Bonjour Means “Do Me!”
September 20, 2003
by Bernard Chapin
Last
week I ran across a book that accomplishes what was hitherto impossible
as it manages to depict sex as a mundane and unexciting activity.
The
Sexual Life of Catherine M. by Catherine Millet contains
pounds of orgies and copulations, but very little in the way of worthy
life.
It concerns a woman who, over many decades, gets teamed more than a group of Clydesdales in a Budweiser Christmas commercial. To be certain, her degeneracy was a bizarre outcome of both nature and nurture. In her youth we foresee the future and it’s not a promising one, “I would take the tiny concave hand of a plastic Ken doll and let it roam over a naked Barbie.” Great!
With a little background information about Millet, the reader will no longer be surprised by the plot. You see our author is a feminist, and not just a feminist but a French feminist, and not just a French feminist but also an art critic. Well of course she is an art critic, what else would she be? A stripper would at least be smart enough to get a few lines of cocaine out of a mindless sexual encounter. Over 209 pages, our French fatale receives nothing except disease and abrasion. She does it all for free and confuses being conned with her own liberation.
Millet is the perfect byproduct of the sexual revolution. She is woman; hear her whore!
The heroine seems to copulate more than she bathes. She gloats her way through the book with a lack of style and a lack of finesse, as the language she uses is vulgar and the book’s characters are not developed. If you’re still awake by the end you’ll witness the result and final accounting: Nameless, faceless primates– 78,932,029; hoodwinked, post-modernist, female–0. It’s an ugly tale of an ugly existence.
This book would be a scandal if it were even remotely entertaining, but it’s profoundly boring. All the sex is factory smut with a dearth of panache in its beds, its fields, its hallways, and its streets. Every locale sees her penetrated in every orifice. She gets ganged and banged in subchapter after subchapter. There is so much anal sex you wonder how this woman could not be incontinent as a result.
It’s all a blur of semen and masochism. Millet does everybody without any prejudice. Some of her inseminators are black, some are white, some are in the country, some are in the city, and frankly “given the conditions under which I gave myself, if my father had happened to be one of the number I would not have recognized him.” Wonderbar! She is a woman with no control over her life and confuses chaos with freedom.
Millet gives us the theme for this tramp-o-rama without irony:
You don’t have to be a great psychologist to deduce from this behavior an inclination for self-abasement, mixed with the perverse intention of dragging others into that same abasement. But this tendency doesn’t stop there; I was carried by the conviction that I rejoiced in extraordinary freedom.
Not only is she quite prescient regarding her own life but she magnificently describes radical feminism in general. That these women abase themselves is their own choice but their self-abasement is never good enough. They need to crusade to ensure the destruction of every other women on the planet. Radical feminists lust for human sacrifice. Without the denigration of other women their “activism” is meaningless. The lie they sell is “the obtainment of extraordinary freedom,” but all they deliver is an ordinary prison cell of a life. After a lost weekend (even if it lasts 50 years) the bill eventually is received, and the gullible few who bought into the lie will suddenly become aware of all they have lost.
In what she desires in a man she informs us of what she lacks in herself. One could argue that a man who is capable of breath would meet her requirements, but she thinks it’s so much more: “If a man’s size is comparable to my own, and I feel an equal division of physical strength in our embraces, I experience a very particular kind of pleasure, which probably includes the desire to feminize the man in question, or even a narcissistic illusion.”
The key word here is “narcissistic.” In case you question, the authoress lets readers know, “I am not short on narcissistic tendencies.” She is one hundred percent correct in this observation. We can be grateful that after years of psychological analysis [I presume] she at least has profited from memorizing the word that is an innate part of her being. We are made to understand that Millet is a freak and that she is a freak who is absorbed in herself to the point where she can’t delineate one human being from another. Millet is clearly wrong about one part of her statement though. Men aren’t feminized by her, but she is dehumanized by them and her own actions.
There is a sunny side to this book, however. If we can somehow get single women to read it, they’ll run from feminism faster than a man from the amorous jowls of Andrea Dworkin. Tell some people about it, and watch the forces that defiled Millet become impotent, historical footnotes.
Bernard Chapin is a writer in Chicago.
