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Tuesday, Nov 10, 2009
A French art critic confesses her love for the male organ (the more the merrier) in a new, pleasingly pornographic sexual memoir.
May 22, 2002 | There's group sex on the fourth page and a chapter that begins "I really like sucking men's cocks." But the most shocking thing about "The Sexual Life of Catherine M.," an unfettered memoir that has become a bestseller in France and is just now being published in the United States, is that it isn't particularly shocking at all. A good quarter of the time, it works as pornography (and I use the term in a descriptive sense, not a judgmental one); the rest of the time it's a rumination on the nature of desire and pleasure and the experience of living a life that is specifically arranged to let desire and pleasure have their way with you. It's titillating, explicit, dryly funny and sometimes exceedingly puzzling.
The only truly shocking thing about it is that it was written by a straight woman and not a gay man.
The author of "The Sexual Life of Catherine M." is Catherine Millet (her real name), an art critic and the longtime editor of the French journal Art Press. Millet, who is now in her early 50s, has written eight books of art criticism. In Vogue magazine last year, Francine du Plessix Gray characterized her as "a demure woman ... who wears white dimity blouses with her prim black suits."
Since being a teenager in the 1970s, Millet has had sexual encounters with hundreds -- in fact, a countless number -- of men. Millet has taken and been taken in public parks, in sex clubs and cozy apartments, at birthday parties that would segue gracefully (or feverishly) into artfully arranged orgies. She also recounts a memorable episode in a delivery van parked outside the Soviet Embassy in Paris, where she was visited by a succession of men who rocked her world so hard that her friend Éric, her protector and cruise director during such sessions, had to bring the evening to a close partly because the van was in danger of tipping over.
"The Sexual Life of Catherine M." is a dare to every human being, particularly every woman, who claims to be sexually open. No woman has ever written a book like this. Millet speaks with so much matter-of-fact assurance about her sexuality and her exploits that she's bound to make enemies, even among those who insist they're anything but prudish. (Beware any human being who begins a sentence with the innocently sinister phrase "I'm no prude, but ...," inevitably a prelude to superiority and judgment.) Millet is unapologetic about her adoration of cocks, and lots of them, preferably all at once. And she never adopts the half-defensive, half self-congratulatory tone of so many women writers who fancy themselves sexually free; her sentences never scream, "Look what a groovy libertine I am!"
Millet is too busy for that: Too busy taking on all cummers, allowing herself to be stroked and pawed, masturbating alone or with a partner, perfecting the art of the blow job. She wants to be where the action is and, in pursuit of it, lives out a glorious perversion of the Puritan work ethic. No idle hands for her; she likes to keep busy. "In the biggest orgies in which I participated ... there could be up to about 150 people (they did not all fuck, some had come to watch), and I would take on the organs of around a quarter or a fifth of them in all the available ways: In my hands, my mouth, my cunt and my ass. Sometimes I would exchange kisses and caresses with women, but that was only ever secondary."
