The Sexual Life of Catherine M.
By Catherine Millet
Grove Press
Copyright © 2002
Catherine Millet
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0802117163
Chapter One
Numbers
As a child I thought about numbers a great deal. The memories we have of solitary thoughts and
actions from the first few years of life are very clear-cut: they provide the first opportunities for
self-awareness, whereas events shared with other people can never be isolated from the feelings
(of admiration, fear, love or loathing) that those others inspire in us, feelings that, as children, we
are far less able to identify or even understand. I, therefore, have particularly vivid memories of
the thoughts that steered me into scrupulous counting exercises every evening before I went to
sleep. Shortly after my brother was born (when I was three and a half), my family moved into a
new apartment. For the first few years we lived there, my bed was in the largest room, facing the
door. I would lie staring at the light that came across the corridor from the kitchen where my
mother and grandmother were still busying themselves, and I could never get to sleep until I had
visualized these numerical problems one after the other. One of the problems related to the
question of having several husbands. Not the possibility of the situation, which seems to have
been accepted, but the circumstances themselves. Could a woman have several husbands at the
same time, or only one after the other? In the latter case, how long did she have to stay married
to each one before she could move on? What would be an "acceptable" number of husbands: a
few, say five or six, or many more than that-countless husbands? How would I go about it
when I grew up?
As the years went by, I substituted counting children for husbands. I imagine that, in finding
myself under the seductive spell of some identified man (in turn, a film star, a cousin, etc.) and
focusing my wandering thoughts on his features, I perhaps felt less uncertainty about the future. I
could envisage in more concrete terms my life as a young married woman, and therefore the
presence of children. More or less the same questions were raised again: was six the most
"acceptable" number, or could you have more? What sort of age gap should there be between
them? And then there was the ratio of girls to boys.
I cannot think back to these ideas without connecting them to other obsessions that preoccupied
me at the same time. I had established a relationship with God that meant I had to think every
evening about what he was going to eat, so the enumeration of the various dishes and glasses of
water I offered him mentally-fussing over the size of the helpings, the rate at which they were
served, etc.-alternated with the interrogations into the extent to which my future life would be
filled with husbands and children. I was very religious, and it could well be that my confused
perception of the identities of God and his son favored my inclination to counting. God was the
thundering voice that brought men back into line without revealing him to them. But I had been
taught that he was simultaneously the naked pink baby made of plaster that I put into the
Christmas manger every year, the suffering man nailed to the crucifix before which we prayed-even
though both of these were actually his son-as well as a sort of ghost called the Holy Spirit.
Of course, I knew perfectly well that Joseph was Mary's husband, and that Jesus, even though he
was both God and the son of God, called him "Father." The Virgin was in fact the mother of the
Christ child, but there were times when she was referred to as his daughter.
When I was old enough to go to Sunday school, I asked to speak to the priest one day. The
problem I laid before him was this: I wanted to become a nun, to be a "bride of Christ," and to
become a missionary in an Africa seething with destitute peoples, but I also wanted to have
husbands and children. The priest was a laconic man, and he cut short the conversation, believing
that my concerns were premature.
Until the idea of this book came to me, I had never really thought about my sexuality very much.
I did, however, realize that I had had multiple partners early on, which is unusual, especially for
girls, or it certainly was among the milieu in which I was brought up. I lost my virginity when I
was eighteen-which is not especially early-but I also had group sex a few weeks after my
deflowering. On that occasion I was not the initiator, but I was the one who precipitated it-something
I still cannot explain to myself. I have always thought that I just happened to meet
men who liked to make love in groups or liked to watch their partners making love with other
men, and the only reaction I had (being naturally open to new experiences and seeing no moral
obstacle) was to adapt willingly to their ways. But I have never drawn any theory from this, and
therefore have never been militant about it.
Continues...
Excerpted from The Sexual Life of Catherine M.
by Catherine Millet
Copyright © 2002 by Catherine Millet.
Excerpted by permission.
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