French Art Mag Editor Bares All. - La vie sexuelle de Catherine M - Legendes de Catherine M - Review - book review

Art in America, July, 2001 by Raphael Rubinstein

Until this spring, Catherine Millet, long-time editor of the respected French monthly Art Press and author of a survey of contemporary French art, was hardly known outside art-world circles. Her status changed dramatically, however, with the publication in April of La vie sexuelle de Catherine M. (The Sexual Life of Catherine M.), a 221-page volume in which Millet recounts her myriad amorous adventures in graphic detail. The book, published by Seuil, quickly became a sensation in France, selling over 120,000 copies by mid-May and occasioning a media frenzy. "Sex, when women tell all," blared the cover of the May 24-30 issue of the French news weekly Le Nouvel Observateur, which prominently featured Millet in a lengthy report on new sexual frankness among French women writers and filmmakers.

In La vie sexuelle de Catherine M., Millet, who is 53, does indeed tell all, recounting her erotic life from her teenage initiation to recent plein-air fucks in the French countryside with her husband, novelist Jacques Henric. The parts of the book that have drawn the most attention are those in which Millet describes her passion for group sex, which, by her account, she has indulged in at friends' houses, in swingers' clubs, in the Bois de Boulogne and in various parking lots on the outskirts of Paris. Near the beginning of the volume, which is written in a cool, matter-of-fact style, Millet calculates that her group-sex encounters have involved some 150 men over the years, though with characteristic precision she breaks this figure down into spectators and active participants. Her tales of partouzes (orgies) are followed by erotic encounters with co-workers, art critics, artists, her dentist (who kindly refrains from billing her after their in-office encounters) and numerous other men whom she barely knows. (Although Millet uses only first names in her memoir, denizens of the French art world will probably have little difficulty in identifying some of her partners.) She also offers detailed accounts of anal and oral sex, an amourous encounter with another woman, the joys of masturbation and her favorite erotic fantasies.

For all its clinical attention to the mechanics of sex, the book is not without passages of self-reflection. In one, Millet finds a parallel between her editorial and sexual activities, describing herself as "perfectly available" as both sexual partner and editor because she doesn't "fasten on an ideal to attain any more in love than in professional life." She continues:

I was considered a person without limits, exceptionally lacking in inhibitions, and I've had no reason not to stay this way. My memories of orgies, of nights passed in the Bois and in the company of one of my pal/lovers, are joined together like rooms in a Japanese palace. You seem to be in an enclosed room until a partition slides back, revealing a further suite of rooms, and if you go forward, more walls open and close, and if there are enough rooms, the methods of moving from one to another are incalculable.

Appearing at the same time as La vie sexuelle de Catherine M., and no doubt adding to the storm around it, was Legendes de Catherine M., a book in which Henric recounts his 30-year-long practice of taking nude or semi-clothed photographs of Millet, often in public places. Reproduced among the pages of Henric's text, which is published by Denoel, are dozens of black-and-white shots of Millet exposing herself in a deserted train station, on a country lane, perched on a truck or, more conventionally, in a hotel room. Perhaps the oddest image in the book is one of Millet standing alongside the grave of Walter Benjamin in Port-Bou, Spain, her summer dress unbuttoned to reveal her breasts and pubic area. Throughout the book, Henric alternates diaristic entries about his and Millet's photographic experiments with esthetic and philosophical speculation.

So, will U.S. readers get a chance to savor--or perhaps be put off by--Millet's confessions? Rumors that the German rights to La vie sexuelle de Catherine M. were auctioned in May for $400,000 suggests that a readership for the book exists beyond the borders of France. Thirty-one years after the publication of Kate Millet's ground-breaking Sexual Politics, another Millet may soon be making her contribution to American erotic discourse.