The Sexual Life of Catherine M.

In 224 exacting and lucid pages, Catherine Millet, a noted French art critic, scrupulously details her erotic activities during the past 35 years in The Sexual Life of Catherine M. (translated by Adriana Hunter; Grove Press, 224 pages, $23). She had seemingly thousands of men and a smattering of women in scores of settings. Routinely, she had sex with dozens of men in a single gangbang or mingled with more than that number as part of an undulating orgy blob. She fucked in the Bois de Boulogne, on roadsides and at truck stops, in apartments, her dentist's office and the closet of her office at Art Press, the influential journal she cofounded and edits. Regularly, and with the knowledge of her husband Jacques Henric, she attended free-form parties, known in France as partouzes, with fellow seekers of bulk sex.

When this memoir was published in France last year, quickly becoming a bestseller, it was accused?mostly by males?of carrying the American taint of confessionalism and of polluting the public sphere with personal disclosure. Jean-Jacques Pauvert, who published Story of O, damned Millet for being unerotic. Sociologist Jean Baudrillard found her simpleminded because, in his assessment, she equated exposing herself with revealing "truth." She makes no such claim. She doesn't generalize from her experience. Like all narrative with the power to suck people into its web, the book remains focused on specifics, a catalog of behaviors and responses.

The memoir will probably stir similar controversy in the U.S. Western women don't get stoned to death for inserting their uncovered bodies into public space, as law decrees in extremist Islamic theocracies, but candor about female sexuality hasn't exactly been welcomed. Baudrillard, in contrasting covering skin to revealing it, called the veiling of women "an excess of secrecy" and Millet's performance "an excess of indecency." Artists who've enlarged the female sex memoir and dealt intimately with the female body?Hannah Wilke, Carolee Schneemann, Holly Hughes, Karen Finley?have all, at some point, been called dumb sluts.

Millet belongs amid these Pandoras, though she doesn't crusade on the page. She doesn't explain her reasons for writing the book, and there are maddening aspects to her detached and sometimes naive tone. She claims never to have been interested in sex as a subject, only in her own behavior, which is a weird revelation in such a book?not because it's unbelievable but because you'd think she'd have boned up a little on the field, let's say dipped into Krafft-Ebing, Kinsey, Masters and Johnson or Hite. Maybe then, writing about her tendency to fantasize about cocks in her head while being impaled by the fleshly kind, she wouldn't have assumed the practice was just her thing.

Millet hides from questions about her motives, however much she's willing to strip off her clothes for strangers and strip off her privacy for the world. She soft-pedals the risk of disease and other physical costs of her activities, including a bad beating she received against her will and a razor slash at the hands of a jealous lover. She holds much else in reserve, and although at times her voice comes across coy, at others the attitude is: Look, I'll tell you what I want to tell you, and that's as far as it goes; it's all going to be on my terms. Fair enough. With slippery compression, she did tell an interviewer who asked why she'd written the book, "Because it was missing."

Indeed. Millet has much to say that the world needs to contemplate. Her book talks about what is, not what is wished for, and challenges all kinds of romanticized beliefs about what sex should be. She does have one romantic rap of her own: she admits to a taste for self-defilement?she likes being depersonalized, being handed off to men by other men, surrendering her will to anyone willing to steer it, being submerged in a communal heap of body parts where her face isn't distinct. She sees this preference as stemming from her early, devout Catholicism, which was jettisoned at 17 when she began having sex. She depicts her energy for lapping smelly assholes and for being used as a toilet as a form of ecstatic martyrdom, where pleasure flows more from ideas than direct physical sensation. No problem with this interpretation. It's that sometimes Catholic girl gets control of the reins and the narrative goes trotting off Chez Bataille, where Millet prettifies her actions as forms of sacrifice and spiritual longing. As with any romance, the dreamer is jammed from imagining other influences on the story.

Mostly, though, Millet delineates trance states rather than speaks from inside them. She doesn't divide sex girl from culture girl. In her book, culture girl wrote about sex girl as much as sex girl did. Millet refuses to keep these parts of herself in different rooms?that's one significance of her going public. But she presents an even larger gift by refusing to judge herself and sexual activity in general, by creating an atmosphere where new thoughts and perspectives are permitted to fly. This freedom was hard fought for by Millet, and in a way sex served as her charm. She depicts herself as having started out shy, paralyzingly so, a woman embarrassed not only by being embodied but by being Catherine. She didn't think she was pretty, and it pained her. When she leaped into sex, she felt she was entering the world. She was able to be with people, including, soon, denizens of the art world with whom she would make her life. She felt empowered by being desired, although, dreading rejection, she found a context in which?given her infinite eagerness and ideally carved ass?she was unlikely to experience it. Sex itself, not particular acts, functioned as a fetish object, making her feel, just by rubbing against it, that missing parts were being restored.

Though Millet often writes about herself the way a naturalist depicts specimens in a tide pool, she regularly tosses aside her notebook and sings arias to sucking and poking?the most robust one to anal eroticism. She likes having all her orifices consulted (who doesn't?), but the door that leads to her casbah is the anal sphincter. She's reduced to a puddle by giving and receiving analingus. She becomes a vapor when the region between her anus and labia is granted so much as a feather touch. She confides to liking Story of O because the heroine is taken as frequently in the ass as the cunt. In presenting her ass first, Millet is putting forward her best face, as she may conceive of it, and there is merit in this view, considering the melonesque perfection of her tush. A full frontal shot of it adorns the cover of Légendes de Catherine M., a collection of nude photographs taken by her husband. Millet is touching in her vulnerability. She isn't boastful or preening on the page. Rather, she's scrupulously uncensored and especially brave in her admission that she's often felt little pleasure in sex.

It may be hard to believe, but until she was 35, Millet never thought sex could provide anything like the pleasure of masturbating. She didn't assume that bodily gratification was what she should expect. The inclusion into her sex story of sadness, deprivation, ignorance and dumb repetition?though absent grievance or a sense of herself as a victim, which she wasn't?may be her riskiest transgression. The book doesn't allow the reader to enter a pornotopia, where the sheets are always fresh and the skin miraculously healed of scars and bruises. Millet's boudoir is more fetid, more bleak and boring, at its center a drama that needs repeating over and over, because part of what is desired?to be wanted and known?can't be found with strangers. There's much to be said for women exploring the menu of male bodies and appetites, but Millet isn't on a quest to know men. Mostly her partners are mere instruments. Of the thousands of cocks she's met, she knows the names of only 49 of their carriers. Never in her book does she wonder about the motivations of her consorts or what they might have been feeling as they rammed into her flesh.

Millet doesn't edit out her frustration and her own smallness because she thinks they are parts of sex. She doesn't think in terms of "good sex" and "bad sex." She doesn't classify her sexual expressions as perverse or normal. To her those terms are as fitting as dressing up runaway horses in evening clothes. Her memoir aids in the rescue of sex from pathologizers?the medical establishment that snatched sex from religious moralizers only to paint smiley faces on some acts and cast furrowed brows at others. To Millet, sex is an immensity in which manifold dramas are enacted, not all of them sweet-smelling or tenderhearted or even aware of themselves as sexual. To Millet, inside women as well as men, libidinal response wears an infinite array of costumes.