Sexual Life Catherine M.

by Catherine Millet

  And yet he was an attentive man, and while I took him and his friends as they came, he would examine me—as he examined everyone—with piercing scrutiny. I have never known a man to be less complimentary in the comments he made about your body, and these comments would be uttered without ulterior motive but with the exactitude of someone exercising his professional eye, and whatever flaws you might have would anyway not detract from the fact that you were a turn-on for him. On top of this, his visual acuity was coupled with great dexterity, from which I benefited when he touched me. But others—if I can put it like this—don’t bother with the body you offer them if you have already rendered them a satisfactory service. Like, for example, the man who took me to an attic room on the avenue Paul-Doumer that served as his office. There he was pawing me—that wasn’t what I came for, but I didn’t mind. The normal procedure would see him taking me to the couch and lying me down on it. Well, no, he is the one who lies down on it, full-length on his back, swooning and, with what is always a rather pathetic gesture, holds out his prick without looking at it. So I take the latter in my mouth, and quite soon I hear him say: “Oh, I’m going to come! I know you don’t mind, I’ll fuck you later.” As far as I am concerned, I can cope with this, but my mind is sufficiently alert to realize that he is behaving badly. He doesn’t fuck me later.

  I am docile not because I like submission—I have never tried to put myself in a masochistic situation—but out of an indifference to the uses we assign our bodies. Of course I never would have given myself to extreme practices such as inflicting or suffering pain, but apart from that, given the enormous scope of individual preferences—sexual eccentricities, even—I always had an open mind and was invariably up for it in mind and body. At the most I could have been reproached for a lack of motivation if someone’s practices didn’t find much resonance in my own fantasies. For a long time I saw a man who now and then felt the need to pee on me. I knew what to expect when he made me get out of bed to suck him off. When his cock was good and hard, he would take it out and hold it with one hand not far from me. I kept my mouth open. Kneeling there in front of him like that, I must have looked like someone about to take communion. There was always a brief pause during which he seemed to be mentally guiding the urine on its way. With this effort of concentration, he managed not to come. And the jet streamed onto me, full, firm and hot. Bitter. So bitter I have never tasted its equal, strong enough to make you retract your tongue all the way to the back of your throat. He manipulated his penis the way he would have a hose, and the flow was so abundant and lasted such a long time that I sometimes really had to duck and dive the way you would if someone were trying to spray you with water. Once when I lay down under the stream, he came and lay down on the floor with me when he had finished. Using both hands, he daubed me all over with his piss and covered me with kisses. I hate the feeling of wet hair on my neck, but there was nothing I could do to stop it trickling. I burst out laughing. This made him angry and brought his affections to an abrupt end. Years later he still held it against me! “There’s one thing you’re not good at, and that’s being pissed on.” I admit it. In my defense, I would like to make clear that I didn’t laugh as a way, for example, of shrugging off my embarrassment (it wasn’t the first time I had been drenched in that way!), even less to make fun of him or of us (every reasonably original sexual exploit, far from debasing me, was in fact a source of pride, like another milestone in my quest for the sexual grail). I laughed because, unable to draw any masochistic satisfaction from the situation, which I did not find humiliating, at least I did feel a sense of jubilation rolling in a disgusting liquid.

  Some positions are less rewarding than others for someone who likes to play the big baby, hanging on to a good-size breast. The least you can say is that I am not a dominatrix, neither morally—I have never conned a man—nor sexually: in perverse little scenes, I never held the whip. And I was very uncomfortable when asked to spank people. The man I used to meet in the area around the Gare de l’Est wasn’t satisfied just to lick at my furrow, he would lift his head from time to time and, pursing his lips, ask to be slapped. I don’t remember the words he used; on the other hand, I do know that he would call me “my queen” for the occasion, which I found ridiculous. I would watch him stretching out his neck, and something about his face repelled me as his features softened while he waited, including his wet lips, which made him look like a drinker who gets a mustache downing his glass. That still didn’t get me to hit him hard enough. I put a lot into it, but I was never able to satisfy this need. I would go at it with a back-and-forth motion, but the thought that I might scratch him with one of my rings held my hand back. On other occasions I would try with one hand and then the other, in the hopes of putting increasing force in each movement, but then it was difficult to stay balanced, with my buttocks as close as they could get to the edge of the bed or the chair, which meant that it wasn’t easy for me to hit his head as it emerged from between my thighs. In the end, I just wasn’t into it. Paradoxically, I am convinced that if he had pretended not to attach so much importance to it—if he had put a little humor into his request, or hammed it up so it became an act—I would have entered into the game more easily, would have let myself get into it and struck him harder.

