The Sexual Life of Catherine M. (2001) written by Catherine Millet, founder of Art Press magazine, is a brutally honest account of her very personal and unique sexual journey. As an art critic Catherine creates her story in a most visually appealing way. From the start the reader is drawn into her vibrant sense of language, "A dick that is constantly exposed demands to be looked at, it provokes sexual excitement with its smooth monolithic contours, whereas the foreskin that you can play back and forth, uncovering the glans like a great bubble forming on the surface of soapy water, elicits a more subtle sensuality, its suppleness spreading in waves to your own orifice" (8).
The book is divided into four thematic chapters: Numbers, Space, Confined Space, and Details. This is as defined and as organized as the story gets. Catherine dives in and out of her sexual encounters with no sense of linear time, rather her experiences all seem to happen as if simultaneously. She will touch upon her childhood fantasies in one paragraph and her mature sexual realizations only a few sentences down. With every layer she paints into the story, one sees a clearer image of the woman behind the hyper-sexual enigma known as Catherine M. Although even by the end of the book, the mental image is quite impressionistic, recognizable only from a distance.
In the chapter titled Numbers - Catherine writes of her obsession with numbers, how as a child she asks herself "what would be an acceptable number of husbands?" (2) Fittingly later in life she loses her virginity in a group sex situation "There were five of us," she writes, "three boys and two girls... (4)" Her fascination with numbers continues to escalate with her experience. "In the biggest orgies in which I participated, from that time on, there could be up to about 150 people...and I would take on the cocks of around a quarter or a fifth of them in all the available ways: in my hands, my mouth, my cunt and my ass"(10). Her first "relationship" is one with a man named Eric whose primary purpose it seems is to escort her to orgies. "With Eric the regime intensified, not only because he took me to places where I could...make myself available to an incalculable number of hands and penises, but more particularly because the sessions were well organized" (11).
Space is an account of her sexual encounters in various spaces including orgies in public parks, interludes in Parisian buildings full of architectural character, and sexual escapes in the beautiful French countryside. She writes, "...natural spaces do not feed the same fantasies as urban spaces" (105). It is in this chapter that the reader becomes acquainted with Jacques, a lover with whom she doesn't participate in orgies and ultimately the man who becomes her husband.
Additionally she writes of how she had to earn her space and distance from her family of origin in order to begin learning about herself and her sexuality. She writes, "I was born into a family of five living in a three-room apartment. And the first time I escaped the place was the first time that I fucked...I had to cover geographical distances to reach parts of myself" (115).
Confined Space recounts her sexual experiences in places such as bunk beds, stairwells, saunas, offices and even more obscure spatial concepts such as the body as it suffers through a migraine. "There is nothing left between my head, which has been turned to stone by the viselike grip of pain, and the skin on my buttocks where the last few caresses linger" (134).
In the chapter titled Details, Catherine discusses the minutiae associated with the sexual act. She discusses her love affair with giving head, "During an exploration carried out simultaneously with fingers and tongue, you come to know every last detail of its topography and even its tiniest reactions - perhaps better than the owner itself" (163). She describes how Jacques loves and appreciates her ass and how she explored one lover "from his earlobes to the shifting skin attaching his testicles" (170).
One of the most striking features about the story is the distance the author takes from her subject, who is of course herself. She recounts her innumerable encounters with very little emotion and an almost sterile eye of a physician observing the symptoms of his patient. It's disconcerting to be witness to this remove while simultaneously being cognizant that the author is indeed the subject. In one sense it seems this may just be a literary tactic that keeps Catherine Millet separate from Catherine M., but on the other it becomes apparent that Catherine the author and the subject both lived and relived her sexuality with an overwhelming sense of remove. On page 101 she writes "While I sought out Jacque's organ as if I were going to yoke it up to myself, I caught a glimpse of myself in the rearview mirror, with my body connected to his and to the whole background. When I see myself in the act, my features seem devoid of expression...my gaze is vague, looking inward as onto a open space..."
Later she writes about an encounter in the bathroom, "I intermittently catch sight of my harshly lit face in the mirror...a face that...is almost lifeless. The cheeks are hollow and the mouth half open like a windup doll whose mechanism has wound down...I cannot recognize myself in such a state of release; with a feeling of shame, I reject it" (177).
Ultimately the story is one of sexual awakening, almost as if by means of writing about the sexual life of Catherine M., the author Catherine Millet discovers facts about her sexuality that were before uncovered. "I often relegated my own pleasure to the background. It took me a long time, a really long time, to identify the caresses, the positions, that I liked best" (180). And later she writes, "I wouldn't be exaggerating if I said that until I was about thirty-five, I had not imagined that my own pleasure could be the aim of a sexual encounter. I had never understood that" (186).
Aside from the voyeuristic pleasure of reading the autobiography, and the prurient fantasies that occur as a natural effect of Catherine's sexually charged descriptions, a woman should take from this book a desire to dissemble the pieces of her own sexual life. She should find the motivation to discover the source of her sexuality, examine its present condition and decide how she can move forward on her own unique journey to sexual satisfaction.
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Originally published March 2006 - "Straight Lines and Sexy Curves"