Word: millets
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...city of Yiyang in central Hunan province, a middle-school teacher was killed recently by a hit man, according to the police, after he told local journalists that 600 teachers had not been paid in months because the local government was pocketing their salaries. Last month, a millet farmer surnamed Song traveled 36 hours from Yan'an county in Shaanxi province to Beijing to complain about having to pay $700 a year in local taxes when his annual income was only $800. Song took his petition to the special complaints office in Beijing reserved for Shaanxi residents, only to watch...
Interspersed with these clinical accounts are dispassionate dialectics on sexuality and the human condition (Millet is French, after all). What's missing is any satisfying sense of what motivated her exploits, which even by libertine standards seem excessive. The most she offers is that she suffered from social awkwardness, which she learned to defray by lifting her skirts. "I saw the sexual act as a refuge into which I willingly abandoned myself as a way of avoiding embarrassing eye contact," she writes...
...exhaustive--and sometimes exhausting--account of her sexual history from the time she lost her virginity at 18, Millet, 53, details encounters with her husband, colleagues, interview subjects and legions of others (she has lost count of them) that took place at orgies and in museums, storerooms, sports stadiums, her dentist's office and the shadowy perimeters of Parisian parks where she regularly serviced dozens of anonymous men in a single evening...
Rather than an ardent hedonist, Millet views herself as a passive participant malleable to the desires of others, observing, "I am not docile because I like submission, because I have never tried to put myself in a masochistic situation, but out of a deep-seated indifference to the uses to which we put our bodies." It's unclear, however, why such indifference led her to embrace sex rather than, say, field hockey...
...opening pages, Millet writes that "until the idea of this book came to me, I had never really thought about my sexuality very much." While this seems hard to fathom, it may explain why the book, though it boasts more sex acts per page than Lady Chatterley's Lover or Penthouse, feels more like a taxonomy of sexual positions than an erotic romp. --By Michele Orecklin