Sexual Politics

Miller is often hailed for challenging puritanism and celebrating a new sexual freedom. However, Millet argues he is “a compendium of American sexual neuroses, and his value lies not in freeing us from such afflictions, but in having had the honesty to express and dramatize them” (295). What Miller offers is a representation of “the disgust, the contempt, the hostility, the violence, and the sense of filth with which our culture, or more specifically, its masculine sensibility, surrounds sexuality” (295). This includes cultural attitudes towards women, “for somehow it is women upon whom this onerous burden of sexuality falls” (295). He reflects widespread, normalized attitudes that have not previously found literary expression, offering a kind of “cultural data” previously hidden “beneath our traditional sanctities” (296).

Although a self-declared “disciple of Lawrence” (296), Miller’s perceptions of sex and sexuality are radically different from those found in Lawrence’s work. Lawrence’s hero “‘makes love’ by an elaborate political protocol” and, in doing so, “effects the subjection of the woman in question” through “careful diplomacy and expert psychological manipulation” (296). Miller’s hero, however, “just ‘fuck[s]’ women and discard[s] them” and, as such, is “merely a huckster and a con man, unimpeded by pretension, with no priestly role to uphold” (296). Lawrence challenged “feminist claims to human recognition and fuller social participation by distorting them into a vegetative passivity calling itself fulfillment” while Miller simply reduces women “to ‘cunt’—thing, commodity, matter” (297). Stripped of personality and personhood, the objectified women of Miller’s world have nothing “to tame or break by the psychological subtleties of Lawrence’s Freudian wisdom” (297).

Miller represents a vision of manhood in which masculine achievement comes from sex and money. Rejecting the money mentality, he nevertheless plays out the same acquisitive attitudes in relation to sex, “converting the female to commodity” so that “he too can enjoy the esteem of ‘success’” (298). Accordingly, acquiring “cunt” is equivalent to acquiring a currency, with all the intimacy or aesthetic interest that this implies. There is virtually no mention of bodies other than the genitals, so that it is “not even bodies who copulate here, let alone persons” and Miller’s whole approach becomes “the dissociated adventures of cunt and prick” (299). Indeed, the “utter impersonality” of the “perfect Miller ‘fuck’” suggests “a pathological fear of having to deal with another and complete human personality” (300). Given these attitudes, it is perhaps not surprising that “Miller’s ideal woman is a whore” who he can reduce to “the function of absolute cunt” (301), existing at men’s convenience and never, in his view, extending beyond this. Nevertheless, he is still perfectly “capable of reviling them as ‘vultures,’ ‘buzzards,’ ‘rapacious devils,’ and ‘bitches’—his righteous scorn as trite as his sentimentality” (302).

Miller reveals that his views are essentially conservative, parasitically dependent on the “conventional morality” (306) his work aims to challenge. In many ways, this is reflected in the “men’s-house atmosphere” (302) of Miller’s work and the sense of “arrested adolescence” in which “sex is clandestine, difficult to come by” (303). Such an atmosphere reflects the sense of bragging, of reporting to “an ubiquitous peer group jury” (303) that pervades Miller’s prose. Miller’s “strenuous heterosexuality depends, to a considerable degree, on a homosexual sharing” (303). The essentially conservative nature of Miller’s attitudes is further reflected in the “very brutality with which he handles the language of sex” (306). While he celebrates the penis as power, he denigrates “cunt” through a number of unflattering words, but ultimately as “really only emptiness, nothingness, zero […] unfathomable vacuum of the female” (308). Miller’s misogyny—reflected in this fear and contempt—is deeply conservative too because it relies on the belief that “since sex defiles the female, females who consent to sexuality deserve to be defiled as completely as possible” (309). Indeed, this view of sex as defilement is the “puritan bedrock” (309) of his attitude that leads his works to simply tell “the old story: guilt fear, a reverence for ‘purity’ in the female; and a deep moral outrage whenever the ‘lascivious bitch’ in woman is exposed” (310).

