I’ve got some thoughts on a book I finally finished reading recently, The Sexual Life of Catherine M.
The reason I’m bothering to write about this book at all is because I think the author has completely detached herself from her subjects (herself, her sex life), and so the book reads more like an account of what her body does while it is engaged in various sexual acts, while her consciousness is somewhere else trying to be all French-ly[1] philosophical and intellectual. The irony is that the novel isn’t filled with awesome, sexy joie de vivre, but a strange coldness.
I started to suspect early on in the book that the author might have been sexually abused as a child and had written this account of her sex life as an attempt to rationalize her habits. Later in the book she does recount an incident; in a section where she is talking about the pleasures of contrasting tactile sensations she rapidly segues–
On the subject of seeking out a contrast between rough surfaces and soft ones, I have just remembered one of the first times I experienced an erotic emotion as such. My brother and I would be sent to spend a holiday with some friends of our father’s whose numerous grandchildren played with us. One day, the grandfather, who was ill, had to go to bed and I went to see him in his room. As I sat on the edge of the bed, he started to examine my face. Feeling his way with his fingers, he commented that I had a very fine jawbone; when he reached my neck, he diagnosed that later in life I might be susceptible to goiter. These contradictory observations worried me. Then, slipping his hand under my blouse, he brushed past my breasts, which were barely beginning to bud. And as I stayed there, silent and motionless, he said that when I became a woman, I would really like it when people stroked my “titties” like this. I still didn’t move, or perhaps just my head, which I turned toward the wall as if I couldn’t hear what I was being told. The callused surface of his big hand snagged on my skin. I was aware for the first time of the stiffening of my nipple. I listened to his predictions. I was suddenly brought to the threshold of womanhood, and I felt a sense of pride. A child forges its power in the enigma of its future life. So, though disconcerted by this gesture, for which I had no prepared response, I turned back to look at this man, whom I was fond of, on his bed. I felt sorry for him because his wife was crippled, obese, her legs covered in suppurating sores that he dressed meticulously morning and evening. At the same time, his grayish face and his lumpy nose made me want to laugh. I extricated myself gently.
That evening, lying in the bed that I shared with one of his granddaughters, I told her about the episode. He had touched her, too. We looked each other right in the eye as we spoke, trying to measure the magnitude of our discovery in the other’s gaze. We were pretty sure the grandfather was doing something forbidden, but the secret that he gave us to share was far more valuable than some moral whose meaning was, anyway, no clearer…
Man, I’m sorry, but that does not belong in a section about contrasting tactile sensations. That belongs in a section on “Why the hell did that old man touch my breasts? And other little girls? Asshole!”
A couple of other shorter quotes to make a point:
As I have described at the beginning of this chapter, I have spontaneously slipped under other people’s skin in an effort to feel myself what they were feeling. That is not just a turn of phrase; I have surprised myself by mimicking habits and exclamations that were peculiar to someone else. Which amounts to saying that I often relegated my own pleasure to the background.
and…
Looking back on it, I now realize just how patient I was in sexual relationships. Feeling nothing, not minding and accomplishing were the whole ritual to its conclusion. Not getting hung up about having the same tastes as my partner, getting on with it, etc. I was indifferent because mentally I was so well tucked away in my very core that I could control my body as a puppeteer does a puppet.
To me, these are the kind of things someone would say if they had lost all sense of where they stopped and other people began. I would bet lots of money on the fact that some pretty messed up stuff was done to this woman when she was a girl (whether mental, physical, sexual). Unfortunately, this happens to a lot of people. So what I find disturbing is the fact that this book is billed on the cover as titillating French erotica, instead of a candid and kind of weird memoir of a woman who had sex with a lot of people.
Salon.com says on the cover of my copy, “Holds you tighter than a pair of handcuffs.”
Entertainment Weekly proclaims, “The garrulous ladies who lunch in Sex and the City would be speechless.”
“This may be one of the most erotic books ever written.” (Playboy)
“…A fascinating romp.” (Newsweek)
People. No. NO. This is not hot stuff. This is sad stuff. I seriously don’t care how many sexual partners someone has (as long as they aren’t hurting people or spreading STDs), but when they mention getting felt up by a family friend and then go on to describe their own sex acts with the heart of a DMV employee giving driver training tests, people should be asking themselves, “WTF?” I want alarm bells to go off in people’s heads! I want people to narrow their eyes and wonder, “Hey, why doesn’t she seem to be enjoying all this hooking up?” I don’t want a book like this to be a NYT best-seller because people think they’re reading the hottest fictional book on sex ever written.
One last quote. In the “new afterword” by the author, she says,
Those who are surprised by the “distance” I maintained as I wrote my account are the ones who, in fact, surprise me. Can a reasonable human being have anything other than a specular relationship with themselves? Is it because it is about sex that people expected me to surrender my own awareness as we do in the throes of ecstasy?
Reason does not preclude emotion. You don’t have to surrender self-awareness in order to write about genuine emotion. In fact, it makes really awesome writing if you don’t.
Yugh… the whole thing leaves a bad taste in my mouth. I could rant on about this for so many more pages…
[1]Circle-ly square. Squarely circle.
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