  Faced with my lack of aptitude, he let it go, and I don’t know whether his masochism drove him to more demanding exploits with other women. For me, these slapping sequences merely added another delay in a relationship dictated by infrequent and unscheduled rendezvous. They would prolong, even if not for very long, my wait for his cock. As I have described, I would come to a rendezvous already in a state of exacerbated desire. From the very first full-on kisses, from the first moment when his arms crept up under my clothes, the pleasure was violent. Next, the unquenchable sucking rekindled my desire to an almost unbearable level. But when the moment of penetration finally came, my little internal thread had broken; I had waited too long. I probably should have looked at the cycle of my desire differently, considered his licking as a prelude, chosen to forgo copulation, accepted the intervals between two rendezvous as a delicious echo of his caresses and faced facts: the high point was that moment when, having opened the door to me, without saying hello or good-bye and while we were still muffled up in our coats, he would crush me roughly against him. In that case, the perfectionist that I am would not have seen the slaps as something that like a schoolgirl you learn but rather as something like the other preliminaries, smooches and simperings, that you just do.

  If I have to play a dominant role, I prefer straddling a man lying on his back. The position has little bearing on the way partners behave in role-play. When I was very young and wanted to be clever, I used to call it the “Eiffel Tower position.” A tower straddling the river Seine, the Seine a torrent churning the tower like a tide. The piston movement up and down, the woman’s buttocks making a sharp noise every time they smack down on the man’s thighs; the first convolutions of a belly dance, the calmest of movements adopted when you want to catch your breath or to prolong the fantasy; the tilting backward and forward, the fastest and—for me—most pleasurable movement…all this is almost as familiar to me as fellatio. In both cases, the woman controls the duration and the rhythm, which obviously gives her a double advantage: the dick reacts directly inside the cunt, and the woman’s body is revealed at a favorable angle, seen from below by the man. And it is gratifying every now and again to hear someone saying: “It’s you who’s fucking me…you fuck so well!” You come and go on the shaft like a well-oiled machine. Because of this ease and control, if I close my eyes I can imagine that the shaft inside is disproportionately big and strong because it so utterly fills a cavity that itself seems to have expanded to the size of my entire torso, and which has been thoroughly emptied of air so that it is a perfect fit. It is also one of the positions in which a woman can best squeeze the thing by contracting the muscles in her vagina. These are like signals sent from afar, a way of letting your partner know�
�while you are unashamedly making prodigious use of something that belongs to him—that you are still thinking of him.

  All of these maneuvers are impossible if a woman sitting astride a man with her cunt fully occupied then opens up her ass to let a second man penetrate her. Two friends who used to skewer me like this claimed that they could feel each other’s dicks through my insides and that it was very exciting. I only ever half believed them. These relatively acrobatic positions, or positions like that one that limit your movements in your attempts to maintain them—or even immobilize you altogether—are more for show. You can amuse yourselves forming a group as models would have done at some academy in the past, and the pleasure is fueled more by the sight of these bodies, which fit as neatly as pieces of Lego, than the actual contact between them. Sandwiched like that, I couldn’t see a great deal.

  When I am busying myself on top, I am now careful not to lean my head too far forward. Even though my face is not too lined, I don’t think it is as firm as it used to be, and if my partner’s eyes were open, I wouldn’t want to give him a view of my jowls. My other reservation about this position is that I can’t maintain each movement for very long. In the up-and-down movement, the thighs work like levers and tire quickly, especially if they are astride a wide pair of hips. I can keep the tilting movement going for longer, but the problem there is that both the very localized sensation on the front of the stomach and the precise linkage to the male movement produce (by a sort of reverberation) an imperious need for gratification. So much so that I stop the motor, clasp onto the body lying beneath me and say: “Give it to me gently.” Three or four little thrusts striking sharply in the depths of my cunt are all I need to feel much happier.

  I admire men who can thrust in and out for a good long time without appearing to suffer. I always wonder how they manage to remain leaning on their arms like that, and to show such stamina moving their hips. And their knees, how do they manage with their knees? When I am in the dominant position that I have just described and the act is taking place on the floor, my knees start to hurt. It is the same during a long fellatio if I am kneeling in front of an upright man. In fact, it is when I go the distance and give a really long blow job that it’s really hell. Sometimes I let go with one or both hands, for exactly the same reason as someone doing a balancing act would, to show how well the mouth can do the job on its own, or to swiftly accelerate the movement. Then my neck tenses and becomes painful. A stiffness, as when a dentist works slowly in your mouth, spreads to my jaw, and the stretched muscles in my cheeks and lips, especially if the size of the organ to which I am attending requires me to keep my mouth wide open. When I curl my lips inward, my teeth leave a swollen ridge along the mucous membrane on the inside of my lips. I like that particular injury. It is hot and tasty. When my mouth is free again, I run my tongue over it with the attention of an animal licking a wound. After exerting myself, I find myself again in this exquisite pain, which I deliberately heighten by pressing my tongue more firmly.

