Sexual Politics by Kate Millett

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Sexual Politics
Kate Millett
Doubleday and Co., 1970

"The term "politics" shall refer to power-structured relationships, arrangements whereby one group of persons is controlled by another." p. 23
"This is so because our society, like all other historical civilizations, is a patriarchy. The fact is evident at once if one recalls that the military, industry, technology, universities, science, political office, and finance - in short, every avenue of power within the society, including the coercive force of the police, is entirely in male hands." p. 25
"In terms of activity, sex role assigns domestic service and attendance upon infants to the female, the rest of human achievement, interest, and ambition to the male. The limited role allotted the female tends to arrest her at the level of biological experience. Therefore, nearly all that can be described as distinctly human rather than animal activity (in their own way animals also give birth and care for their young) is largely reserved for the male. Of course, status again follows from such an assignment." p. 26
Quoting Robert J., Stoller, Sex and Gender, Science House, 1968"Dictionaries stress that the major connotation of sex is a biological one, as for example, in the phrases sexual relations or the male sex. In agreement with this, the word sex, in this work will refer to the male or female sex and the component biological parts that determine whether one is a male or a female; the word sexual will have connotations of anatomy and physiology. This obviously leaves tremendous areas of behavior, feelings, thoughts, and fantasies that are related to the sexes and yet do not have primarily biological connotations. It is for some of these psychological phenomena that the term gender will be used: one can speak of the male sex or the female sex, but one can also talk about the masculinity and femininity and not necessarily be implying anything about anatomy or physiology. Thus, while sex and gender seem to common sense inextricably bound together, one purpose this study will be to confirm the fact that the two realms (sex and gender) are not inevitably bound in anything like a one-to-one relationship, but may go into quite independent ways." p. 29
"Because of our social circumstances, male and female are really two cultures and their life experiences are utterly different - and this is crucial. " p. 31
"Patriarchy's chief institution is the family." p. 33
"Traditionally, patriarchy granted the father nearly total ownership over wife or wives and children, including powers of physical abuse and often even those of murder and sale." p. 33
"One must acknowledge that the chivalrous stance is a game the master group plays in elevating its subject to pedestal level." p. 37
"The concept of romantic love affords a means of emotional manipulation which the male is free to exploit, since love is the only circumstance in which the female is (ideologically) pardoned for sexual activity." p. 37
". . . the service of an unpaid domestic still provides working-class males with a "cushion" against the buffets of the class system which incidentally provides them with some of the psychic luxuries of the leisure class." p. 38
"We are not accustomed to associate patriarchy with force. So perfect is its system of socialization, so complete the general assent to its values, so long and so universally has it prevailed in human society, that it scarcely seems to require violent implementation." p. 43
"The feeling that woman's sexual functions are impure is both world-wide and persistent." p. 47
"The tale of Adam and Eve is, among other things, a narrative of how humanity invented sexual intercourse." p. 53 a long discussion of Adam and Eve is found between pages 52 and 53
"The myth of the Fall is a highly-finished version of the same themes [referring to Pandora's box]. As the central myth of the Judeo-Christian imagination and therefore of our immediate cultural heritage, it is well that we appraise and acknowledge the enormous power it still holds over us even in a rationalist era which has long ago given up literal belief in it while maintaining its emotional assent intact. This mythic version of the female as the cause of human suffering, knowledge, and sin is still the foundation of sexual attitudes, for it represents the most crucial argument of the patriarchal tradition in the West.
The Israelites lived in a continual state of war with the fertility cults of their neighbors; these latter afforded sufficient attraction to be the source of constant defection, and the figure of Eve, like that of Pandora, has vestigial traces of a fertility goddess overthrown. There is some, probably unconscious evidence of this in the biblical account which announces, even before the narration of the fall has begun - "Adam called his wife's name Eve; because she was the mother of all living things." Due to the fact that the tale represents a compilation of different oral traditions, it provides two contradictory schemes for Eve's creation, one in which both sexes are created at the same time, and one in which Eve is fashioned later than Adam, an afterthought born from his rib, peremptory instance of the male's expropriation of the life force through a god who created the world without benefit of female assistance.[end of page 52]
The tale of Adam and Eve is, among other things, a narrative of how humanity invented sexual intercourse. Many such narratives exist in preliterate myth and fold tale. Most of them strike us now as delightfully funny stories of primal innocents who require a good deal of helpful instruction to figure it out. There are other major themes in the story: the loss of primeval simplicity, the arrival of death, and the first conscious experience of knowledge. All of them revolve about sex. Adam is forbidden to eat of the fruit of life or of the knowledge of good and evil, the warning states explicitly what should happen if he tastes of the latter: "in that day thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die." He eats but fails to die (at least in the story). from which one might infer that the serpent told the truth.
