52 pages • 1 hour read
Kate MillettSexual Politics
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1970A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
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Chapter 1 Summary: “Instances of Sexual Politics”
The first chapter opens with a passage from Henry Miller’s Sexus in which the main character, Val, recalls the seduction of his friend Bill Woodruff’s wife, Ida Verlaine. Of the seduction, Millett notes that “[i]n accord with one of the myths at the very heart of a Miller novel, the protagonist, who is always some version of the author himself, is sexually irresistible and potent to an almost mystical degree” (4-5). It is of little surprise that Ida succumbs to his advances which play out as “a series of stratagems, aggressive on the part of the hero and acquiescent on the part of what custom forces us to designate the heroine” (5).
Miller’s tone is “of one male relating an exploit to another male in the masculine vocabulary and with its point of view” (5). Similarly, the suggestion that Ida didn’t fight back is significant and “the entire scene is a description not so much of sexual intercourse, but rather of intercourse in the service of power” (5). Indeed, throughout Miller’s description, “the reader is vicariously experiencing […] a nearly supernatural sense of power—should the reader be a male” (6), with Miller’s penis transformed into “an instrument of chastisement, whereas Ida’s genitalia are but the means of her humiliation” (7).
Millett next analyzes a passage describing heterosexual sodomy from Norman Mailer’s An American Dream, noting that the “practice is not only one of the book’s primary attractions, but so central to the action that one might even say the plot depended on it” (10). In the scene, Rojack, the book’s hero, with whom “Mailer transparently identifies,” has “just finished murdering his wife and is now relieving his feelings by buggering the maid” (10). In addition to being presented as holding “mystical and metaphysical import,” as Rojack believes that the maid’s “anus can teach him [something] about evil” (12), anally raping her is “his way of expressing contemptuous mastery” (13).
For Millett, the maid Ruta’s response embodies typical masculine fantasy: “her gratitude at being sodomized is positively astonishing” (13). The passage, however, is “almost exclusively a description of Rojack’s activity—and properly so—as coitus here is simply his accomplishment as enacted upon Ruta, and therefore its value is precisely its value to him” (14). This value includes various aspects, but perhaps most significantly is part of Rojack acquiring masculine status, something that runs throughout the scene as the “reader is given to understand that by murdering one woman and buggering another, Rojack became a man” (15).
Millett ends the chapter with an analysis of works by Jean Genet, initially a passage from his autobiographical novel The Thief’s Journal, in which “the author’s identification is with the ‘female figure’” (17). In fact, he is “both male and female” at different points in his life:
the despised drag queen, the maricone (faggot), contemptible because he was the female partner in homosexual acts. Older, distinguished by fame, wealthy and secure, he became male; though never ascending to the full elevation of the pimp (or supermale) (17).
Importantly, this framing relies on the understanding that “sexual role is not a matter of biological identity but of class or caste in the hierocratic homosexual society projected in Genet’s novels” (17). This makes Genet’s works valuable for understanding heterosexual society because his characters so perfectly “ape and exaggerate the ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ of heterosexual society” (17). Genet’s descriptions show “what it is to be female as reflected in the mirror society of homosexuality” and “what it is to be male. It is to be master, hero, brute, and pimp. Which is also to be irremediably stupid and cowardly” (17).
In his later plays, Genet expands his understanding of rigid categories to wider socio-political relations:
by dividing humanity into two groups and appointing one to rule over the other by virtue of birthright, the social order has already established and ratified a system of oppression which will underlie and corrupt all other human relationships, as well as every area of thought and experience (20).
Chapter 2 Summary: “Theory of Sexual Politics”
Chapter 2 addresses the political implications of sex and sex as a status category. Millett bases her analysis on an understanding that politics refers to “power-structured relationships, arrangements whereby one group of persons is controlled by another” (23). The relationship “between the sexes now, and throughout history, is […] a relationship of dominance and subordination” (24-25).
