The Sexual Life of Catherine M

I saw Catherine Millet at the Writers’ festival last week.

I should confess right up front that I am a huge fan and that the next three posts will be all about her and some of the things she said at the festival.

For those of you who don’t like her - I apologise and promise in a few days all will be back to normal.

For those of you who don't know how she is, she is a French art critic / analyst who is very famous for her influence on the modern art world in France.

However, and here comes the part where I fell in love with her, in 2002 she wrote a memoir called The Sexual Life of Catherine M. This is a frank, tell all description of her love life as a libertine. Catherine describes a libertine as a person who has no belief in God and therefore they create their own morals. For many libertines, this plays out in their sexual life. For Catherine, it meant taking many lovers, sometimes many at one time.

At the time this book was written, Catherine was fifty-four years old, writing about a time in her history when she sourced her self esteem from being sexually brave. I was a woman of thirty-five years old experimenting heavily with her own sexuality. I was engaged in the BDSM lifestyle and learning a great deal about myself and others in the process.

In 2005 Catherine came to the Sydney writers festival to talk about her book and about how difficult it was to write such a frank account. She was very honest in saying two things prevailed. 1) it was an easy book to write because there is a subliminal admiration for women who are courageous about this sort of thing. 2) Everyone was interested in her and in the sex, rather than in the quality of the writing.

Catherine has said that in order to write about her own experiences, she had to step out of herself and see herself as object. She looked at herself as she would a work of art, and used the art critics voice to tell her story. The way the book was written is a significant part of why this book is so shocking. It is written without emotion. Catherine is very detached and separate to the woman described in the book, and yet one can't help feeling Catherine may have actually have been like that, observing herself in the act of living, taking mental notes as she watched herself have sex with so many different people.

However, what I learnt at the 2010 Sydney Writers festival is that all was not well with Catherine later on and that leads us to tomorrows post.

Barbra

http://www.barbranovac.com/

Sex Workers

I went to a wonderful workshop at a feminist conference today. It was led by sex workers, mostly women, a trans man and another man. There was about thirty of us in the small area divided off from another section. Many of the people in the audience were sex workers as well.

That sex workers were included in a feminist conference was a big deal. In the past feminists have been the arch enemy of sex workers. However, sex workers deal with a lot of unfair discrimination, not to mention unpleasantness from the general public (you and I) that is encouraged by inaccurate stereotypes, so it had always puzzled them that the feminists would see them as enemies.

Mind you, they can't really understand why women see them as the enemy at all. But that is because they have one enormous advantage over us women at home - knowledge.

So the first thing to talk about is why I went to this workshop when I had many to choose from.

It all started with an interesting article I read about younger women who are going to male prostitutes (buffed handsome, healthy ones) to lose their virginity. I was shocked and enthralled to learn about this. But after thinking about it for a little while, I thought – what a great idea! (I wish I'd thought of that years ago)

Imagine parents going to a sex worker, and having a conversation with hr about enrolling their son or daughter in safe / consensual / open minded sex? And then offering it to their son or daughter as a gift or opportunity?


Anyway, that article made me think. What if prostitution wasn’t in the hand of sleazy men? What if it belonged to women and healthy good men? What if you could go and “sweat out” those “girl attraction” issues you had with a professional instead of your best friend when you were drunk? What if men could be educated about safe sex and consensual sex from a professional instead of trying to work it out for themselves from a world filled with porn and mates and jealous girlfriends?

It’s a radical idea – I know. And its way out there. But still, it bares thinking about. I mean, unless you think sex and love are the same thing, there is no way something like this can interfere with your love life – I mean your real love life. So where is the threat?

Speaking with these women and men today helped me see that sex workers are NOT our enemy. We are simply told that. It is not a choice between “Madonna and whore” as we have been told either. There is more to the subject than that. These women are friends, students, mothers, transgendered people living difficult lives, gay men, gay women, your neighbor, your friend. They are older, younger, all body types and they are beautiful and ugly and sometimes both at different times.

They’re you and me.

I was very grateful they took the time to talk with me and I was very grateful to be a part of the conversation.

Please feel free to read more about sex workers rights at the Scarlet Alliance website.