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Sexual Politics
by Kate Millett.
(Editors Note: This 1968 essay by Kate Millett was circulated before
the publication of her book Sexual Politics. The ideas within
it were later incorporated into Chapter 2 of the book, which is a feminist
classic. )
Is it possible
to regard the relation of the sexes in a political light at all? It
depends on how one defines politics. I do not define the political area
here as that narrow and exclusive sector known as institutional or official
politics of the Democrat or Republican--- we have all reason to be tired
and suspicious of them. By politics I mean powerstructured relationships,
the entire arrangement whereby one group of people is governed by another,
one group is dominant and the other subordinate.
It is time
we developed a more cogent and relevant psychology and philosophy of
power relationships not yet considered in out institutional politics.
It is time we gave attention to defining a theory of politics which
treats of power relationships on the less formal than establishmentarian
grounds of personal intercourse between members of well defined and
coherent groups-- races, castes, classes and sexes. It is precisely
because such groups have no representation in formal political structures
that their oppression is so entire and so continuous.
In the
recent past, we have been forced to acknowledge that the relationship
between the races in the United States is indeed a political one--
and one of the control of collectivity defined by birth, or another
collectivity also defined by birth. Groups who rule by birth are fast
disappearing in the West and white supremacists are fated to go the
way of aristocrats and other extinct upper castes. We have yet one
ancient and universal arrangement for the political exploitation of
one birth group by another-- in the area of sex.
Just as
the study of racism has convinced as that there exists a truly political
relationship between races, and an oppressive situation from which
the subordinated group had no redress through formal political structures
whereby they might organize into conventional political struggle and
opposition--just so any intelligent and objective examination of our
system of sexual politics or sex role structure will prove that the
relationship between the sexes now-- and throughout history-- is one
of what Max Weber once termed "Herrschaft"-- or dominance
and subordination-- the birthright control of one group by another-the
male to rule and the female to be ruled. Women have been placed in the
position of minority status throughout history and even after the grudging
extension of certain minimal rights of citizenship and suffrage at the
beginning of this century. It is fatuous to suppose that women-- white
or black-- have any greater representation now that they vote -- than
that they ever did. Previous history has made it clear that the possession
of the vote for 100 years has done the black man precious little good
at all.
Why, when
this arrangement of male rule and control of our society is so obvious
-- why is it never acknowledged or discussed? Partly, I suspect because
such discussion is regarded as dangerous in the extreme and because
a culture does not discuss its most basic assumptions and most cherished
bigotries. Why does no one ever remark that the military, industry,the
universities, the sciences, political office and finance (despite absurd
declarations to the contrary on the evidence that some little old lady
owns stock over which she has no control). Why does no one ever remark
that every avenue of power in our culture including the repressive
forces of the police -- entirely in male hands? Money, guns, authority
itself, are male provinces. Even God is male -- and a white male at
that.
The reasons
for this gigantic evasion of the very facts of our situation are -many
and obvious. They are also rather amusing. Let's look at a few of the
thousand defenses the masculine culture has built against any infringement
or even exposure of its control: is to react with ridicule and the
primitive mechanism of laughter and denial. Sex is funny -- it's dirty
-- and it is something women have. Men are not sexual beings -- they
are people -- they are humanity. Therefore, any rational discussion
of the realities of sexual life degenerate as quickly as men can make
them into sniggering sessions, where through cliché so ancient as to have almost ritual
value, women who might be anxious to carry on an adult dialogue are
bullied back into "their place".
At the
level of common attitude -- sex and particularly that very explosive
subject of the relationship of the sexes -- is a subject closed to
intelligent investigation and accessible only to persiflage and levity.
The second
evasion our culture has evolved is via folk myth. From Dagwood to the
college professor, sex is folklore and the official version of both
is that the male is the "victim" of a widespread conspiracy.