But at the moment when the pair eat of the forbidden tree they awake to their nakedness and feel shame. Sexuality is clearly involved, though the fable insists it is only tangential to a higher prohibition against disobeying orders in the matter of another and less controversial appetite - one for food. Rohein points out that the Hebrew verb for "eat" can also mean coitus. Everywhere in the Bible "knowing" is synonymous with sexuality, and clearly a product of the contact with the phallus, here in the fable objectified as a snake. To blame the evils and sorrows of life - loss of Eden and the rest - on sexuality, would all too logically implicate the male, and such implication is hardly the purpose of the story, designed as it is expressly in order to blame all this world's discomfort on the female. Therefore it is the female who is tempted first and "beguiled" by the penis, transformed into something else, a snake. thus Adam has "beaten the rap" of sexual guilt, which appears to be why the sexual motive is so repressed in the Biblical account. yet the very transparency of the serpent's universal phallic value shows how uneasy the mythic mind can be about its shifts. Accordingly, in her inferiority and vulnerability the woman takes and eats, simple carnal thing that she is, affected by flattery even in a reptile. Only after this does the male fall, and with him, humanity - for the fable has made him the racial type, whereas Eve is a mere sexual type and, according to tradition, either expendable or replaceable. And as the myth records the original sexual adventure, Adam was seduced by woman, who was seduced by a penis. "The woman whom thou gavest to be with me, she gave me of the fruit and I did eat" is the first man's defense. Seduced by the phallic snake, Eve is convicted for Adam's participation in sex.
Adam's curse is to toil in the "sweat of his brow," namely the labor the male associates with civilization. Eden was a fantasy world without either effort or activity, which the entrance of the female, and with her sexuality, has destroyed. Eve's sentence is far more political in nature and a brilliant "explanation" of her inferior status. "In sorrow thou shalt bring forth children. And thy desire shall be to thy husband. And he shall rule over thee." Again, as in the Pandora myth, a proprietary father figure is punishing his subjects for adult heterosexuality. It is easy to agree with Roheim's comment on the negative attitude the myth adopts toward sexuality: "Sexual maturity [end of page 53] is regarded as a misfortune, something that has robbed mankind of happiness. . . .the explanation of how death came into the world.
What requires further emphasis is the responsibility of the female, a marginal creature, in bringing on this plague, and the justice of her suborned condition as dependent on her primary role in this original sin. The connection of woman, sex, and sin constitutes the fundamental pattern of western patriarchal thought thereafter." pages 52-54
"As with other marginal groups a certain handful of women are accorded higher status that they may perform a species of cultural policing over the rest." p. 57
"A sexual revolution would require, perhaps first of all, an end of traditional sexual inhibitions and taboos, particularly those that most threaten patriarchal monogamous marriage: homosexuality, "illegitimacy," adolescent, pre- and extra- marital sexuality. The negative aura with which sexual activity has generally been surrounded would necessarily be eliminated, together with the double standard and prostitution. The goal of the revolution would be a permissive single standard of sexual freedom, and one uncorrupted by the crass and exploitative economic bases of traditional sexual alliances." p. 62
"Under the common law which prevailed in both countries [US and England] at the opening of the period, a woman underwent "civil death" upon marriage, forfeiting what amounted to every human right, as felons now do upon entering prison. She lacked control over her earnings, was not permitted to choose her domicile, could not manage property legally her own, sign papers or bear witness. Her husband owned both her person and her services, could- and did- rent her out in any form he pleased and pocket the profits. He was permitted to sue others for wages due her and confiscate them. All that the wife acquired by her labor, service, or act during "coverture" became the legal property of the male. Save for owning property, single women enjoyed nearly as few civil rights under law as did married women. The principle of "coverture" or femme couverte, general throughout Western jurisprudence, placed the married woman in the position both of minor and chattel throughout her life. her husband became something like a legal keeper, as by marrying she succumbed to a mortifying process which placed her in the same class with lunatics or idiots, who were also "dead in the law."
No matter how irresponsible an individual husband might be, nor how careless of the welfare of his children he was legally entitled to demand and receive the wife's wages at any moment, even to the peril of his dependent's lives. As head of the proprietary family, the husband was the sole "owner" of wife and children, empowered to deprive the mother of her offspring,. who were his legal possessions, should it pleas him to do so upon divorcing or deserting her. A father, like a slaver, could order the law to reclaim his chattel-property relatives when he liked. Wives might be detained against their will; English wives who refused to return to their homes were subject to imprisonment.
