Up Against the Men's Room Wall

Monday, Aug. 03, 1970

Article Tools

Reprints

Sphere

RSS

SEXUAL POLITICS by Kate Mtltett. 393 pages. Doub/eday. $7.95.

First, a short radical-awareness test. Fill the blank spaces in the following statements:

1) What do those want, anyhow?

2) There are good and bad ,

just like anyone else.

3) have often been guests in my

home.

4) I'm not prejudiced; in fact, my children were even brought up by .

If you filled in the word Negroes or blacks, you flunk. Please accept a year's supply of condescending smiles. But if you wrote "women," or even "females," you are right on, grooved, with it, Queen for a Day.

Pipe and Slippers. For if it has not already happened at your house, braless converts to the Women's Liberation Movement are poised to leap right off the panels of the TV talk shows and play hell with your pipe and slippers. Sooner or later they will probably be armed with a copy of Kate Millett's Sexual Politics. Despite placards and slogans, revolutions need theoretical touchstones, dialectics to subdue the opposition. In this regard, Sexual Politics will have its uses. Without making explicit comparisons with other contemporary movements, Millett attempts to place Women's Lib in the roiling main currents of the struggle for human rights. In effect, she translates the war of the sexes from the language of 19th century bedroom farce into the raw images of guerrilla warfare. What emerges from her pages is a vision in which men constitute a colonial power that exploits and suppresses the aspirations of women by whatever means necessary. . Although Millett modestly claims that her theory of sexual politics is "tentative and imperfect," it moves with the inexorable certainty of a long, lumbering freight train. It is full of strategically selected references to history, sociology, psychology, sexology, biology and literature. The material is written and assembled like a collection of incomplete Ph.D. treatises; the scholarship is carefully but forcefully tailored to prove her thesis.

A 36-year-old American sculptor and active New York feminist who graduated with honors from the University of Minnesota and Oxford, Millett views male supremacy as a myth that has been kept alive for thousands of years by a grandiose patriarchal conspiracy. "Primitive society," she writes, "practices its misogyny in terms of taboo and mana which evolve into explanatory myth. In historical cultures, this is transformed into ethical, then literary, and in the modern period, scientific rationalizations for the sexual politic."

The worst enemies are those who are thought to maintain their power and prerogatives with self-deluding and unctuous paternalism. Millett singles out 19th century chivalry, particularly as it is enshrined in the works of Tennyson and Ruskin. Like other feminist writers, Millett views such legends of feminine evil as Pandora's Box and the fall from Eden as basic instruments of patriarchal power. The etiquette of courtly and romantic love is also interpreted as a male method of emotionally manipulating and exploiting women, "since love is the only circumstance in which the female is (ideologically) pardoned for sexual activity."