From the folk figure of Jiggs or Punch to the very latest study of the
damage which mothers wreak upon their sons, we are assailed by the bogey
of the overbearing woman -- woman as some terrible and primitive natural
evil -- our twentieth-century remnant of the primitive fear of the unknown,
unknown at least to the male, and remember, it is the male in our culture
who defines reality. Man is innocent, he is put upon, everywhere he
is in danger of being dethroned. Dagwood -- the archetypal henpecked
husband -- is a figure of folk fun only because the culture assumes
that a man will rule his wife or cease to be very much of a man. Like
a dimwitted plantation owner who is virtually controlled by his far-cleverer
steward or valet, Dagwood is a member of the ruling class held up both
to scorn and to sympathy-scorn for being too human or too incompetent
to rule, yet sympathetic because every other member of the privileged
group knows in his heart how burdensome it is to maintain the illusory
facade of superiority over those who are your natural equals.
The phantasy
of the male victim is not only a myth, it is politically expedient
myth, myth either invented or disseminated to serve the---political
end of a rationalization or a softening and partial denial of power.
The actual relation of the sexes in our culture from the dawn of history
has been diametrically opposite to the of official cult of the downtrodden.
Yet our culture seeks on every level of discussion to deny logical
charge of oppression which any objective view of the, sex structure
would bring up, masculine society has a fascinating tactic of appropriating
all sympathy for itself. It has lately taken up the practice of screaming
out that it is the victim of unnatural surgery . . . it has been "castrated".
Even Albert Shanker. has discovered of late that black community control,
the Mayor, and the Board of Education have performed this abomination
upon his person. To those in fear of castration word one word of comfort.
The last instance of its practice on a white man in western culture
was the late l8th century when the last castrati lost a vital section
of his anatomy in the cause of the art of music --at the hands of another
male, I must add. For castration is an ancient cruelty which males practice
on each other. In the American South it was as a way to humiliate black
victims of the Klan. In the Ancient East it was a barbarous form of
punishment for crime. In the courts of the Italian Renaissance castration
was a perverse method of providing soprano voices for the Papal Choir.
It was felt that women were too profane to sing the holy offices so
to supply the demand for the higher musical register, eunuchs were created
through putting young men to the knife
As the
practice of physical castration has been abolished clear that the word
in current usage must be accepted in a metaphoric rather than literal
connotation, if we are to any sense of the fantastic anxiety contemporary
male egos, for on every hand, in the media and in the culture both
high and low, men today have come to see the terrible specter of the "castrating
female" all about them, their paranoiac delusions are taken for
social fact. Having in a confused way, associated his genitals with
his power, the- male -now bellows in physical pain and true hysteria
every time his social and political prerogatives are threatened. If
by castration is meant a loss through being forced to share power:with
oppressed groups deprived of power- or even of human status, then there
are many white men in America who will suffer this psychic operation,-but
it will be the removal of a cancer in the brain and heart not of any.
pleasurable or creative organ. To, argue that any woman who insists
on full human, status is a "castrating bitch" or guilty of
the obscure- evil: of "penis envy" (only the consummate male
chauvinist could have imagined this term)'is as patently silly as to
argue that dispossessed blacks want to become white men-- issue is not
to be Whitey, but to have a fair share of what Whitey has - - the whole
world of human possibility
While I
am fully aware that equal rights entail equal responsibility there
are some things Whitey has which I- am very sure I don't want, for
example, a Green Beret, a Zippo for burning down, villages the ear
of a dead of peasant, the burden of the charred flesh a Vietnamese
child. Nor do I have an any interest in acquiring the habits of violence,
warfare-' (unless in the just cause of self-defense -- a cause I cannot
foresee ever happening-in American foreign policy) ), or the white
man's imperialist racism, or rape or the capitalist exploitation of
poverty and ignorance.
Because
of the smoke-screen of masculine propaganda one hears endless cant
about castration--whereas real and actual crimes men commit against
women are never mentioned. It is considered bad taste, unsportsmanlike
---to refer to the fact that the are thousands of rapes-or crimes against
the female personality--in New-York City every year--I speak only of
those instances which are reported--probably one tenth of those which
occur. It is also generally accepted that to regard Richard Speck and
so many others like him in anything. but the light, of exceptional
and irrelevant instances of individual pathology, is another instance
of not playing that Speck merely enacted the presupposition of the
majority male supremacists of the sterner sort--and they are -legion.
