The double life of Catherine M

I bought this book when it first came out in the US, in 2002. I think I need to come to terms with me probably being some kind of sex addict. I mean, I'm fine with it but the problem becomes my constant striving to lead a monogamous life and then being disappointed and frustrated because of what one woman cannot do.


By day she was a sought-after curator and well-respected member of the French intelligentsia; by night she was an insatiable hedonist whose passion was indiscriminate sex with anonymous men. And now she's written a shockingly candid and provocative memoir of her experiences. Jessica Berens meets Catherine Millet

Sunday May 19, 2002
The Observer

Catherine Millet does not look like a person who has slept with the whole world. Promiscuity tends to be linked with pneumatic aspects, after all: big tits, prozzie lips, all that. Catherine Millet has bosoms that, as she has said herself, are not 'resplendent'. And she had very bad teeth until she slept with a dentist who made her a present of some new ones.

She is quite a small Frenchwoman, 54, chic in black cardie and Mary-Jane shoes, living in an apartment crowded with modern art near the Bastille in Paris. There are a lot of books, untidy clutter, a lady doing the ironing, a husband upstairs, and copies of Millet's book which show her naked from the back. She is the editor of Art Press, a high-minded arts magazine with a circulation of 30,000 that she launched 30 years ago. She looks like what she is - an intelligent art critic - though she does not have that stern intolerance that sometimes arrives in a mature female intellectual. There is no set mouth or frightening jawline. She is amenable. She laughs. And she has a lot to laugh about nowadays.

Her book, The Sexual Life of Catherine Millet, published in France last year, has sold 400,000 copies and is still inciting worldwide debate. 'This has been one of the happiest times of my life,' she says. 'Not just because the book is a success, but because a lot of people understand it.'

Employing provocative precision and embarrassing honesty, Catherine Millet has exposed herself in print with all the conscientious rigor of a Hustler model posing for a photographer. Her memoir details her sex life, from masturbation as a child to an adulthood where she was propelled by a predilection for group sex. She is a visual person and her facility is to convey images successfully. The prose - never silly, never flowery - is as relentless as that of Henry Miller.

'Today I can account for 49 men whose sexual organs have penetrated me,' she writes. 'But I cannot put a number on those that blur into anonymity.'

Catherine Millet felt most at home lying on a table at a club named Chez Aimé, being penetrated by lines of unknown men. Page 18: 'I was sometimes set upon so violently that I had to hold on to the ends of the table with both my hands and for a long time I bore the scar of a little gash above my coccyx, where my spine had rubbed against the rough wood.'

She liked sex and she particularly liked an orgy. Why? She liked the anonymity, the abandonment, the 'delicious giddiness'. As a young woman she was shy - 'awkward', she says, at making relationships. Strangely, she felt more embarrassed with her clothes on than off; not so strangely, she disliked her body. To achieve transcendence through climax was to leave her self behind.

'I was carried by the conviction that I rejoiced in extraordinary freedom. To fuck above and beyond any sense of disgust was not just a way of lowering oneself, it was to raise yourself above all prejudice. There are those who break taboos as powerful as incest. I settled for not having to choose my partners.'

Cemeteries. Saunas. Train platforms. Store-rooms. Art galleries. Fields. Vans. Oral sex. Anal sex. Abortions. Fat men. Thin men. Filthy, naked men that she never saw again. Ringo who was 'wiry', Claude with a 'beautiful dick', Eric who took her to clubs where 'I could make myself available to an incalculable number of hands and penises.'

There is no youth, or lingerie, or televisual pouting. Catherine Millet does not conform to the mould that contemporary culture has created to define (and incarcerate) a woman's sexuality. She is a middle-aged woman who holds a respected position in the circles of Parisian intelligentsia. Now she is saying things like: 'I could gather together a good many anecdotes concerning the use to which for many years I put my anus.' In British terms, it is as if Joan Bakewell had decided to reveal herself as an insatiable swinger.

The book took her a year-and-a-half to write and was published in France by Denis Roche, who happened to be a friend and live next door to her. His Editions du Seuil publishing house has an established catalogue of avant-garde work. 'He didn't think I would go through with it,' Millet says now. Asked whether she kept a diary, she says no, but for certain things, she has ' une mémoire diabolique!'

