Submission

by Michel Houellebecq

My own sex life, during my early years as a lecturer at Paris III, hadn’t evolved in any notable way. Year after year, I kept sleeping with students, and the fact that we were now teacher and student didn’t change things much at all. At the beginning, there was scarcely any age difference between us. Only gradually did an element of transgression enter in, and this had more to do with my rising academic status than with my age, real or apparent. In short, I benefited from that basic inequality between men, whose erotic potential diminishes very slowly as they age, and women, for whom the collapse comes with shocking brutality from one year, or even one month, to the next. The one real change, since my student years, was that now I was usually the one who broke it off when the school year began. It wasn’t that I was a Don Juan, or yearned for some kind of untrammeled sexual freedom. Unlike my colleague Steve, who also taught nineteenth-century literature to the first- and second-year students, I didn’t spend the first days of school eagerly checking out the “new talent.” (With his sweatshirts, his Converse, and his vaguely Californian looks, he always reminded me of Thierry Lhermitte in Les bronzés, emerging from his cabana every week to assess the new crop at the resort.) If I broke up with these girls, it was more out of a sense of discouragement, of lassitude: I just didn’t feel up to maintaining a relationship, and I didn’t want to disappoint them or lead them on. Then ...