That his murders echo in the surrealist chambers of masculine phantasy
and wish fulfillment is testified to by every sleazy essay into sadism
and white slave traffic on the dirty movie belt of 42nd St. and anti-social
character of hard core pornography. The Story of O tells it
like it is about masculine phantasy better than does Romeo and Juliet.
So does the -Playboy, chortling over the con-game he has played on
that Rabbit, he dreams of screwing ---the Bunny, or woman reduced to
a meek and docile animal toy.
For the
extent and depth -of the male's hatred and hostility toward his subject
colony of women is a source of continual astonishment.' Just as be
hind the glowing' mirage 'of "darkeys"crooning in the twilight
--is reality the block, the whip and the manacle, the history of women
is full of colorful artifact. ...the bound feet of all of old China's
women---women deliberately deformed- that they might be the better controlled
-- (you can work with those useless feet, but you cannot run away) --
the veil of Islam (or an attenuated existence as a human soul condemned
to wear a cloth sack over her head all the days of her half-life) ;--
the lash, the rod, domestic imprisonment through most of the world's
history -rape, concubinage, prostitution . Yes, we have our own impressive
catalogue of open tyrannies. Woman are still sold in Saudi Arabia and
elsewhere. In Switzerland, they are even today disenfranchised. And
in nearly every rod of ground on this earth they live only via the barter
system of sex in return for for food of the latter. Like every system
of oppression male supremacy rests finally on force, physical power,
rape, assault and the threat of assault. A final resource when all else
has failed the male resorts to attack. But the fear of force is there
before every woman always as a deterrent-- dismissal, divorce, violence
--personal sexual or economic.
As in any
society in a state of war, the enforcement of male rule which euphemism
calls "the battle of the sexes", is possible only through
the usual lies convenient to' countries at war-- The Enemy is Evil---the
Enemy is not Human. And men have always been able to believe in the
innate evil of women. Studies of primitive societies just as studies
of our own religious texts -- illustrate over and over-the innumerable
instances of taboos practiced against women. A group of aborigines
agree with Judaism in the faith that a menstruating, woman is "unclean,"
taboo, untouchable. Should she have access to weapons or other sacred
and ritual articles the male, she will place a hex or spell upon them
that their "masculine" owners will not survive. Everything
that pertains to her physical make-up or function -is despicable
or subversive. Let side the village and inhabit a hut alone and without
food during her period - let her be forbidden the temple -- even
those outer precincts assigned to her for a-specified number of-days
after, as the Gospels-coolly inform us she has given birth to the
very savior of the world'-- for she is still, dirty. Dirty and mysterious.
Have you ever thought it curious that 'nocturnal' emissions were
not regarded as either dirty -or mysterious, that the penis was (until
Industrialism decided to veil it again for greater effect) never
considered as dirty-- but so regal and imperious that its shape is
the one assigned to scepters, bombs, guns, and airplanes?
In history;
vast numbers of peoples have worshipped the phallus openly. It may
also be true that ever larger numbers of peoples once worshipped the
womb or the fertility powers of the earth. It may also be true that
one of the-many causes for the commencement of that now-universal
oppression and contempt for women lay in the male's very fear of the
female powers of giving life and perhaps inspired that enormous change
in world affairs we call the patriarchal take-over. Living so close
to the earth, without having yet developed toys of his own in warfare
and the rise of princely city-states full of toiling slaves building
him empty monuments, and unaware of his own vital role in conception
the male may well have past glances of envy on the woman and what
was -- in those conditions-- her miraculous capacity to bring another
human life out of her very belly-and seen in it a connection with
the phases of the moon, and the seasons of the earth's vegetation
-- and stood both in awe and terror -- and finally in hatred -- and
decided to cast this function down from what he rather naturally I
assumed was its collusion with the supernatural, the terrible, the
uncontrollable forces of nature -- and denigrate it to the level of
the the bestial, the pernicious and the obscene. And thus the filthy
totem was,appropriated by the male and taboo assigned in a thousand
ways to operate against the female.
Having
vitiated all effects of the female power the male set about aggrandizing
his own. Having finally appropriated all access to the supernatural
for himself he established an alliance with the new male god (both
his brother his father, depending on auspicious or inauspicious circumstance),
he then proceeded to announce his kinship with the divine through
a long and impressive list of patriarchs and prophets, high priests and
emperors. Now that he had gone into partnership with God, the male
set himself up as God to the female. Milton puts it this way: "He for
God only, she. for God in him".