Should the husband die intestate, the state might pick over his property (for all property was legally his) leaving the widow nothing at all, or as little as it chose to bestow upon her." p. 67
Quoting Blackstone's Commentaries "By marriage, the husband and wife are one person in law: that is, the very being or legal existence of the woman is suspended during marriage, or at least is incorporated and consolidated into that of the husband. . . But though our law in general considers man and wife as one person, yet there are some instances in which she is separately considered; as inferior to him, and acting by his compulsion." p. 68
Quoting from Victorian Working Women by Wanda Neff, Columbia University Press, 1929
"I have a belt around my waist and a chain passing between my legs, and I go on my hands and feet. The road is very steep, and we have to hold by a rope, and when there is no rope, by anything we can catch hold of. . . .The pit is very wet where I work, and the water comes over our clogs always, and I have seen it up to my thighs: it rains in at the roof terrible: my clothes are wet through almost all day long. I never was ill in my life but when I was lying-in. My cousin looks after my children in the daytime. I am very tired when I get home at night; I call asleep sometimes before I get washed. I am not so strong as I was, and cannot stand my work so well as I used to do. I have drawn till I have had the skin off me; the belt and chain is worse when we are in the family way. My feller [husband] has beaten me many a time for not being ready. I were not used to it at first, and he had little patience. I have known many a man beat his drawer." p. 70
Quoting from Jean-Jaques Rousseau's L'Emilie or a Treatise on Education
" "The whole education of women ought to be relative to men. To please them, to be useful to them, to make themselves loved and honored by them, to educate them when young, to care for them when grown, to counsel them, to make life sweet and agreeable to them - these are the duties of women at all times, and what should be taught them from their infancy."
Most education for women in the nineteenth century followed this prescription scrupulously- a great deal of it does so to this day. There are an endless number of statements from the period advocating higher education for women on the grounds that it would make them better housewives and mothers; there are an equal number which argue against the effort, predicting its malevolent influence should the newly educated go beyond the agreed upon end of subordination.
Even with such perfect co-operative subjection as an ideal, the project of educating depressed groups has always the seeds of its own subversion within it. A little knowledge is indeed a dangerous thing if only because it so often induces a thirst for more. Serious study can grow even from the rudiments of prescribed frivolity; can give rise to analysis, direction, organization - finally the way out of present circumstances." p. 74-75
"In both countries {US and England] the growth of higher education for women was the result of two factors: the opening of teaching to women, and feminist agitation. The spread of universal primary and secondary education was on of the great ideals of the nineteenth century. Since in both England and America, the cheapest system of public education was obtained through hiring women as schoolteachers, women had to be conceded better education if only so that they might teach children. Higher education for woman on an equal basis with men was one of the feminists' chief objectives. yet so fearful were its advocates of compromising their cause, that they were occasionally timid about the more doubtful campaign for suffrage.
One can say with considerable certainty that the sexual revolution would have had little impetus, the Woman's Movement still less, without the growth of higher education for women, one of the major achievements of the period." p. 76
Quoting from Eleanor Flexner's Century of Struggle
" "It was in the abolition movement that women first learned to organize, to hold public meetings, to conduct petition campaigns. As abolitionists they first won the right to speak in public and began to evolve a philosophy of their place in society and of their basic rights. For a quarter of a century the two movements, to free the slave and to liberate women, nourished and strengthened one another."
The first generation of feminists were active and dedicated abolitionists: the Grimke sisters, Lucy Stone, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucretia Mott, and Susan B. Anthony." p. 80
"The issue of women's entrance into the professions is a spectacular case of the contradictions in the chivalrous mentality with which the sexual revolution had to contend. Women have always worked. They have generally worked longer hours for smaller rewards and at less agreeable tasks than have men. The issue of employment during the period of the first phase was simply their demand that they be paid for their efforts, have an opportunity to enter the most prestigious fields of work, and when paid be allowed to retain and control their earnings. Even before the industrial revolution brought them to the factory, women had always done menial labor, most of it physically exhausting and tedious, much of it agricultural. Yet chivalry's accessory police ethic, "decorum" found it outrageous for a "lady" to use her mind rather than her hands or back. Such powerful feeling against such infraction of taboo affords a glimpse of how economically and politically useful taboo can be. In embarking upon the intellectually and socially responsible employment which the professions constituted, pioneers in each field met with ruthless and nearly overwhelming opposition in law, medicine, science, scholarship, and architecture." p. 85
Referring to Mill's The Subjection of Women (1869): "Mill composed his essay in collaboration with his step-daughter, Helen Taylor, and claimed that his own part in it was largely inspired by his wife, Harriet Taylor." p. 91
