Sex, Not Sexy

Americans who consider themselves sophisticated about sex may nevertheless be startled by the graphic content of The Sexual Life of Catherine M. (Grove Press; 209 pages). Not to worry. The memoir by Parisian art critic and magazine editor Catherine Millet managed to shock even the French.

In an exhaustive — and sometimes exhausting — account of her sexual history from the time she lost her virginity at 18, Millet, 53, details encounters with her husband, colleagues, interview subjects and legions of others (she has lost count of them) that took place at orgies and in museums, storerooms, sports stadiums, her dentist's office and the shadowy perimeters of Parisian parks where she regularly serviced dozens of anonymous men in a single evening.

Interspersed with these clinical accounts are dispassionate dialectics on sexuality and the human condition (Millet is French, after all). What's missing is any satisfying sense of what motivated her exploits, which even by libertine standards seem excessive. The most she offers is that she suffered from social awkwardness, which she learned to defray by lifting her skirts. "I saw the sexual act as a refuge into which I willingly abandoned myself as a way of avoiding embarrassing eye contact," she writes.

Rather than an ardent hedonist, Millet views herself as a passive participant malleable to the desires of others, observing, "I am not docile because I like submission, because I have never tried to put myself in a masochistic situation, but out of a deep-seated indifference to the uses to which we put our bodies." It's unclear, however, why such indifference led her to embrace sex rather than, say, field hockey.

In the opening pages, Millet writes that "until the idea of this book came to me, I had never really thought about my sexuality very much." While this seems hard to fathom, it may explain why the book, though it boasts more sex acts per page than Lady Chatterley's Lover or Penthouse, feels more like a taxonomy of sexual positions than an erotic romp.