In some
cultures females were allowed to participate on an inferior level
as figures of identification for human females-- useful in encouraging
them to an enforced cooperation in their own control. So they can
see themselves as honored through the rapes of Jove on Europa and
Leda, favored in divine seduction scenarios as an endless series
of wood nymphs, possibly debased versions of other tribal goddesses
at loose ends now their matriarchal reign had ended -- or incarnate
in that first troublesome woman, Juno - the insubordinate wife.
But in
sterner patriarchal societies such as the Judaic and Christian, there
was never any kidding around about goddesses. Christianity did not
elevate the Virgin to goddess status until the 12th Century and the
Protestants dethroned her a mere 4 hundred years later. The device
of making her both virgin and mother not only excites admiration
for its ingenuity but astonishment as its perfection of effect --
here is divine or nearly divine woman completely relieved of that
insidious sexuality by which woman herself has always been defined.
Mere mortal
women in the Christian ages were continuously assured of their inherent
evil and inferiority by a whole procession of fanatic mile supremacists--from
Paul who found even the exhibition of their hair in church a powerful
provocation and an indelicate enticement to hellish practices more
apparent in his mind than in others-- (such it is to represent the
sexuality of the whole race in only one half of it)-- to Jerome,
Augustine, Aquinas and a whole parade of ascetics, hermits, and other
non-participating types who have projected their own teeming sexuality
onto the female. For so strong is the hold of the Christian assumption
through Eve and other notable exempla that the "evil" of sex was introduced
via the female alone-- that today even Women think of Women when they
think of sex, sexiness, sex objects, sexuality and sex symbols -- a
state of rather surprising paradox in a society which rigidly enforces
heterosexuality for women.
Judaism
is even more punctilious than Christianity in the matter of male
supremacy. First thing in the morning every male Jew is enjoined
to thank God for creating him a male and therefore a superior order
of being. I have never been informed as to what Jewish women are
instructed to say on such occasions of coming to consciousness--perhaps
it is some little bit of advice to themselves not to fall into the
much-satirized posture of the overbearing Jewish mother.
Of course
it is not surprising that religion as we know it takes the enforcement
of male supremacy by divine fiat as part of its function in a
patriarchy -- so too does literature, all traditional and contemporary notions
of government, those platitudes which currently pass for social
science --and even--despite the influence of the Enlightenment--science
itself cooperates in a number of transparently expedient rationalizations
in maintaining the traditional sexual politics on grounds so
specious as to have a certain comic charm.
A further
way in which contemporary masculine culture refuses to face the issue
of sexual politics is through the reduction of the two sexual collectivities
of male and female into an endless variety of purely individual situations,
whereby all cases are unique --each a delicate matter of adjustment
of one diverse character to another --all of them merely the very
private matter of one-to-one. relationships. That this is so largely
our favorite method of portraying sexual relationships today --since
Freud and the development of that very private science of psychoanalysis
- is probably due in good part to the convenience it offers in shielding
us from the unpleasant reality of sexual relations should we begin
to view them on general or class/caste terms as we have learned to
see race. For we know very well now that race is not a matter between
one employer and his "boy" or one family and its "maid", but
it is to be perceived in the far more pertinent light of one race's
control over the other
The Individual
Case translates our older myth of the dangerous Female into a newer
but by now rather shop-worn cliché of the bitch stereotype --the
most stock figure of the contemporary media. It is interesting to note
how this bitch leads one to fancy - without ever coming right out and
saying it -- that all women are bitches. It is puzzling too how, as
woman -- with woman's minority status and therefore a creature completely
out of the male power structure-- she is arbitrarily and unjustly blamed
for nearly every fault in American life today -- and turned into a veritable
symbol of the Hateful Establishment. As beauty queen, the male establishment
is willing to allow woman a place as mascot or cheerleader--but it is
a long way from admitting her to any personal stake in the establishment's
show. As a girlfriend or a wife, she may participate vicariously for
a time, --but she is easy to replace and the trade-in on old models
of wife and mistress is pretty brisk. She may sleep with so many thousands
a year or such and such an office, but she is dreaming if she ever fancies
such glory is her own.
