The Sexual Life of Catherine M.  by Catherine Millet

Y – A – W – N  .  .  .  Who would have thought a book about sex could be so boring!

In this supposed erotic memoir, Catherine Millet writes about her adventures as a very willing participant in countless anonymous gang-bangs and orgies over a few decades in France, in various locations from truck-stops and carparks, to fine apartments and maison throughout the city and countryside.   

Millet, a high-ranking member of the French art world and intelligencia, and working within the milieu of ‘70’s Feminism, does assume for herself an unabashed and unapologetic sexual life, without any moral constraints.  If there were prizes for that, then she should get one.  A woman with seemingly no female friends, she has many male companions, but seems uninterested in their personalities or characters. Her attitudes towards men are friendly and loving, but towards women she displays an indirect aggression.  Sleeping with seemingly thousands of other women’s husbands, she describes how she would delight in using the wife’s bathtowels to wipe between her legs after sex with the husband.  Telling of her screaming tantrums when other female orgy participants were prettier than her, or of the scorn she felt for the other women who were “making a show” of enjoying themselves (admitting that she herself got little pleasure from the events, other than being “completely available”), she even sets out on numerous occasions with her guy pals to trick and trap lovelier and more innocent girls into the gang’s activities.

Sex for her is without any of its magic – no dance of seduction, no psychological probing, no questions posed, so that in the end for Millet, it is all just about mucus membranes. 

As for the actual writing, one has to wonder how someone of her professional standing could be such a poor communicator.  Filled with painterly expressions and academic posturings, Millet seems to lose the thread of her own musings – using half parentheses, unmatched commas, and seemingly forgetting, or getting bored, with what she was going to say.  A lot.  There may be some small excuse here in that the work I read was translated, but she generally talks a whole lot about nothing of interest to anyone else.  Offering no humour or wit, and neither understanding nor questioning herself or others, the book is just one scene after the other of multiple penises.  Describing her body as a “spunk bag”, her writing is clumsy, dull and aggravating.  Millet seemingly communicates only via her three gaping, greedy orifices.

I thought there was to be one interesting part in this very disappointing memoir when the author attempted to investigate jealousy, which would have been fascinating in the context, but Millet again comes up with nothing, except to reveal much later that the mere thought of another woman using her towel horrified her “as much as an epidemic of leprosy”.

As a supposed work of erotica, this one is a big droop.  And if I read one more memoir by some famous slut confessing that as a little girl she fervently resolved to become a nun, I will up-chuck.