Interview: Catherine Millet | Books | The Guardian https://www.theguardian.com/books/2002/may/19/biography.

features

The double life of Catherine M

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

Jessica Berens
Sun 19 May 2002 12.22 BST

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,

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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.

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Interview: Catherine Millet | Books | The Guardian https://www.theguardian.com/books/2002/may/19/biography.features

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

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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

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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,

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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

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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.'

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