadows of an as yet unexplored ceiling and to have climbed out of the sheets and stayed for a few moments in the no man's land of an apartment in which I had forgotten overnight which corridor led to the bathroom. At times like that, it is the other body that you leave behind, a body you may have known only a few hours but during those hours it nourished you with its solid presence and its smell, it is that body which provides your only source of the ineffable well-being of familiarity. How many times have I thought, as I fantasised languidly about the life of high class whores, that that was one of the advantages of their job. As for the journey itself, the lapse of time we inhabit when we are no longer in one place but not yet in the next, it can be a source of pleasure measured on the same scale as erotic pleasure. In a taxi when all the bustle that precedes departure suddenly falls away, or wallowing in that semi-conscious state while waiting at an airport, I can sometimes feel that instantly recognisable sensation of a giant hand inside my body, squeezing my entrails and drawing from them a sensuous delight which irrigates my every extremity, exactly like when a man looks at me in a way which implies he is moving in on me in his head.

In spite of this, I have never used the frequent, long-distance journeys necessitated by my work to find lovers. I fucked infinitely less when my timetable was more flexible than it is in Paris, and when I could have made the most of those casual relationships with no tomorrows. However hard I try to remember, I can think of only two men that I have met on a journey and with whom I had some form of sexual contact during the journey itself. And when I say contact, there was only one instance each time, between breakfast and the first meeting of the morning with one, and during what was left of the night with the other.

There are two explanations. Firstly, right at the beginning of my career a more experienced female colleague had led me to understand that symposia, seminars and other meetings held in seclusion with people who were temporarily cut from their usual ties were God-given opportunities for furtive creepings up and down hotel corridors. I was used to a rather different and far more concentrated speciality in sexual rendezvous; nevertheless this shocked me to the same extent as the shapeless clothes people wear to show that they are on holiday when they would usually be very particular about their appearance. With the intransigence of the newly converted, I believed that fucking - and by that I meant 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 pre-determined times, well then it was carnival time! (A little aside to put this severe verdict into context. We no longer need to prove that our sexual tendencies can turn inside out like an old umbrella, and the device that protects us when the wind blows with reality can flip the other way and leave us to get soaked in the squalls of our fantasies. Once again in this book, I am narrowing the divide between fact and fantasy, in this case to expose a pleasing antinomy: despite the moral stance I have just expressed, I have often been aroused by imagining myself as a "spunk bag" for a group of stressed executives at a meeting, they would each dump their load on me secretly, hiding at the back of a hotel bar, even in a 'phone box, with the receiver in one hand as they carried on their statutory conversation with their wives: "Yes darling, it's going well, it's just the food that's not..." etc. That's one of the scenarios that is most guaranteed to get me to orgasm at my own complete degradation).

In the realms of reality, though, the exotic adventures of this speleologist of Parisian car parks can be dealt with in just two paragraphs. The assistant who had so emphatically drawn me to him right in the middle of the hotel foyer did indeed come and wake me up the following morning. Being very fair, he had let me rest after our repeated travelling - we had been going across Canada - over the last few days. He pushed his hips calmly. I let him get on with it without much conviction, but I encouraged him almost as a professional would, simply choosing a vocabulary that was rather more affectionate than obscene. Afterwards he said, quite unaffectedly, that he had been thinking about it for several days, but that he had waited until the end of the trip so as not to upset our work. We worked together again a number of times. He never made the slightest gesture of sexual invitation again, and neither did I. It was the fist time that a sexual exchange that had started with someone whom I was to see again did not continue, did not naturally infiltrate the soil of our relationship as friends and colleagues. It has to be said that I was at a stage in my life where I was trying with limited success, if not to be faithful, at least to restrict myself. I thought that this might be the sort of pardonable transgression permitted to people who were not libertines. It was the only time in my life that I vaguely regretted a sexual act.

