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Underground > Books, Criticism & Writing >

The Sexual Life of Catherine M

  
 
Ariadne
10:19 / 27.09.03
Has anyone read this? I'm about half way through and somewhat bemused by it. It's fascinating, but very different to what I expected.
I suppose I expected to read the story of a very strong woman who, you know, knows what she wants and goes after it. And yet it's not that at all - she's very passive, prefers to be introduced -- or just passed on -- from one man to the next. It's the chance element that she prefers, I think, and she seldom picks up men on her own. Apparently she's the same in her work though, just doing what she's told, more or less (though how that fits with her being fairly high powered and respected, i don't know).

The way it's written is interesting too. Rather than any chronological story, she just jumps back and forth under four chapter headings: Numbers, Space, Confined Space and Details. My edition has an introduction where she talks about why and how she wrote it. She wanted, she says, a collage of images taken from her life over time, giving a more full picture than one straightforward narrative description (sorry, I'm translating this from French sitting in a Web cafe, so I'm paraphrasing madly).

As I say, I'm only part-way through but I would be interested to talk about this if anyone's read it.
 
 
Brigade du jour
03:58 / 11.10.03
No I haven't read it but I will now you've mentioned sexual orgies. Thanks!
 
 
sleazenation
08:32 / 11.10.03
ari are you reading it in french or english?
 
 
Ariadne
11:14 / 24.10.03
Sorry for the delay - I didn't see your message, sleaze. I read it in French and learned some very handy vocabulary. I'm just working out a way to drop my new words into conversation at my French class.
 
 
ibis the being
18:16 / 26.12.07
I just made my way through this one and was hoping to see a little more on the board here about it... perhaps a bump with get more input.

My impressions of the book were much like Ariadne's above. I was expecting erotica or at least well-written pornography of some sort, as advertised on the jacket, but in fact I found Millet's narrative rather horrifying. I'm not exactly sure what the purpose of such a memoir is but it certainly isn't the great expose of female sexuality that some reviewers seem to have claimed... for much of it Millet allows herself to be led around by male friends who arrange group sex scenarios in which she lies passively on a table and lets multiple, usually anonymous men parade through and have a turn with her. She even confesses, toward the end of the book, that for maybe 30 yrs of her seuxal life she didn't even know that women were supposed to experience their own pleasure during sex and all that time her satisfication just came from being a source of pleasure for her male partners.

As much as I pushed myself to read her memoir with a open mind toward whatever brand of sexuality she was relating... I couldn't help but feel frequent repulsion and discomfort with the self-abasement and willing but sort of ignorant degradation that she described. I think what disturbed me most was how she didn't seem to have a great deal of self-awareness about her own sexuality despite the microscope with which she was analyzing it... I felt almost as though I was taking a psychological journey toward an unseen but inevitable mental breakdown with her (but never got there).
 
  
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