One of the key aspects of patriarchal rule is ideology. Philosopher Hannah Arendt noted that “government is upheld by power supported either through consent or imposed through violence” (26). In the case of sexual politics, consent arises “through the ‘socialization’ of both sexes to basic patriarchal polities with regard to temperament, role, and status” (26). Society raises both men and women to believe that men are superior and have attributes, dispositions, and skills that are more important and of more value than women. People uphold these supposed differences as biological. Millett, however, takes issue with this biological assumption. Male dominance often gets paralleled with musculature and the male physique, but this explanation is inadequate as “male supremacy, like other political creeds, does not finally reside in physical strength but in the acceptance of a value system which is not biological” (27). Millett suggests these distinctions as cultural instead of biological.
In the absence of a solid biological base for these differences, Millett considers how children become conditioned early on, which results in self-fulfilling prophecies. How culture encourages aggressive impulses in men but discourages them in women is a primary example of this early conditioning. Much of this early conditioning happens in the family. Children learn their gender roles from the family unit “largely through the example and admonition of their parents” (35), and eventually recognize and understand the larger structures of patriarchal rule—that is the rule of a male authority figure such as the “head of the family” (33)—that play out in society. Family also serves a vital role in economics and property with marriages serving as “financial alliances” and property passed down along patrilineal lines of father to son.
In traditional patriarchies, women are “permitted no actual economic existence as they could neither own nor earn in their own right” (39). Things arguably improved in “modern reformed patriarchal societies” where “women have certain economic rights” (39). However, the “‘women’s work’ in which some two thirds of the female population in most developed countries are engaged is work that is not paid for” (39-40). Millett speaks similarly of women’s average wages:
[these wages] represent only half of the average income enjoyed by men […] woman’s independence in economic life is viewed with distrust, prescriptive agencies of all kinds (religion, psychology, advertising, etc.) continuously admonish or even inveigh against the employment of middle-class women, particularly mothers (40-41).
In an intersection of gender and class, in these “middle and upper classes, there is less tendency to assert a blunt patriarchal dominance” compared with working-class men who are “more likely to claim authority on the strength of […] sex rank alone” as a result of “share power with the women of his class who are economically productive” (36).
In societies, people don’t often equate patriarchy with the use of force. This sort of equation finds parallels in crimes of the past, often viewed as exotic or primitive. When they do arise, they’re dismissed as faults in individual character. However, force is central to patriarchal rule. Often this has been institutionalized in the form of legal systems and, in the past especially, in rigid and violent systems of punishment. There are also other forms at play in contemporary patriarchies, including the ways men are socialized to embrace violence while women are not, the high incidence of, and ambivalent response to, rape and sexual violence, and forms of hostility that include the mockery that abounds in misogynistic literature.
Patriarchal understandings also abound in myths and religions, presenting both the idea that women are inherently inferior and that they are dangerous or dirty, particular in regard to their sexual functions. Indeed, the notion that “women’s sexual functions are impure is both world-wide and persistent” (47), manifesting in everything from the “practice of isolating [menstruating women] in huts at the edge of the village [which] occurs throughout the primitive world” (47) to calling menstruation “the curse” in contemporary slang. Historically, the “primitive” employment of “taboo and mana which evolve into explanatory myth” develop further into “ethical, then literal, and in the modern period, scientific rationalizations for the sexual politic” (51). Both the myth of Pandora’s box and the Bible’s myth of the Fall (in which Eve is tempted by the phallic snake) represent explanatory myths that blame female sexuality for great evils in the world.
These various aspects of patriarchy effect both sexes, resulting in “the interiorization of patriarchal ideology” (54) exemplified in practices like infantilizing women, undermining their self-respect, or reinforcing the idea that they are incapable and dependent on male support. Indeed, social science research conducted on this issue suggests that women hold “the expected traits of minority status: group self-hatred and self-rejection, a contempt for both herself and for her fellows—the result of that continual, however subtle, reiteration of her inferiority which she eventually accepts as a fact” (56). Patriarchy thrives on the mythos of its “universality and longevity,” which helps it appear irrefutable and inevitable. Despite this, there are periods during which “its workings are exposed and questioned [and] it becomes not only subject to discussion, but even to change” (58). It is this period of sexual revolution that Millett details in the next chapter.