A Brazilian adventure left me with more complex feelings. I had just arrived in Rio de Janeiro for the first time and, of all the telephone numbers I had been given, this artist was the only person to reply. As luck would have it, he was very familiar with an area of French cultural history which was my field, and we stayed up very late, chatting on a gloomy terrace in Ipanema. Several years went by, he came to Paris, I went back to Brazil a couple of times. In Sao Paulo, as we came away from a party for the Biennial, we took the same taxi. He gave the address of my hotel. Without taking my eyes off the back of the taxi-driver's neck, I drummed my fingers lightly on his thigh. He gave the address of his hotel. The bed stood by a bay window and street signs outside threw blocks of yellow light across it like something out of a Hopper film. He did not lie over me and cover me, he sewed my body with parts of his, reassuring himself that I was there with his hands, his lips, his penis, as well as his forehead, his chin, his shoulders and legs. I felt good, and then I was drowned in the depths of a migraine which terrified him. I could hear him whispering about the time, about all that time. There was no second time with him, either. Later, in another taxi, in Paris this time, as I watched rather than listened to him speaking to me attentively, I was overcome by an intense feeling of joy: I was thinking about the geographical distance between us, the long intervals of time between our meetings which were nevertheless regular - sometimes, if I was travelling through Rio, I might just give him a quick 'phone call; and I thought of that single occasion when time and space came together, and their union formed a perfect architecture.

The other explanation for the limitations in my adventures while travelling is connected with a subject I raised in the first chapter. I liked to discover - on condition that I had a guide. I liked it if a man was introduced to me by another man. I would leave it up to the relationship with the one and with the other, rather than having to think about my own desires and how to satisfy them. In fact, feeling desire and having sexual relations were almost two separate activities; I could want a man very much and nothing might ever actually happen without my feeling any frustration. I was a dreamer, I was gifted when it came to fantasising; a major part of my erotic life was lived like that, heightened by the friction on my vulva, held between my thumb and index finger. Copulating really answered a wider necessity: carving a smooth path for myself in the world. As I have had the opportunity to illustrate, I was evolving in the comfort of a family-like complicity. Something you do not get when you arrive for the first time (and without any specific contacts) in some distant city.

With many men, it is their houses that I remember before anything else. That is not an excuse to underestimate other memories that I have of them, it is rather that they cannot be dissociated from their background, and that it is a spontaneous reconstruction of this background which brings back a moment of affectionate friendship or the details of how we were lying. The reader may well have realised: I quickly take in the setting. When my most intimate opening has given access, I have opened my eyes wide too. I learned to use this method, amongst others, as a way of finding my way around Paris when I was very young. An architect friend whom I used to visit in his Parisian pied-!-terre on the top floor of a new building, so high up that the view from the bed dived straight into the sky, once commented that from my home in the rue Saint-Martin on the Rive Droite to his at the top of the rue Saint-Jacques on the Rive Gauche you just had to follow a straight line. I came to love the area around Invalides when I accompanied a dentist friend on his trips to one of his girlfriends. She had been a successful variety singer in the 1950s and she still had the bland and slightly starchy appeal of record covers of the period. She lay back with lukewarm enthusiasm and I passed the time by playing the aesthete for my own amusement, scorning the pedestal tables cluttered with a collection of tortoises in all shapes and sizes, in stone and in porcelain, and going and gazing through the windows at the sublime proportions of the buildings along the esplanade. Each home elicited a specific way of looking at it. In Eric's apartment, the bed was the dispatching centre in a kaleidoscope of camera lenses, screens and mirrors; in Bruno's, based on the model of Mondrian's studio, a vase of flowers was the only focal point in a space where the door jambs, the beams, the frames of the cupboards and the furniture all seemed to be one continuous unit, all with homogenous proportions, as if the same volume repeated several times served a variety of functions, as if the big dining table, for example, was merely a taller replica of the bed.

I carry in me a sweet nostalgia for large apartments somewhere in Italian cities. When my collaboration with Enzo began he was living in Rome, in what I think was an outlying part of the city, in one of those ochre-coloured buildings which stand apart with unexplained gaps between them. When I compared this place to the suburb of my childhood, I was amazed that there was so much space lying fallow. There must have been a sort of feudal urbanism dictating that each building should be able to project its entire shadow onto the ground in the evening. Inside, the rooms were much larger than those in apartments in a comparable category of building in France. Voices echoed in the bathroom, and the tiling which covered the floor of the entire apartment was so clean that it made it all the easier to appreciate the full extent of the space, as if someone had just finished washing it down in honour of our visit. After a couple of years Enzo moved to Milan. The buildings were older, the apartments even more spacious, the ceilings higher. There was no more furniture. It was such a pleasure wandering around it with nothing on, as pristine as the fresh paint on the walls, as true to myself as the bedroom was true to the essence of a bedroom, furnished as it was with only a bed and an open suitcase! Pulling off my sweater and letting my skirt slip to the floor caused an in-draught which aroused my entire body.

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