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The Sexual Life Of Catherine M

by Catherine Millet, translated by Adriana Hunter

Serpent's Tail $180

WHEN IT COMES TO sexual politics, good girls vote conservative. The perils of promiscuity - from a bad reputation to an unwanted baby - mean they will have sex only after much persuasion, with a view to marrying and being monogamous.

Bad girls see things differently. Fifty-four-year-old French art critic Catherine Millet, in her tell-all sexual memoir, claims to have had sex indiscriminately with thousands of men, most of them strangers in orgies. But readers seduced by this title into expecting erotic tales are in for a disappointment. While Millet has sex, loads of it, it seems unlikely that her exploits bear any resemblance to the fantasies of the average girl, whether she's good, bad or otherwise.

Millet's preferred method is anal sex and she speaks of numerous occasions when 20 or more men would sodomise her in an evening. Only once does she confess that: 'It did at the end hurt.' She prides herself on having had sex with any man who wanted it: 'I was completely available . . . I was seen as someone who had no taboos, someone exceptionally uninhibited.'

What's odd about this testimony though is her apparent lack of enjoyment of sex itself. Although she has taken part in group sex from age 18 onwards, when someone asks her when she is 30 what a female orgasm is, she isn't sure. She doesn't even discover until she experiments on her own with a Japanese dildo. Later she writes: '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.' Her motivations lie elsewhere, though exactly where is never clear.

She does at one point explore the idea of an 'inclination for self-abasement'. When asked how she can have sex with a man who has no personal hygiene and lives in a filthy hovel, she rants about the delights of sewers and then says: 'To **** above and beyond any sense of disgust was not just a way of lowering oneself, it was, in a diametrically opposite move, to raise yourself above all prejudice.' But this line of thought isn't explored further, and she offers no evidence of an abused childhood or other emotionally damaging experiences.

Her premise in writing this memoir is that she is just telling it like it was, but even here she's lying by omission. Other than a brief mention of venereal diseases at the beginning, she tells us nothing about those she must have contracted. She uses no contraception, but an abortion is only mentioned once, and even then only in passing. She would like to have us believe that she has had her cake and eaten it too, but the real world just isn't like that.

The most frustrating thing about her writing though is that she doesn't narrate chronologically. She skips backwards and forwards in time, jumping from one orgy to another. It all ends up blurring into one long stream of consciousness with no distinctive storyline, characters or setting. Whether or not something has been lost in translation from the original French is hard to say, but this book was an instant best-seller in France selling more than 350,000 copies last year.

Much of the attention Millet has attracted is due to the fact that she is already known in France as the editor of respected art journal Art Press. Her career as an art critic may give another clue to her reasons for writing this book. Art Press tends to favour startling, uncomfortable images. Millet believes that the purpose of art is to disgust and shock, and you can see the same traits in her memoir. It's as if she's saying: 'Look at the awful things I did! Haven't I stirred you out of your safe little world?'

It doesn't matter whether you like her or not, it's controversy she wants. And reactions from the press have provided plenty of that: Edmund White on the BBC said it was 'the most explicit book about sex ever written by a woman'; the New Yorker called it 'chronic vulgarity'; and nerve.com called it 'faux intellectual vagina-speak'. It's safe to say that, as in most things, Catherine M has already got what she wanted.



Sexual liberation a sordid affair