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Sexual Politics
by Kate Millett
393 pp. Garden City, New York, Doubleday & Company, 1970. $7.95.

The Prisoner of Sex
by Norman Mailer
Harper's, Vol. CCXLI (March, 1971), pp. 41-92. $1.00.
240 pp. Boston, Little, Brown & Company, 1971. $5.95.

Everyone by now knows, or has heard, that Sexual Politics is a blockbuster. Kate Millett has produced shock waves of successive printings. These have catapulted her to current leadership of the feminist movement, according to a Time cover story, and have drawn the dubious recognition of a salvo from Norman Mailer, one of the book's chief targets. Despite its sensational aspects, Sexual Politics is no run-of-the-mill bestseller. It demands far more from its readers than the usual quick taking in before turning elsewhere. This Millett would immediately recognize as the insult it is, no matter how many copies she sells. Her prodigiously discerning and articulate book deserves as great a response in kind as we can give it: to discover the sources of its explosive energies and assess its impact with respect to the fundamental kinds of human change that are Millett's urgent imperatives.

One of the sources of energy is the radicalism of the the basic concepts developed in Chapters II through IV. For her purposes, she announces bluntly, "the term 'politics' shall refer to power-structured relationships, arrangements whereby one group of persons is controlled by another" (p. 23). Within this broader definition, Millett is concerned to establish that "sexual dominion obtains . . . as perhaps the most pervasive ideology of our culture and provides its most fundamental concept of power" (p. 25). The ensuing discussion ranges widely, drawing ammunition from physiology, genetics, psychology, sociology, anthropology, and history to strike at the cornerstone of the only form of human organization we know-patriarchal, male-dominated society. It seems likely that Millett's model, not only in method but also in Marxist orientation, is Simone de Beauvoir's monumental The Second Sex (1949). Yet Millett's discourse is far less abstract, far more likely-in its marshalling of particulars-to assault its audience and to be assaulted by it. Certainly there will be researchers and experts who will take Sexual Politics to task for oversights, oversimplifications, and overstatements that are inevitable in dealing with a subject of such scope in

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short compass. But it is impossible to think that Millett (essentially updating and expanding on Engels' 1884 tractate, The Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State) is in danger of refutation.

Millett traces back the total present-day concentration of the means of power in male hands to the division of labor by sex (which has produced the invidious, long-standing concept of separate roles) and the evolution of the family as property-the property of the eldest male, or "head," of the family. The history of jurisprudence reflects the conception of wife and children as chattels (many aspects of legal dependency and disfranchisement still hold today); and the related insistence on legitimacy to insure the family's monopoly on the basic functions of reproduction and socialization has put in force a complex system of restrictions and reprehensions (the so-called "double standard" is most conspicuous here). There can be no question that our traditional and universal patriarchial social structure is deeply implicated in and responsible for the linkage of domination and force with sexuality. A whole set of polarities has emerged to inform our commonest notions and our ordinary behavior, mingling prescription and description in a fatal confusion for both sexes. To be male is to be masculine, that is, aggressive and even sadistic; to be female is to be feminine, that is, passive and masochistic. Freud is almost singly responsible for the last terms in each equation; Millett's explosion of his myths about female sexuality, now a major feminist objective, is one of the most necessary and cathartic sections of the book.

What is to be done about patriarchy? Millett surveys the record of past attempts to come to terms with the principles and practices of male dominance on the combined fronts of state and home. One need not subscribe to her pat divisions of historical periods-The Revolution (1830-1930), The Counter-Revolution (1930-1960)-for which she does not give sufficient substantiating evidence. The broad outlines of her interpretation remain valid. She describes the upsurge of the woman's rights movement out of the anti-slavery movement (an American imperative arises for us afresh here) and details gains in the attainment of suffrage and in the areas of organized labor and education. This historical movement probably did reach its peak in the drastic reforms undertaken in Soviet Russia in the period 1918-25; it also met its greatest downfall there because people were ill-equipped psychologically and materially to deal with the dissolution of fundamental bonds. As Trotsky remarked bitterly in The Revolution Betrayed (1936), "You cannot 'abolish' the family; you have to replace it." The consequence, not only in Russia but also throughout the western world where militarism became the major preoccupation from the 1930's into the 1960's,

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was a marked reassertion of male supremacy. Nazi ideology may not even have been its most virulent form. Millett believes that we may now be entering a new phase of "sexual revolution," the goal of which she projects as "a permissive single standard of sexual freedom, and one uncorrupted by the crass and exploitative economic bases of traditional sexual alliances" (p. 62). She affirms the necessity of dispensing with family structure and of replacing marriage with other sorts of voluntary association.

