Catherine's sex life: Too much information

I first noticed "The Sexual Life Of Catherine M." (Grove Press, $23, 209 pp.) on the beach. How rare is it to see two copies of the same book on the same beach, unless it's maybe John Grisham or Tom Clancy? This was, after all, a beach in New Jersey.

The next time I noticed it was on the subway. There was a woman hunched over it like she was studying the curlicues on the Gutenberg Bible. (Now that I know what's INSIDE the book, I might know why she was hunched over, but LET'S NOT GO THERE, OK?)

Anyway, I could see part of the cover, and there appeared to be a nekkid woman inside the capital "O" in "The Sexual Life Of." Was it Catherine M.? More important, what does Catherine M. do when she gets nekkid?

Then, without ever looking up a review or trying to find out anything about it, this book -- this FRENCH book, as it turns out-- kept popping into my field of vision, and, by osmosis, I picked up bits and pieces from e-mail and conversation.

"Have you read Catherine M.?"

"No."

"I'm dying to know what you think."

"What's it about? Is it like 'The Story of O'?"

"It's about this French art critic who has slept with hundreds of men."

"They do that in France."

Well, there are probably women who do that everywhere -- Saudi Arabia excepted -- but what made this book better than, say, www.sluttybehavior.com on the Internet? I haven't seen this much excitement about a sex book since Xaviera Hollander's "The Happy Hooker," but maybe that's because the French sort of own this category.

After all, the French not only came up with "The Story of O" in the Fifties, but the novel "Emmanuelle" by Emmanuelle Arsan in the Sixties. "Emmanuelle" is supposedly a true account of this French wild woman who hung out in Thailand with her incredibly understanding diplomat husband -- who didn't care who she went to bed with because he believed in "free love" -- and a bunch of other rich French people who lived in Southeast Asia and liked to (a) have sex, and (b) make long boring speeches about the meaning of sex.

De Gaulle himself hated "Emmanuelle" so much that he tried to get it banned, and in the course of defending it the publisher had to admit that there was no Emmanuelle Arsan and that the book had been written by a guy named Maryat Rollet-Andriane. Then the author of "The Story of O" came clean in the Nineties, revealing that the narrative didn't really happen but was written by a French mistress for her married lover.

"The Sexual Life of Catherine M.," on the other hand, seems to be the real deal. Catherine Millet is editor of the French art magazine Art Press, and she doesn't make any secret of her orgy-loving lifestyle. There's her picture, right on the endflap, short hair, long bangs, Gallic nose, giving us this frank sidewise look, a little mischievous, as though to say "Only one thing on MY mind!" I keep comparing the author's photo to the nekkid woman in the "O," who has a lot more hair and a foreshortened nose, but that could be because she's looking directly at the camera.

So anyway, long before it swept the Jersey Shore, the book was a best-seller in France and other European countries, and all we were waiting for was the English translation by Adriana Hunter, who came up with a whole lot of fancy ways to describe the Sign of the Triple-Humped Couch Weasel.

Obviously, I took the bait.

First lemme sum up the plot here:

As a young French girl, I always had dreams and fantasies about being with many men at the same time. I lost my virginity in a tent at the age of 18, fought with my parents, then ran off to live with a guy. Then I lived with another guy, and another guy, and another guy, and all these guys liked to share me with other guys, and I enjoyed that because it doesn't really matter to me who uses my body because I can find something to appreciate even in ugly foul-smelling fat people. Sometimes we did it in cars and parks around the Bois de Boulogne (I gather that this is a rough area frequented by truck drivers), and sometimes we did it at private homes where there were 150 guys, and I would usually be with about 30 of them before the night was over. Then we started doing it in soccer stadiums and abandoned churches in the countryside, but mostly I would do it at all times of the day and night while I was working, often with artists and business associates. I wouldn't flirt. I would just be available. I made a decision to make myself available at all times, because it made me feel free.

