Madam How-Many-Times

Currently reading a collection of essays, about women, seduction, and desire. Interesting. Extremely well-written. Thought provoking.

Our author is careful to point out, however, that "[While] lust is a great and inexhaustible literary subject...writing graphically about what excites one isn't literature". This quote is ostensibly in reference to the author's thoughts on Catherine Millet, who wrote at length on the issues of lust, sexuality, and female power. It should be noted, however, that THIS reader did not miss the parallel by which OUR author implicitly defended her own work which is about...oh, lust, sexuality, and female power.

Speaking specifically of Millet, though, our author says something interesting. Well, many interesting things, but something that struck me as particularly insight-invoking, both into Millet's body of work and into a certain type of woman whom I've never understood and always known far too well (at least, I think so):

"Millet's chthonic** vulgarity is a provocation...men and women suffer from grandiosity in different ways. Men tend toward fantasies of omnipotence, women of uniqueness. Millet wants her readers to ask themselves the question: 'How can she?,' and one does. But perhaps her motive, hidden in plain sight, is prodigiously ordinary: to hold the interest of a man."

**http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chthonic (interesting)

INTERESTING.

The chapter closes with Millet's own words, once again providing a solid defense for her own work and a slightly more subtle defense of our own author's intentions:

"Obscenity is such a narrow domain. One immediately begins to suffocate there, and to feel bored."

I LOVE it. I agree entirely.