Sexual Politics

1970, possibly first edition, from Doubleday
Kate Millett
Sexual Politics
Original price unknown, purchase price $8.50
Hardcover in good condition
B-

Millett is at her best in skewering sexist writers from Freud to Norman Mailer.  With the former, I laughed out loud at her take on penis envy, particularly when she says of his view that a woman can only reach fulfillment by bearing babies, which are penis-substitutes, "were she to deliver an entire orphanage of progeny, they would only be so many dildoes."  I find it harder to be amused by Mailer, partly because he was more violent than Freud (in real life as well as his writing, since he stabbed his wife), and partly because he's closer to a contemporary for me, having died as recently as 2007.  Partly because of Sexual Politics, I've never read his writing, nor the equally misogynist Henry Miller, so it is possible that Millett is taking quotes out of context, but considering the hate that oozes out of the passages (to use appropriate phrasing), it's hard to imagine what context could redeem their stories of men brutalizing and humiliating women.  D. H. Lawrence comes off well in comparison, although he, too, published rape fantasies.  I think she lets Genet off too easily, but again, I haven't read him.  And I do appreciate that, probably because of her (then unstated) bisexuality, she has none of Greer's homophobia.

While I appreciate Millett's analysis, it's unpleasant to read about writers whom I definitely don't ever want to read.  Also, I have to mark Millett down for taking on too much in her attempts to cover history.  She dismisses even the possibility of ancient matriarchal culture (although there was evidence accessible at that time, as we shall see with Davis's The First Sex, coming up soon), and closer to her present she clumsily handles "the sexual revolution" and "the counterrrevolution."

At this point, I should discuss the definition of "sexual" in the title and throughout the book.  "Sex" means both genitalia and intercourse, with "sexual politics" meaning that attitudes towards "sex" affect and reflect larger politics.  If Mailer sees anal sex as an expression of death and vaginal sex an expression of life (although he describes them as equally violent), this affects how he sees women, male homosexuals, power, and war, although with machismo it's hard to say which came first.  (The cock and the sperm rather than the chicken and the egg?)  Lawrence was opposed to feminism, and he saw sex as a way to put woman back in her place.

In my discussion of The Egoist, I said that Millett unfairly compares the last section to Jane Austen, and was too soon to compare it to Three's Company.  Therefore, it's time to quote my favorite sitcom:

JACK:  Whatever happened to the sexual revolution?
CHRISSY:  Your side lost.

The sexual revolution was seen by the mainstream as being about promiscuity, but Millett sees it as being about a revolution in sex roles and the role of sex.  She places it as 1830 to 1930, dates that might surprise other readers as they did me over 20 years ago.  While she does show how feminism grew in the Victorian period, she doesn't actually say much about it in the early 20th century.  If you're going to give an era a beginning and an end, you need to discuss the whole time.  She's in too much of a hurry to move on to the reactionary period of the 1930s, particularly as expressed in Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia.  This is her choice, but then why not show more of what was going on in her own country?  Or at least someplace not ruled by a dictator.  Susan J. Douglas does a much better job of portraying the 1940s and 1950s in the U.S. in 1994's Where the Girls Are, even though her book is "only" about women's relationship with pop culture. 

Millett clearly knows literature, sometimes mentioning novels in passing that are relatively obscure as well as such classics as Dickens and Ibsen.  The book would be strengthened if she hadn't tried to also take on the history that produced the writers she's examined, or if she went into the history more completely.

Still, this book was definitely one of those that influenced me as a young feminist.  Her sense of humor in particular, even about authors she admires, is itself admirable.  And Greer is wrong that Millett wrote about Mailer et. al. because she thought they were cretins.  Millett's argument is that they used their artistry for propaganda, and thus became lesser as artists.  For me, when a writer has pretentions, I'm going to dislike him/her more if I don't like the message.  Three's Company doesn't offend me because it never pretends to be more than well-done crap.  Similarly, there's icky sex in Here's Your O.R.G.Y., but none of it horrifies me like when Lawrence's, Mailer's, and Miller's "heroes" act as if they're using their phalluses to not only punish but instruct their victims/disciples.

Douglas's book tells how Millett was attacked in the press, and reproduces the very unflattering portrait Time put on its front cover.  It seems odd looking back four decades later, because Sexual Politics really isn't that out there compared to other feminist works, including Greer's.  Millett discusses some of the backlash she faced, including from other feminists, in Flying, which we'll get to in 1974.