  I endure all the risks of coitus in the same way, the eccentricities of each partner and the minor physical discomforts. This can be put down to an ability to program the body independently of physical reactions. A body and the mind attached to it do not live in the same temporal sphere, and their reactions to the same external stimuli are not always synchronized. That is how we hear a shattering piece of news without batting an eyelid or, conversely, can carry on crying even after we have taken on board the fact that everything possible has been done to console us. If I set the assembly-line of pleasure in motion inside me, even if my body encounters some discomforts, they will not be enough to stop it. In other words, I will become aware of the discomfort only after the fact, after I seem to have reached the peak of pleasure, and in the aftermath you really don’t care about the discomfort; you forget it before you have noticed it. How else could you explain the fact that for years the same men caused me the same problems and I never complained or tried to avoid them? I am someone who hates to feel wet anywhere other than under a shower, but I have frequently been splattered with great drops of sweat by one particular man. I have never seen anyone sweat as much as he did. I could distinguish the impact of each individual droplet as it fell onto me. He didn’t seem to be bothered by feeling too hot, but I had an icy feeling all over my soaked chest. Perhaps I compensated for this discomfort by listening to the wet smacking of his thighs against mine; I have always been stimulated by noises. I could have asked him nicely to wipe himself from time to time, but I didn’t. Nor did I ever get over the allergy I had to one particular cheek being rubbed against mine. Given that the problem was chronic, shouldn’t I have smeared myself with cream in preparation for my rendezvous with the owner of the cheek, who made a point of shaving carefully? No, I always came away from his flat with half my face on fire. The marks took hours to fade. It could also be that, on the subject of the discontinuity between the mind and body, in this case, my feelings of guilt for visiting this man in secret could have added to the allergic reaction to make me go red. In those instances, the mind was catching up with the body in spite of itself.

  Different Manifestations of Pleasure

  It is all the easier to write about discomforts and displeasure because they seem to distend time, and time allows us to focus. Even if they do not register with us straightaway, they carve out a furrow within us that represents time. The slapping sessions never went on for long, and wallowing in sweat was by no means a key element of my relationship with that man, which doesn’t alter the fact that while they were going on, I would be both active and passive, waiting (and watching). Talking about pleasure, extreme pleasure, is much more a work of art. Anyway, isn’t it commonly compared to being transported outside oneself and the world and, therefore, outside time as well? And is there the added, aporetic problem of wanting to identify and recognize something that no one has yet described for you, or only sketchily?

  I have mentioned the truly ravishing feeling of the first physical contact, and I have also evoked how I discovered a prolonged orgasm, thanks to a dildo; finally, I have tried as best I can to describe the mobilization at the aperture of my vagina that becomes as hard as a ring of metal when my excitement is at its peak. I came to these facts relatively late. For a large part of my life, I fucked without regard to pleasure. First I should concede that, for someone who has known so many partners, no outcome was ever as guaranteed as when I sought it alone. I control the pitch of my pleasure to the nearest fraction of a second, which isn’t possible when you have to take into account someone else and when you depend on their moves, not your own. Here is my story. Let us say that I am a porn actress auditioning fifteen possible partners who offer themselves naked all in a row. In my fantasy I am the officer reviewing the troops, examining each in turn and squeezing his apparatus while I rub my clitoris with the end of my middle finger; it soon becomes sticky. I feel the way it dilates. Sometimes I think it just rises up, a pointed little growth like a seedling. In fact, the whole mons veneris and vulva swell under my palm, and I can abandon my circular movements for a few seconds to prod and feel the whole as I would a pear.

  On with the story. I choose one, and I lead him by the cock to a sort of massage table where I lie down, my pussy on the edge. At that point (but this preamble will already have taken a long time, six or eight minutes, sometimes more), my level of excitement can be extremely high. It is very localized, like a weight pulling toward the depths of my vagina and seeming to close it like the aperture of a lens. And yet I know (but where does this knowledge come from? From spontaneously measuring the exact degree of excitement, which, bordering on exasperation, feels almost overcharged and can only stagnate? From the fact that it won’t be in that position that gave me the impression of being filled to the brim by my imaginary partner?) that, if I carry on, I won’t get to orgasm or, if I do, it won’t be very intense. So I stop the movement abruptly and backtrack in my story. I lick a few stiffened dicks before choosing one. Back to th
e massage table. (There can be several flashbacks, each one slightly different.) This time there are two or three who will take it in turns in my cunt. I increase the pressure with my finger, my clitoris rolls over a firm base—a bone? I picture one of the boys hammering me. The friction becomes frenetic. I sometimes murmur a few basic words of encouragement, pronouncing the words quite clearly: “You’re so good,” “Go on…” When the time comes, my mind empties. Exit the fifteen stallions. I grimace with concentration, curl my mouth up in an ugly snarl; one of my legs becomes paralyzed, but in an unexpected switch, I sometimes spontaneously knead one of my breasts gently with my free hand. The orgasm comes as the result of a decision. If I can put it like this: I can see it coming. In fact, I do often have my eyes wide open, and they don’t see the wall in front of me or the ceiling but a fantasy X-ray. If it has gone well, the pleasure comes from far away, from the very depths of that long gut with its ridged gray walls, right to the mouth, which opens and closes like the jaw of a fish. Every other muscle relaxes. There can be six or seven waves. Ideally, I stay there for a moment, sliding my fingers over my vulva, then I bring them up to my nose to revel in the sweetish smell. I don’t wash my hands.