The Sexual Life of Catherine M
Catherine Millet Serpent's Tail, 186pp, £12
ISBN 1852428112
Catherine Millet is a demurely dressed, strong-featured, jolie-laide (or laide, in her own self- deprecating account) Frenchwoman of 54 who edits Art Press, a respected French art magazine. She is married, with no children. So far, so unremarkable. But Mme Millet recently made the news with a decidedly un-demure work of sexual confessions, The Sexual Life of Catherine M, which Edmund White called, in a dream quote for the publisher, "the most explicit book about sex ever written by a woman". Having sold 400,000 copies in France and completely divided the critics, it is now published here in translation.
The hot questions in the debate so far seem to have been: well, is it pornographic? Is it erotic? Is it Proustian? (I'll give you a quick answer to this one: no. Especially in Adriana Hunter's heavy-footed translation: "How many times don't people say 'Look!' when they're fucking? [sic]". Proust never wrote like that.) But is it feminist? Is it a milestone on the path towards female sexual liberation? Or not?
First, the plot. Well, there is no plot. By page 5, Millet has plunged us into her account of multi-partner couplings: on a sunny hill above Lyons, in the woods at night, on car bonnets, in anonymous flats, on tables whose wood rubs roughly against her back, in toilets - you name it, she and her lovers have been there. The book has no conventional narrative line, just a grid of structuralist-influenced chapter headings: Numbers, Space, Confined Space, Details. The curious reader, however, can slowly piece together an autobiographical story that is a thousand times more personal and more plaintive than Millet's flat, affectless accounts of oral, anal and vaginal penetration by men whose faces and personalities we for the most part never see.
She grew up in a relatively poor family in a cramped three-room apartment where she had to share a bed with her mother, and had her brother sleeping in a bed alongside. Father does not seem to have been around. Her mother admitted having had seven lovers (which shocked Millet at the time), yet insisted that her teenage daughter wear restricting undergarments and chastised her for masturbating. At 12, the grand-father of a friend of hers touched her breasts. Millet, who did not like her body or her face, was painfully shy and awkward in company as a young woman, and her first romantic liaisons ended in rejection.
Sexual availability seems to have been something she learnt to offer as a way of avoiding rejection, defying her mother and dealing with the social insecurities inevitable for a girl from her background trying to move into a different social world. "I only really relaxed when I had removed my dress or my trousers. My true clothing was my nudity, which shielded me."
She was not the initiator, sexually, but practised perfect receptivity and prided herself on being totally available - something she herself characterises as "passivity". For a very long time - she seems to find this hard to write about - she herself did not have orgasms, so she provided pleasure rather than taking it.
It's a long way from my idea of liberated female sexuality, which might include orgasmic pleasure and the freedom both to make advances and to say "No". In the background there are always powerful male "fixers" who showcase Millet's sexual talents or arrange fixtures for her like high-class pimps: Claude, Eric, and finally the man she marries, Jacques Henric, who prefers photographing (and penetrating) her naked outdoors to setting up orgies.
Nevertheless, The Sexual Life of Catherine M has aspects of genuine liberation. It is still daring for a "respectable" intellectual woman to reveal everything about her sexual history, without shame. It defies the convention, deeply rooted in the logics of different male and female strategies for reproductive success, that men are admired for promiscuity, and women despised. (But in a way, Millet proves the truth of those evolutionary logics, for she has not had children. This means she has no one to embarrass or hurt by her frankness.) Because she has studied her subject in depth, she is interesting when she starts documenting her observations of different kinds of penis, and it is refreshing to read a woman genuinely knowledgeable about male sex organs, willing to give oral sex, and not opposed on principle to penetration.
Why, then, am I sounding so lukewarm? Because this static, episodic book is not really satisfactory either as erotica or as pornography. Both kinds of sexual writing require a story, however rudimentary, with sensory details, just as the movement in real life from arousal to orgasm has its own story. There is no storytelling in Catherine Millet's pages. Sex, in this chilly, busy, freeze-frame world, is not much fun, never funny or affectionate, and rarely ecstatic; nor does it produce children. So what was the point of it all for her, exactly?
Maggie Gee's most recent novel, The White Family (Saqi), has been shortlisted for the Orange Prize
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