For the
purpose of male propaganda, one of the most felicitous effects of
the Individual Case myth is that it immediately translates any resistance
to the present political situation in sex relations into a damning
conviction of the sin of neurosis. As Psychology has replaced religion
as the conformist in social behavior, it has branded any activity
at odds with the force quo (which, by the way, it has taken to be "normality") as
deranged, pitiable or dangerous behavior. By this criteria, current
"normality" in the United States is racism, police brutality
and ruthless economic exploitation.
This is
what happens, if, like the Shrinks, you take 19th Century social
life as both the State of Nature and the State of a Healthy Society.
Any woman who fails to conform to the sterile stereotype of wife
and motherhood as all and only, or who fails to bow in elaborate
deference to male authority and opinion on any and all questions
---is clearly off her nut. Men have said it.
One other device to maintain the current and traditional sexual politics
is to claim that the whole thing has already been settled
a long time ago "we gave you the vote" as the male authoritarian puts
it with such stunning arrogance —we went to the polls and elected
you into the human race because one day you mentioned the oversight
of your exclusion and, obliging fellow that we are, we immediately rectifies
this very trivial detail .
The foregoing
is both a distortion of history and a denial of reality. Women fought
hard and almost without hope, driven to massive and forceful protest
which has served as a model both for the labor movement and the black
movement. They struggled on against overwhelming odds of power and
repression for over one hundred and fifty years to get this worthless
rag known as the ballot. We got it last of all,-- black and white--
women are the last citizens of the United States'-- and we had to
work hardest of all to get it.
And now
we have it we realize how badly we were cheated--we
had fought so long, worked so hard, pushed back despair so many times that
we were exhausted-- we just said then give us that and we will do the
rest ourselves. But -we didn't realize, as perhaps blacks never realized
until the Civil Rights Movement, that the ballot is
no real admission to civil life in America; it means nothing at all if you
are not represented in a representative democracy. And we are not represented
now any more than black people...both groups have only
one senator --- one Tom apiece. The United States has fewer women in public
office than hardly any nation in the world--we are more effectively
ostracized from political life-in this country than any other constituency
in America --and we are 53% of its population. Political nominees
announced their intention of helping asthmatic children and the mentally
retarded of every age, if elected-- but not a word about women
half the population- but not a word --the largest minority status group in
history. But not one word.
It is time
the official fallacy of the West and of the United States particularly
- that the sexes are now equal socially and politically - be exploded
for the hoax it really is. For at present any gainsaying of this
piety is countered with the threat that "women have got too much power
I they're running the world", and other tidbits of frivolity which
the speaker, strange as it may seem, might often enough believe. For
the more petty male ego(like that of the cracker or the Union man..in
the North who voted for Wallace) - in his paranoia is likely to believe
that because one woman or one black man in millions can make nearly
or even a bit more than he does -- the whole bunch are taking over that
sordid little corner of the world he regarded as his birthright because
the was white and male -- and on which he had staked his very identity-just
because it prevented him from seeing himself as exploited by the very
caste he had imagined he was part of and with whom, despite all evidence
to the contrary, he fancied he shared the gifts of the earth and the
American dream--. Nightmare that it is.
The actual
facts of the situation of woman in America today are sufficient evidence
that, white or black, women are at the bottom unless they sleep with
the top. On their own they are Nobody and taught every day they are
Nobody and taught so well they have come to internalize that destructive
notion and even believe it. The Department of Labor statistics can't
hide the fact that this is a man's world --- a white man's world:
the average year-round income of the white male is $6,704, of a black
male $4,277, of a white I female $3,991, and of the black woman $2,816.
As students you live in a Utopia--enjoy it, for it is the only moment
in your lives when you will be treated nearly as equals. When you
get married or get a job you will be made to see where power is,
but then it will be too late. That is why you should organize now:
look at your curriculum and look at your housing rules,--that's a
start at realizing how-you are treated unfairly.