Seuil started with a small print run which quickly went into reprint as the book attracted, variously, shocked disapproval and loud applause. There were, as Millet puts it, ' beaucoup des attaques'. She was particularly stung by one 'ex-friend' who accused her of a cynical book motivated by money.

Detractors, ever welcome aids to promotion, included the renowned publisher Jean-Jacques Pauvert, who published the Story of O in 1954 and declared that Millet's book was a victim of the fact that eroticism had been killed by its own ubiquity. Perhaps the bottom has fallen out of the bottom market. The critic Michel Schneider commented that writing about sex was neither politically or socially revolutionary. He resented the idea that the author should labour under the delusion that anyone should care about the nature of her sex life.

Jean Baudrillard weighed in with a characteristically opaque point about nudity and truth. 'If one lifts one's skirt, it is to show one's self, not to show oneself naked like the truth,' he sniped in Libération .

Millet says that the book's detached tone arises from the fact that she did not want to write a pornographic book that established an empathy between author and reader. Yet she does not object to the word pornographic. 'There were people who reproached me for not writing a pornographic book which they could find sexually arousing, while others found certain passages very exciting.'

In other words, she could not win as the debate wavered between the stagnant 'what is pornography?' question (American Vogue said it was, Edmund White said it was not) and the issue of whether acts of sexual transgression still have the power to subvert. This last question holds more relevance in France, where the profane writings of libertinage (and underground anti-monarchy libelles ) were political and seen as having a part in the French Revolution. More recently, pornography and erotic fiction have increasingly come under the scrutiny of post-feminist writers and other academics. The late Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault were instrumental in the reassessment of de Sade and the establishment of Georges Bataille as a dissident hero.

'We had found a ready-made philosophy reading Bataille,' Millet notes in her book. She was also affected by Catherine Deneuve's appearance in Belle du Jour, and though she enjoyed daydreams about being a high-class prostitute, she knew that her 'excessive reserve' would prohibit the negotiations of 'mercenary relationships'.

Catherine Millet did not want to speak, she did not want to be seduced, she did not want to be paid, she did not want to become involved in any S&M power game, she did not even want to flirt; she simply wanted to enjoy a lot of penetrative sex and, on the way, 'satisfy my intellectual and professional curiosity'.

The Sexual Life of Catherine M will be published in England next month by Serpent's Tail, an independent and independent-minded publishing house under the aegis of the quietly anarchic Peter Ayrton. He was tipped off about it by a friend in France and 'made a modest offer'. To his enormous surprise, it was accepted.

'Some London editors have made it quite clear that they did not rate the book,' he says. 'Some have told me it is disgusting. But it has been published throughout Europe - the reaction here is merely a reflection of the conservatism of London publishers.'

Ayrton argues that this is an important book - unique as a sexual memoir written by a woman and important against a backdrop that is fast scorning the effects of the sexually liberated 60s. This repudiation is highlighted in the novels of Michel Houellebecq and was best summed up by Joni Mitchell, who recently said, 'There is no such thing as free love.'

'Catherine Millet is not well known in British intellectual life,' says Ayrton. 'So the book will not have the same impact it had in France. It will probably confirm the British stereotypes of the French as a nation of rabbits. But it will be read by voyeurs curious to know what all the fuss is about, it will be read by the art world who know Millet in her role as a leading curator, and it will be given a sympathetic reading by a Sex and the City generation of women whose sexual encounters are numerous and guilt-free.'

Millet wears her new-found fame with a little discomfort. 'I am always embarrassed when people approach me in the street,' she says. She is set to appear at the Hay-on-Wye festival, where the straight brigade will doubtless be disappointed to learn that she no longer practises the sex that she writes about. She is married to Jacques Henric, an avant-garde poet and novelist, and has been monogamous for eight years. 'I would have liked to have had children,' she says. 'But when the moment came nothing happened, and that didn't matter much.'

Henric has written his own memoir of their life together, Légendes de Catherine M, complete with Readers' Wives-style photographs. Henric, a voyeur, enjoys an open-minded liberality that includes sex in parks and in cupboards. His opus did not sell as many copies - 40,000 or so. Did he mind? 'Oh no,' she says. 'He was pleased. He is a novelist, he is used to selling 4,000.'