It is hard to see, from Millett's presentation, why an end to patriarchy must mean an end to marriage and the family. Although Engels' indictment of the historical debasement of this institution, reiterated by Millett, remains compelling (prostitution, for example, was the first and for a long period the only female work for which payment was given; marriage, with its exchange of financial security for sexual relations and domestic labor, is merely the respectable counterpart), still the logical identification is nowhere demonstrated. Why not put an end to male domination in marriage and the family rather than end all three together? If on the one hand it appears timorous and naive to try to salvage such debased institutions, what are the actual chances, on the other hand, of undoing the thorough cultural conditioning which has made these units the basis of all human society? Even supposing this could be done, what would the substitute be? Millett does not go beyond acknowledging the magnitude of the goal she envisages and the obstacles to it. Nor can she be held accountable for failing to specify practical procedures or alternative models. Yet the undeveloped futurism of Sexual Politics is sure to lessen its impact with regard to social change. The book is likely to be much more effectual in its other aspect, the brilliant analyses of the history of ideas of human sexuality and their literary expressions from the earlier nineteenth century to the present.

Simone de Beauvoir is a precursor, but Millett's cross-country race through the precincts of literature is all her own. She knows, too, that her greatest strengths are here; her opening chapter, a provisional critical statement about the sexual presuppositions and revelations in the works of Henry Miller, Norman Mailer, and Jean Genet, is a staggering tour de force. Millett devotes the latter half of the book (originally a Columbia Ph.D. dissertation in English) to longer and more detailed studies of these three writers, having in the meanwhile generated a rich thematic matrix out of the disparate materials referred to above and a number of briefer analyses of earlier writers. (Among these, D. H. Lawrence receives exceptionally full treatment as the combined high

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priest and apologist for a phallic cult which Millett views as the religion of sexual counter-revolution.)

This is extraordinarily bold and original criticism, shattering conventional notions of twentieth-century literary history, ejecting central figures like Miller and Mailer from the ranks of revered revolutionaries on the grounds of their celebration of woman's domination by man. Millett convincingly documents the mutual degradation and dehumanization which affect characters and their fictional universe in these writers. She makes adroit use of the techniques of stylistic analysis-tone, point of view image and metaphor, diction, and rhythm-to establish a measure of artistic and human worth (or lack of it). In Millett's perspective, Lawrence, Miller, and Mailer make up a continuum of explorations and assertions of masculinity as it links itself with primitivism, obscenity, and militarism in turn to express extreme and unrelenting sexual hostility.

In Lawrence, the hostility of male to female emerges as psychological conflict, often lyrically rendered; in Miller, as a mechanical round of "organ grinding" (process description in four-letter words); in Mailer, as antisocial egomania mistaken for individualism or revolutionary consciousness. Most original of all, however, is Millett's analysis of Genet's surrealistic fiction and drama. She makes good on her paradoxical thesis that his homosexual world objectivizes for us the real content of the notions of heterosexuality on which the larger world operates-the terrible exploitation, violence, and impersonality of a sexual power structure. Millett's treatment of the cultural implications and literary achievements of these four writers is certain to be the most influential aspect of Sexual Politics. She has challenged not only reputations but our whole angle of vision on contemporary literature.

To reflect on the impact of the book in the experience of the reader is to realize how its double focus, activist and analytical, arises from an insistent humanism which is all too rare in our day. Here the embodiment of the humanism is female, but Millett's whole undertaking is to show that it must become the vital principle of both sexes. We must find, and if not find, create, our truer selves. Male supremacy is wrong. To understand this is to recover the unique potential of being human. Even if, contrary to the biological evidence we have so far, male dominance were to emerge as "natural," we alone among living things are able to make conventions (though we have made so many of the wrong sort) and bring about a mode of life which will enable male and female to interact on equal terms and with mutual esteem. As the only political animals, we owe it to ourselves, Millett tells us, to repudiate "sexual politics."