Quoting Mill: "Men do not want solely the obedience of women, they want their sentiments. All men, except the most brutish, desire to have, in the woman most nearly connected with them, not a forced slave but a willing one; not a slave merely, but a favorite." p. 98
"What Mill has to say on the subject is directly at odds with this. While in the lower classes the ethic of male supremacy may take the form of brutality, in the middle classes it tends toward the rankest hypocrisy; among the educated "the inequality is kept as much as possible out of sight; above all out of sight of the children," with "the compensations of the chivalrous feeling being made prominent, while the servitude which requires them is kept in the background." " p. 102-103
"In Miml's analysis, the system of sexual dominance is the very prototype of other abuses of power and other forms of egotism." p. 103
"Chivalry and all- marriage is really feudal, and Mill hates feudalism. At present little more than a "school of despotism in which the virtues of despotism, but also its vices, are largely nourished the family can afford no real love to its members until it is based on a situation to total equality among them." p. 103-104
Again referring to Mill, "Carried aloft by his chimera of woman's power, he insists, "there is not a war in the world, no, nor an injustice, but you women are answerable for it; not in that you have provoked, but in that you have not hindered." " p. 106
"The major theorists were Chernyshevsky, Mill, Engles, Bebel, and Veblen. Much of what they said is still relevant to a sexual revolution and therefore still speaks to us today." p. 108
"In view of the long-standing belief in the existence of a "vaginal orgasm" it might be emphasized that the clitoris is the organ specific to sexuality in the human female, the vagina being an organ of reproduction as well as of sexuality, and possessing no erogenous tissue save in the lower third of the vaginal tract, the nerve endings in these cells all deriving from and centering in the clitoris. . . .The clitoris, one might point out, is the only human organ which is specific to sexuality and to sexual pleasure: the penis has other functions both in elimination and in reproduction.
While the male's sexual potential is limited, the females appears to be biologically nearly inexhaustible, and apart from psychological considerations, may continue until physical exhaustion interposes." p. 117 - 118
"But Engles is both more logical and more radical: only with the end of male economic dominion and the entrance of women into the economic worked on perfectly equal and independent terms will sexual love cease to be barter in some manner based on financial coercion.
Quite as one would expect, Engles' foresight is strongest in the area of economy. Mill had thought legal change would be sufficient and was content that if women obtained suffrage and a just property law, most might well continue in their traditional roles. Engles realized very well that woman's legal disabilities were not the cause but merely the effect of patriarchy. The removal of such invidious law would not give women equal status unless it were accompanied with total social and economic equality and every opportunity of personal fulfillment in productive work. Engles' argument that one cannot be a dependent and still an equal is very compelling." p. 125
"As the patriarchal family depends for its cohesiveness on the economic dependence of women and children, financial equality is almost impossible within it, and its unity is rooted in its economic and legal entity rather than upon its exclusively emotional ties." p. 158-159
"Governments who manipulate population growth have two choices: making maternity pleasant or making it inescapable. . . .
To provide contraceptive information in Nazi Germany was dangerous and punishable even in physicians. . . . Abortion became a very risky affair, penalized by extreme measures, the criminal law of May 1933 making even the act of assistance in obtaining an abortion a penal offense. Unless there were suspicion of congenital defect, generally understood as non-Aryan parentage, all pregnancies must be brought to term." p. 166
"The virility cult of Nazi male culture, its emphasis upon "leaders" and male community, lent the entire Nazi era a curious tone of repressed homosexuality, neurotically anti-social and sadistic in character." p. 167
". . .the authoritarian and patriarchal mind cannot separate the liberation of women from racial extinction and the death of love, an equation of human affection and reproduction with slavish subordination, excessive or accidental progeny, and servile affection which never fails to convict the speaker." p. 176
Responding to Freud's theory of penis envy: "Confronted with so much concrete evidence of the male's superior status, sensing on all sides the depreciation in which they are held, girls envy not the penis, but only what the penis gives one social pretensions to." p. 187
"The Lost Sex [a mid-twentieth century anti-feminist book] is explicit about what it takes to be the real feminist threat, an end to home, family, and motherhood." p. 208
More about The Lost Sex "Through divorce, through abortion, through contraception, the sexual revolution has undermined marriage." p. 208
Even more about The Lost Sex "At times one even detects a note of petition. All male activity, maleness, perhaps patriarchy itself, depend upon penile erection: "Here it is that mastery and dominion, the central capacity of the man's sexual nature must meet acceptance or fail." To achieve erection, the male must be master." p. 209
Referring to DH Lawrence "The sexual revolution had done a great deal to free female sexuality. An admirable astute politician, Lawrence saw in this two possibilities: it could grant women an autonomy and independence he feared and hated, or it could be manipulated to create a new order of dependence and subordination, another form of compliance to masculine direction and prerogative." p. 240-241
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