Chapters 1-2 Analysis
Chapter 1 introduces three of the four key writers whom Millett will discuss later in more detail. A brief discussion of these writers highlights sex roles and the intersection of violence, power, and sexuality. These themes appear first in the analysis of Miller, with the observation that the sexual relation between the key characters takes the form of “a series of stratagems, aggressive on the part of the hero and acquiescent on the part of what custom forces us to designate the heroine” (5). Both the aggressive sexual behavior of the male and the submissive behavior of the female in this scenario are enactments of traditional sex roles, with males equating to active participants and females to passive heroines. The focus of the encounter rests on sex as domination: “the entire scene is a description not so much of sexual intercourse, but rather of intercourse in the service of power” (5). This allows a male reader to vicariously experience “a nearly supernatural sense of power” (6) as Miller’s penis becomes a symbolic method of chastisement.
Sex is also a form of domination and violence in Mailer’s work. Millett makes explicit the intersection of violence, domination, and male sexuality when she notes that anally raping his maid exemplifies Rojack’s obsession with mastery over her. Sex roles that define masculine as active and feminine as passive are also present here, as the entire scene reveals the sex act as a male’s “accomplishment” acted upon a passive female. This scene also ties into one of the book’s key motifs: an understanding of masculinity as something proven or earned. This is briefly alluded to in Millett’s analysis of Miller’s use of troubling language. Millett analyzes the characters’ masculine point of view and coinciding language. Miller’s text works as a way for men to share exploits and bolster their masculinity.
This sense of masculinity (and femininity) as something culturally assigned rather than biologically preordained also appears in Genet’s work. As in the works of the other writers, sex in Genet’s writing is about power and domination. However, this takes place between homosexual males who perform heterosexual society’s concepts of masculine and feminine. Genet’s homosexual characters embody hypermasculine roles of pimps and abusers, while others assume hyperfeminine roles of queens, victims, and sex workers. These characters therefore highlight how “sexual role is not a matter of biological identity but of class or caste in the hierocratic homosexual society projected in Genet’s novels” (17). Millett critiques another key motif in Genet’s work: homosexual culture reflecting heterosexual culture. That is to say, Genet’s “explication of the homosexual code becomes a satire on the heterosexual one” (19).
Millett’s critique of Genet’s and Miller’s characters builds towards what is perhaps the book’s central theme: the political nature of sex. While the discussions in Chapter 1 offer examples of sex as politics, Millett makes this enquiry explicit in the second chapter, which attempts “to prove that sex is a status category with political implications” (24) because sex historically involves both dominance and subordination, as well as differences in status and personality. While many argue that these differences are biological in nature, Millett suggests that this groupthink stems from patriarchal conditioning. For Millett, these so-called distinctions don’t actually “originate in human nature” (27). They are the result of how men and women are raised and culturally conditioned.
Millett shows that the family, too, is a deeply political institution, responsible for not only “the conditioning of early childhood” (31) but also serving important roles in economics and private property, functioning as a microcosm of the patriarchal state by preparing children for further patriarchal rule. Further examples of the political nature of the patriarchal state include the discussion on economic control, and violence and force to subordinate women. The brief discussion of sexual violence also briefly alludes to Millett’s thematic interest in the intersection of sex, power, and domination.
Underneath these more material forms of patriarchal control are deep-seated cultural understandings, often originating from myths. The discussion of this briefly alludes to the widespread understanding of women as dangerous or impure.
Lastly, the chapter brings together themes of the political nature of sex; the intersection of sex, power, and domination; and sex roles, to note that the political nature of sex and gender under patriarchy has a profound impact on both sexes, so much so that patriarchal ideology is internalized. This self-defeating behavior also helps to establish and reinforce the restrictive sex roles of patriarchal society while patriarchal society itself works to normalize and justify its role by claiming that it’s natural rather than created by society.