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It is surprising that Millett's humanistic appeal could go uncomprehended, so urgently it resounds throughout her big book. Yet Norman Mailer, not an obtuse man, has missed it. He begins his article, "The Prisoner of Sex," with a detailed reconstruction of how he was drawn into the vortex of feminism centering in Sexual Politics and how he reacted to it. A self-styled (and well-received) culture chronicler and diviner, Mailer grew curious about Millett and Women's Liberation when he learned that things were being said about him. At first displaying equanimity, in a show of literary interest, and insufferable, though apparently unwitting, condescension (how really, unexpectedly well the ladies wrote-almost as well as men-in trying this new line!), Mailer does not take long to blow his cool. Angry to the core, spewing out turgid sentences of clotted rage, Mailer undertakes to argue against Sexual Politics-the sections on Lawrence, Miller, and Genet, that is. In this long section the obvious omission of direct self-defense is all that remains of the pretense to objectivity.

Mailer convicts Millett of certain distortions, exaggerations, inconsistencies, and quotations out of context. That most authors can be convicted to this extent is clear without going beyond Mailer's broadside attack, for it commits all of the same faults. Moreover, Mailer is oddly unaware of substantiating the gist of Millett's interpretations while he claims to be demolishing them. He attributes to Henry Miller the portrayal of aggression and hostility "in the sexuality of men as it had never been seen before" (p. 66).* He illustrates this as he defends Lawrence's projection of dominance over women as a man's psychological and sexual necessity, to be achieved at all costs (p. 78). He also adduces more evidence that Genet's homosexual prison life precisely refracts the grim actualities of our larger heterosexual one (p. 80). However, for as long as Mailer lingers in the "land of Millett," as he calls it, he is oblivious of the forest. He hacks endlessly at the few defective trees which may appear to excuse and deserve his rage. But the most sobering spectacle is Mailer's persistent pointing of his finger at Millett as guilty of advocating the depersonalization and inhumanity which Mailer associates with the technology of our era. In the reiteration of this baseless charge it is hard not to find willful misunderstanding.

Why does Mailer misunderstand? Why is he so angry? The two questions have a single answer in Mailer's colossal egocentricity and self-absorption. These are not simply a matter of abundant autobiographical -reflection, long passages in which the narrator recounts his phallic prowess and his importance as a man of letters. Mailer is worst on the subject of women, for he then makes it clear how contented he is with

*All page references to "The Prisoner of Sex" are taken from the article as it first appeared in Harper's.

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the old ploy of alternately romanticizing and reducing the opposite sex by viewing it as nothing but erotic object. Little more than morbid fascination attaches to Mailer's circuitous route in "The Prisoner of Sex" from his first metaphysical fantasy over "that inner space of creation," "the incontestable mystery that women are flesh of the Mystery more than men" (p. 54) to the concluding nonsense, expressed in the most mystifying-or is it mystical?-language, that all contraception should be done away with in order that women may exercise their primal power of willing or not willing (as the case may be) that a sperm fertilize their ovum (pp. 89-92). Such anti-biological daydreaming is irresponsible and callous, unthinkable in any author who is writing for an audience beyond himself.

But Mailer remains locked in his subjectivity, its true prisoner. His contorted narrative posture is, first and last, the best index to his condition: writing in the third person about the contents of his own consciousness, affecting generality in the exclusive use of the pronoun "he" (no proper nouns), Mailer creates a strangely involuted and reduplicated effect, as if there were two persons immersed beneath the murky surface of the prose. It is soon evident, however, that only Mailer is there, once as speaker, once as subject. While more sympathetic readers may construe such literary egocentricity as the only available cement for a worldview when that world seems to be dissolving, it is hard for a woman to feel that the masculine bluster of "The Prisoner of Sex" speaks to or about her. In larger terms, it is also hard to believe that one could glean from Mailer the drift of our civilization. As in other works he claims to descry imminent doom, here of the ultimate values of life and love. But what is to assure us that what Mailer takes for the rumble of apocalypse is anything more than the pounding of blood in his middle-aged pulses?

Janel M. Mueller
The University of Chicago
Chicago, Illinois