Not that different, when you get right down to it, from "Emmanuelle." The difference is that this woman has no particular philosophy other than, "Well, here I am." She makes occasional references to jealousy, but she does it in a distant way, as though she's describing a person she doesn't know.

What this is, really, is "Reality TV for French Intellectuals." If Fox did the TV version, it would be called "Partners," and each week the hand-held documentary camera would follow her on some furtive journey that has no real foreplay -- she doesn't even like to go to dinner first -- and then close-ups of the infinite ways in which her body can be used and manhandled until all the males within range of the viewfinder have been satisfied and she drapes her dress back over her sore body and goes home.

At the same time, it's a chick book. Nothing about the couplings is particularly erotic, and she's an art critic above all, beginning her section on orgies "Communities" like this:

"There are two ways of envisaging a multitude, either as a crowd in which individual identities become confused, or as a chain where, conversely, what distinguishes them from one another is also what binds them, as one ally compensates for another's weaknesses, as a son resembles his father even while he rebels. The very first men I knew immediately made me an emissary of a network in which I could hope to know all the members, the unwitting link in a family of biblical scale and diversity."

In other words, her role in life is to be the woman that ALL guys have in common. She's the cement for male bonding. But notice the passive voice. She's not writing about herself. She's writing about Catherine M., this strange being she observes on a canvas -- actually, it would have to be a mural, a long wall mural made up of just about every man in Paris.

You wouldn't necessarily wanna get too close to this mural, though, because when she gets into the details -- how her body feels after it's been used in the same particular position for hours, her point-of-view shots of grimacing faces and sweaty chests, the way things look, smell and taste when you're viewing them upside down through the open door of a car while your body is otherwise occupied -- you start to think: WAY too much information. Then when she gets into the nitty-gritty of her erogenous zones and how she likes to use them, you're pretty much into the arena of wishing you didn't have that imprinted on your brain.

The particulars of a sex act are fascinating to two people -- or, in her case, 20 people. The ones who are involved in it. Otherwise it starts to become like a long list of adjectives describing how individual candies taste, only they're candies that exist in a parallel universe you'll never enter. The book is exotic, almost like a National Geographic documentary on an idiosyncratic African tribe. And what strikes me about it is that the men are faceless. I know the names of some of them, and I know the professions of others, and I know about their kinky habits and hygiene. But they all ultimately blend together to become one bland Ueber-Penetrator, making me think that sleeping with all the men in the world is a way to never sleep with anyone at all.

It's a strangely emotionless book. You find yourself wondering, "Exactly what is she going for here?" I mean, at least when you read the sexual memoirs of a male -- Casanova or Don Juan -- the story is full of humor and suspense. He has to pursue the prey, and a lot of things are gonna go wrong before he's successful. With this book, all you have to do is touch her and she's on her back, preferably with a minimum of conversation. It's one of those post-modern things, I guess, with everything stripped to its bare essentials.

The only clue she gives as to her motivation -- and it's not much of one -- is that she was "carried by the conviction that she rejoiced in extraordinary freedom." And yet she doesn't go racing down the Seine in a speedboat, feeling the wind in her hair. If anything, she's the opposite. She's totally passive. A man doesn't read this book and think, "Wow, wonder if I can get her phone number." Instead you think, "Who has that much TIME?"

What does it all mean? I'm not sure. Maybe it's one of those French things, where they flaunt their bohemianism as a way of assuring themselves they're artists. Whatever it is, it just doesn't seem like much FUN.

This just in from the publicist at Grove Press: Yes indeed, the nekkid woman in the "O" on the cover is Catherine Millet in her prime. I'm looking at it again now. Her torso is twisted, but her face is blank. Her bangs are so long you can't really see her eyes. It's a picture that says, "I'm bored, might as well have sex."

Think I'll go wash up now."

Joe Bob Briggs writes a number of columns for UPI and may be contacted at [email protected] or through his Web site at joebobbriggs.com. Snail mail: P.O. Box 2002, Dallas, Texas 75221.