In Which Rain Makes Time for Inspirational Reading and Lachlan Makes a Date

I have discovered an icon, reader.

I can't believe I had not yet heard of the work of Catherine Millet, art critic and author of The Sexual Life of Catherine M. Harvey, my dear sweet decorative roommate, suggested I borrow the book from his shelf, and since then it has been consuming the hours I've spent trapped indoors while I've been menstruating. I'll finish a few pages and then find myself wandering off into beautiful worlds of fantasy, the object in my hands forgotten for a moment. Then I'll remember myself, read a few more pages, and repeat the process. I suppose this makes it a notable example of a book that is not exactly difficult to put down, not because it is dull, but because it is best savored bit by sumptuous bit, like a box of truffles. (I feel similarly about Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities.)

This is the original jacket art:

In the introductory section about Catherine's childhood:

"The little gang would come and wait for me late in the afternoon at the end of the road. They were happy and playful, and spotting them one day, the student's father said with a cordial note in his voice that I must be a hell of a girl to have all these boys at my disposal. In fact, I had given up counting. i had completely forgotten my childhood investigation into the permitted number of husbands. I was not a 'collector' [...] I was happy simply to discover that the delicious giddiness I felt at the ineffably soft touch of a stranger's lips, or a hand fitting itself over my pubis, could be experienced an indefinite number of times because the world was full of men predisposed to do just that. Nothing else really mattered." 

This sets the scene for the rest of the memoir, which details real-life exploits of a woman living in Paris during a sexual revolution that created a cultural space for a new community of sorts. Through this community of sexual liberation, Catherine realizes her apparently inborn sluthood in ways that would make even the most sexually prolific and shameless person blush at times.

Group sex is the most constant preoccupation of her narrative; she describes so many orgies and gang-bangs featuring her own body as the primary cum receptacle in the first fifty pages that I was left feeling a little spinny, like I myself had been through an ordeal. Not to mention the wetness between my legs, the constant presence of beautiful men all around me (*sigh*, my life is so hard), and the fact that I've been in my moon and unable to completely ravage even one of them...

Even as I throb with sympathy with her exploits and her perspectives on them, I am distracted by a few enormous problems. First, the issues of avoiding pregnancy and STD's are only vaguely touched on; she once mentions contracting the clap, but writes it off as "the shared fate of those who fuck a lot." No one in the scenes she describes ever thinks of using any sort of protection, and the hotness of these scenarios is largely predicated upon the immediacy that the privilege to fuck barebacked affords.

I can't go too far in the direction of identifying with this part of her narratives because in the age of HIV and other ever more sophisticated viral assaults on human sexuality that are my generation's inheritance, it is futile and irresponsible for any ethical slut to even dream of hetero intercourse without the necessary inconvenience of condoms. I myself have spent a great deal of effort trying to learn how to make these awkward few moments sexier, to incorporate them as a normal part of sexual interaction, that I keep wondering when these characters in her drama are ever going to get sensible and put on a goddamn rubber. The riskiness of the idea is not even arousing to me, and in fact can be rather distracting.

Second, the brand of sexual liberation in which Millet's real and fantastical sexual universe participates is uncritically heteronormative in its basic assumptions and practice. Men are almost always initiators, and women are almost always passive recipients. Men are seed-sowers and women are fertile fields. Lesbians are treated with tolerance, but as peripheral and somehow sexually crippled outsiders. There are absolutely no gay men, and the one trans person who made a brief appearance was treated as an amusing aside.

The liberation Millet espouses is so limited to one particular orientation--that of an enthusiastically heterosexual and submissive female-bodied woman who, like many porn stars, portrays the image of one who lives to give men pleasure and see them ejaculate, preferably on or inside her--that I am left wondering where all the queers and feminists are in this "revolution." They can't be far away, but Millet does not concern herself with their concerns at all.

I realize that my objections have much to do with generational and cultural differences, and that a woman writing an honest personal memoir cannot be expected to pause to pontificate upon issues that she feels do not concern her. That's why I still love this book. Nevertheless, I thought it deserved mentioning.

Here is a sample passage from her early twenties:

"Victor's birthday parties impressed me the most. [...] Eric would settle me onto a bed or a sofa in one of the alcoves, respecting some vague custom by taking the initiative to undress me and put me on display. He might start to rub me and to kiss me, but then would immediately hand me over to the others. I would almost always stay on my back, perhaps because the other most common position, in which the woman actively straddles the man's pelvis, is less adapted to intervention from several participants and, anyway, implies a more personal relationship between the partners. On my back, I would be stroked by several men while one of them, rearing up to make room and to see what he was doing, would get going in my sex. I was tugged and nibbled in several places at once. [...] What I remember most is the stiffness between my legs after being pinioned sometimes for four hours, especially as many men tend to keep the woman's thighs spread well apart, to make the most of the view and to penetrate more deeply."

This is common, if perhaps even a touch less graphic, of the narrative style of the sex scenes that make up almost the entirety of the book. She speaks of all the loads of sperm dripping from her cunt as man after man after man comes inside her. Men lining up outside a work van on a busy Paris street to step inside and have their way with her. Men throwing her over the hood of a car in a parking deck and fucking her, one after the other. Taking a cock in each hand, one in her mouth, one in her ass, and another in her cunt.

...You get the point. And always, always this rather detached, self-involved tone. Her perfectly amoral attitude towards the pleasure she gets from sex is one of the most amazing things about the book. I am a bit envious of the ease with which she dismisses shame as a sort of baffling vestigial psychological function. If I had been equipped with that attitude from such a young age, reader, I wonder if I might not have ended up in a similar position. (Pun intended.)

I suppose I should at least mention that I have a date with Lachlan sometime this week. I have the vaguest sensation that he was rather intrigued by my reason for turning him down last time. He certainly called back much faster when I asked him if he wanted to see me this week than he ever did before. It might also be that he is in a better mood; his voice sounded less troubled or harassed than the last few times we spoke. I wonder if he might not, in some small way, wish to prove that he is capable of not being a downer. He doesn't need to prove it to me, but I'll be happy to let him try. I'll also be more than happy to show him I'm still attracted to him. Mrrow.

Signing off, lovelies.