The emergence of a voracious woman unsentimentally pursuing her own sensual pleasure without recourse to protocol or pleasantry is particularly potent when accompanied by a high IQ and a talent for articulate communication. Page 165: 'I needed affection, and I found it, but without feeling any need to go and build love stories out of sexual relationships.'

Millet could easily be viewed as a post-fem player, much needed on a field cluttered with Bridget Jones clones, narcissistic una-woman celebrities and idiotic chick-lit types who have created a repressive atmosphere where women never see romance for the lust that it is, where questions are no longer asked and progressive political thought is nonexistent.

For a man, one might imagine, Millet would represent a schizoid Eve - welcome since she is always available, terrifying because her appetite can never be satisfied by his performance.

She does not view her sexuality as 'unusual'. 'Many women have fantasies about this kind of sex,' she points out. 'I happened to play them out.'

The essentially promiscuous nature of the female species has been reflected in recent research into semen conducted by the English scientists R Robin Baker and Mark A Bellis, who wondered why a human penis must ejaculate 350m sperm when a man has no (conscious) desire to fertilise 350m women. The theory of sperm competition says that sperm must be prepared to do battle with the sperm of another man inside a woman because of the possibility that she has 'double mated'. Evolution seems to tell a truth denied by civilisation.

Millet had not launched herself from a feminist or political springboard, and her book may well fit into Barthes's 'author is dead' notion where the reader is the creator of meanings. She was not a bra-burner, partly because she did not wear a bra, or any underwear, for that matter. Her feelings about equality were assimilated into Art Press, which seriously addressed female artists before it was fashionable to do so.

She wrote the book, she says, in order to reintroduce the idea of complexity into an area where theories about the nature of sexual liberty, largely manufactured by men, had become increasingly simplistic. Her achievement, she thinks, is to participate in a movement where sexuality is spoken about honestly. The memoir has helped to trigger openness.

'Sexual mores have evolved recently, nevertheless some sexual practices are only tolerated if they are kept hidden. During publication, people came to me wishing to describe their own experiences, which had been secret. Now they feel they can talk about them without being ashamed. I look forward to a democratisation of sexuality where anyone can reveal their true nature without suffering socially.'

So what made Mademoiselle Millet? She was born in Bois Colombe, a petit-bourgeois suburb of Paris. There was no money. Her father, Louis, was a driving instructor; her mother, Simone, suffered from a mental illness which erupted into wild 'episodes' of insanity and ended in suicide. Her mother's condition meant that, in general, Millet became the adult and the carer.

The apartment was cramped.Her parents did not like each other much and were seeing lovers. Millet shared a bed with her mother until she left home as a teenager. At the age of 23, after the death of her brother, she was subsumed by a feeling of ' mal de peau' ('feeling bad within her skin') and went into psychoanalysis.

There is a natural inclination to view misery as the psychic fuel of her promiscuity and thus condemn her enjoyment as an illness - even to see her as a sex addict in need of a programme, but this would be to agree with all those arrogant old medics who spent years causing untold damage to the normal sensate women they incorrectly treated as 'hysterics'. Millet sees herself as a normal person afflicted with an average ration of angst.

'It is evident that sexuality is formed as a child,' she says, 'but what can happen to one person in childhood can have a different effect on another. It is dangerous to think that the taking of pleasure can be traced to neurosis, for this leads to the religious attitudes that demanded the taking of pleasure demanded atonement.'

Despite the clear honesty with which she presents her sexuality, the Millet of the memoir remains an enigma because she is created by a collection of conflicting paradoxes that serve to brook no definition. There is the dislike of her body, but the comfort with nudity; there is the excessive reserve and the wild exhibitionism; there is the woman who enjoyed hard-core casual encounters from the age of 18, but it was not until the age of 35 that she realised, 'My own pleasure could be the aim of a sexual encounter.' And there is the Catholic girl with the clap.

Is her book an honest representation of herself, I wonder. 'Within the limits I prescribed myself,' she says, 'I believe this is a true account of my personality. But as one learns in psychoanalysis, one is not necessarily accurate about who one is.'