But the
oppression of women is not only economic; that's
just a part of it. The oppression of women is Total and therefore it exists
in the mind, it is psychological oppression. Let's have a look at how it
works, for it works like a charm. From earliest childhood every
female child is carefully taught that she is to be a life-long incompetent
at every sphere of significant human activity therefore she must
convert herself into a sex object -- a Thing. She must be pretty
and assessed by the world: weighed, judged and measured by her looks alone.
If she's pretty, she can marry; then she can concentrate
rate her energies on pregnancy and diapers. That's life --that's female
life. That's what it is to reduce and limit the expectations and potentialities
of one half of the human race to the level animal
behavior.
It is time
we realized that the whole structure of male and female personality
is arbitrarily imposed by social conditioning a social conditioning
which has taken all the possible traits of human personality-- which
Margaret Mead once, by way of analogy, compared to the many colors
of the rainbow's spectrum --and arbitrarily assigned traits into
two categories; thus aggression is masculine, passivity-feminine
violence- masculine, tenderness feminine, intelligence masculine'
and emotion feminine, etc., etc....arbitrarily departmentalizing
human qualities into two neat little piles which are drilled into
children by toys, games, the social propaganda of television and
the board of education's deranged whim as to what is proper male
- female Role- Building. What we must now set about doing is to reexamine
this whole foolish and segregated house of cards, and pick from it
what we can use: Dante, Shakespeare, Lady Murasaki and Mozart, Einstein
and the care for life which we have bred into women -- and accept
these as human traits. Then we must get busy to eliminate what are
not properly humane or even human ideas -- the warrior, the killer,
the hero as homicide, the passive, dumb cow victim.
We must now begin to realize and to retrain ourselves to see that
both intelligence and a reverence for life are
HUMAN qualities. It is high time we began to be reasonable about the relationship
of sexuality to personality and admit the facts -the present
assignment of temperamental traits to sex is moronic, limiting
and hazardous. Virility - the murderer's complex- or self definition
in terms of how many or how often or how efficiently he can oppress
his fellow --- This has got to go. There is a whole generation coming
of age in America who have already thoroughly sickened of the
military male ideal, who know they were born men and don't have
to prove it by killing someone or wearing crew cuts. There is also a vast
number of women who are beginning to wake out of the long
sleep known as cooperating in one's own oppression and self-denigration,
and they are banding together, in nationwide chapters of the National
Organization for Women -- in the myriad groups of Radical Women
springing up in cities all over the country and the world, in the women's
liberation groups of SDS and in other groups or, on campus,
and they are joining together to make the beginnings of a new and massive
women's movement in America and in the world -- to establish true equality
between the sexes, to break the old machine of sexual politics
and replace it with a more human and civilized world for both sexes,
and to end the present system's oppression of men as well as women.
There are
other forces at work to change the ;whole face of American
society: the black movement to end racism, the student movement
with its numbers and powers for spreading the idea of a new society
founded on democratic principles, free of the war reflex. free of the
economic and racial exploitation reflex. Black people, students and
women --that's alot of people with -our combined numbers it is probably
70% of the population or more. It is more than enough to change
the course and character of our society -- surely enough to cause a
radical social revolution. And maybe it will also be the first Revolution
to avoid the pitfall of bloodshed, a mere change of dictators and
the inevitable counter-revolution which follows upon such betrayal
and loss of purpose.
We are
numbers sufficient to alter the course of human history -by changing
fundamental values by affecting an entire change of consciousness.
We cannot have such a change of consciousness unless we rebuild
values---we cannot rebuild values unless we 'restructure personality.'
But we cannot do this or solve racial and economic crimes unless
we end the oppression of all people- unless we end the idea of violence,
of dominance, of power, unless we end the idea of oppression itself
-- unless we realize-that a revolution in sexual policy is not
only part of but basic to any real change in the quality life. Social
and cultural revolution in America and the world depend on a change
of consciousness of which a new relationship between the sexes
and a new definition of humanity and human personality are an integral
part.
As we awake
and begin to take action, there will be enough of us and
we will have both a purpose and a goal -- the first truly human condition,
the first really human society. Let us begin the revolution
and let us begin it with love: All of us, black, white, and gold, male
and, female, have it, within our power to create a world we could
bear out of the desert we inhabit for we hold our very fate in our
hands. |
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