Numbers make books. This is nothing new. But it seems particularly true for Catherine Millet's sexual memoir, The Sexual Life of Catherine M. She is one of the very few authors who have made it to the five minutes of fame dispensed by Newsnight, where Jeremy Paxman presented her with his usual aplomb: Catherine Millet, he said, has sold 400,000 copies in France, has slept with 5,000 men and says she would only be able to identify 49 of them.
Millet is the new icon of highbrow pornography. She is editor of an influential magazine, Art Press, and a respected art curator who, in a daring first-person narrative, relates her compulsive taste for group sex and her appetite for unconventional practices. She lets herself be taken by whoever - lorry drivers, col leagues and countless anonymous encounters alike - and wherever - orgies, the Bois de Boulogne or parking lots.
When it was published in France last year, her book immediately elicited controversy. Her exponents lauded her sophisticated prose, while feminists applauded the honesty of her guiltless confession. For their part, her detractors derided the naivety of her project, arguing that there was nothing socially or politically revolutionary in writing explicitly about sex. Millet says her aim was to tell the "real truth" and raise her tale above ideologies, but amid the sensation, the blatant seems to have been overlooked: the book is not so much about sex, pleasure and freedom as about sad sex, self-abnegation and indifference.
French women writers and film directors - Catherine Breillat with Romance, Virginie Despentes with Baise-moi - have recently claimed their contribution to pornography, ignoring precedents. In 1965, Pauline Réage produced The Story of O, which caused a scandal because it tells of a woman enslaved to the male version of her sexuality. So does Millet. For her, to serve every man's needs is empowering. That her confessions have been welcomed by feminists is a paradox. "Until I was 35 I had not imagined that my own pleasure could be the aim of a sexual encounter," she concludes.
Millet's book has been said to pertain to the tradition of the Marquis de Sade. His pornography goes hand in hand with social and philosophical commentary. However, Millet's attempt to give deeper meaning to her sexuality is contrived. She has fucked in the same way, she says, as she has directed Art Press: "completely available", "with no taboos, exceptionally uninhibited". Good. Except for the obvious. Open-mindedness is not necessarily acquired by opening your legs.
Millet picks up on one of Sade's big themes, fraternity. Though she scarcely details the mores of the orgies - some people fold their underwear, others don't wear any - she insists on the social mix, the spontaneous urbanity of their members. Sade's imaginary orgies subverted the social order of the ancien régime; Millet's are real but their sociability is as artificial as the bonding displayed on Big Brother. Against the silenced backdrop of urban ennui and solitude, both confuse community and friendship, nudity and truth, sexual liberation and emotional fulfilment.
When the book came out, the philosopher Jean Baudrillard drew a parallel between it and reality TV, both being manifestations of exhibitionism and voyeurism. There is indeed little difference between Millet telling of sperm leaking between her legs and the Big Brother contestants happily unpacking toilet rolls: it is banality turned into spectacle. Both shun the real questions: in Millet's case, jealousy, the dilemma between the libertine pursuit of freedom and attachment, for instance.
Her enterprise is oddly puri tanical: not only because of the diligence with which she executes blowjobs but also because of the effort she puts into her tireless and self-defeating descriptions of them. They lack sensuousness because they are charged with psychoanalytical truisms. Through exhaustive description, she attempts to decipher the enigma of orgasm. "Here I am, coming," she says, looking at herself in the mirror. No need to have read Lacan (and Millet has) to find this naive.
The book finished, one yearns for secrecy and silence, for Nabokov or Proust and the metaphoric detours that make their writing about sex so compelling. Or for Matisse's nudes, which record the mutability of the body at the contact of air and light, and are like promises of joy and gravity defeated. "I see God when I paint," said the painter.
I am not advocating that sex be clothed in mystique. But Millet gives the impression of seeing only herself. Légendes de Catherine M is a collection of pictures of Millet posing naked in public places in front of the camera of her husband, Jacques Henric. One features her on Walter Benjamin's grave in Port-Bou, where the philosopher committed suicide after realising he could not escape the Nazis.
Whether or not the couple meant anything with this, there was no need to comment on his essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. Both Henric's album and Millet's memoir have amply demonstrated the loss of aura in endless replication. Excess is numbing.
· Henriette Korthals Altes is a literary critic.
henriette.korthalsaltes@new.oxford.ac.uk
