Sexual Politics

Millett uses literature to explore the conflation of male sexuality with violence and domination. Studying an excerpt from Miller’s Sexus, Millet finds that the seduction of the character Ida is less a description of sexual intercourse than a depiction of power and exploitation. The penis becomes an instrument of physical punishment. Domination and violence are even more overt in Mailer’s descriptions of male sexuality where characters conflate their penises with guns. It is perhaps most obvious in the scene from An American Dream in which the hero murders his wife and then sodomizes the maid. The two acts of violence, first murder and then rape, serve to establish Rojack’s masculinity and allow him to express a kind of mastery. Although less graphic and violent, Lawrence’s Aaron’s Rod provides possibly the most interesting example because it shows two men who are so disgusted by modern women and so committed to male supremacy that they abandon women all together and live together instead, establishing obvious homosexual overtones. However, like Lawrence himself, they are incapable of conceptualizing male sexuality without domination and soon find themselves in a dispute over who will be subordinated.

Millett critiques the traditional sex roles of male activity and female passivity. The traditional family unit, for example, revolves around men engaging in the pursuits of the public sphere while women stay at home engaging in domestic duties of the private sphere. Even during the sexual revolution, which did much to challenge these understandings (for example, providing access to higher education for women), there was significant resistance from figures such as Ruskin who suggested that such domestic tasks simply reflected women’s passive nature and attempted to justify this using the concept of chivalry. The active/passive dichotomy has long been applied to sexual intercourse also, with the belief that intercourse involves the male seeking gratification and actively penetrating the female who passively relents to sexual contact that she does not desire. After the sexual revolution, Freud did much to reestablish and re-legitimize this understanding, taking the high levels of hyposexuality in women of the period (which might more accurately be seen as a result of cultural conditioning and patriarchal oppression) and using it as evidence that women inherently have low libidos. He went even further to argue that women are actually incapable of actively contributing to civilization because they do not have the super ego that men develop as a result of their fear of castration. Millett argues against the construction of sex roles as innate or natural, insisting instead that they are actually the result of conditioning and socialization.