Mailer’s attitudes are contradictory and paradoxical, and his work offers “the spectacle of his dilemma, the plight of a man whose powerful intellectual comprehension of what is most dangerous in the masculine sensibility is exceeded only by his attachment to the malaise” (314). He shows himself to be a “prisoner of the virility cult” (314). In his work, the “sexual animus behind reactionary attitude erupts into open hostility” (315). By his own admission, the characters from The Naked and the Dead for whom he had “the most secret admiration […] were violent people” (317). Works like Barbary Shore also “connect, even equate combat and cruelty with sexuality” (317), while D.J. Jethroe, charismatic protagonist of Why Are We in Vietnam?, is “perfectly […] at home with the hero ‘who can’t come unless he’s squinting down a gunsight” (319) and often “fancies his penis a gun to ‘those Dallas debutantes and just plain common fucks who are lucky to get drilled by him’” (320). During his “Hipster period of ‘The White Negro’ and Advertisements for Myself,” he still has “reservations about the virtues of violence on a collective scale” but “appears to have fallen in love with it as a personal and sexual style” (317). He creates “an aesthetic of Hip whose chief temperamental characteristic in a malign machismo,” which confuses “the simply antisocial with the revolutionary,” and in which a “rapist is a rapist only to the ‘square’” (317). In these ways, Mailer often creates protagonists who end up “vindicating American virility” (322) through their commitment to the intersection of masculinity, sexuality, and violence.

Mailer describes himself as a “Left Conservative” and, as his writing progresses, the “stress falls with increasingly apoplectic emphasis upon the latter term” (322). Although once presenting himself as “a hero of the sexual revolution,” his attitudes have “hardened so they might do credit to a parish priest” as he becomes increasingly “lyric about ‘chastity,’ ferocious about abortion, and wildly opposed to all birth control” (322). This is primarily the result of him realizing the “the real implications of a sexual revolution,” in particular the liberation of female sexuality and social role and turning “from such frightening possibilities” to instead work “in defense of male supremacy” (323). The possibility the men will lose access to “the double standard and the subtle way in which ‘shame’ is manipulated to control women” is threatening to Mailer and a true sexual revolution is “incompatible with his own male-chauvinist propensity to give guilt a coercive function in sexual politics” (323).

While Lawrence manipulates women and Miller “cover[s] [them] with contempt” (324), Mailer is more openly hostile, viewing sexuality as a war between the sexes in which “it’s kill or be killed” (326). The “desirable woman” in Mailer’s works is less likely to be a “beaten loser” than a “tough fighting spirit” (326). However, this is far from a progressive move aimed at liberating women. Rather, it serves only to make the fight to dominate women more interesting for the male participant and spectator, to ensure that “the male struggle to retain hegemony will have the spice of adventure to it” (326). Importantly, while Mailer plays out at well-used “formula of ‘fucking as conquest,’” in his presentation, the “conquest is not only over the female, but over the male’s own fears for his masculinity, his courage, his dominance, the test of erection” (327). This reflects a sense that masculinity is not something fixed or secure but something that must be earned or proven repeatedly. Indeed, as he writes in The Armies of the Night, “nobody was born a man” but rather “you earned your manhood, provided you were good enough, bold enough” (327). In this sense, masculinity becomes “a precarious spiritual capital in endless need of replenishment and threatened on every side” (329). While Mailer observes this state, he does nothing to challenge or subvert, remaining committed to this unstable, fragile, and violent model of masculinity.

Mailer’s concerns with masculinity extend from the personal into broader concerns with the “Womanization of America” and fears about the “overbearing modern woman,” and the “rising threat of homosexuality” (330). He continues to “dramatize and illustrate the character of masculinist sensibility while remaining totally incapable of reasonable criticism of it” (330). Key to this is his immersion in “the logic of virility” (330), which suggests that one cannot criticize “‘masculine aggression,’ since to do so is to frustrate nature itself, and, paradoxically to demoralize culture as well” (331). He suggests that limiting models of masculinity that equate violence with virility must be maintained to avoid “slip[ping] to the level of effeminacy and succumb[ing] to homosexuality” (331). Indeed, it is “the secret terror of homosexuality […] which drives Mailer to his heterosexual posturing” (331). His work suggests that “cruelty and violence spring out of the repressed homosexuality of men’s-house culture” (332) but does not see this as a reason to tolerate or celebrate homosexuality. Rather, he sees this cruelty and violence as “inevitable and beneficial because they constitute the only defense against homosexuality which […] [he] regards as a greater evil than murder” (332). For Mailer, homosexuality “constitutes the mortal offense against heterosexual orthodoxy” (333), not least because he is afraid that “masculine coupling might undermine patriarchal hierarchy” for, “in a sex war, faggots are deserters” (334).

In the counterrevolutionary texts Millet analyzes, “love is dead. Or very likely in a bad way” (336). On the contrary, Genet’s work contains an echo of courtly love, albeit it with a key difference: while “the courtly lover, though de facto master, chose to play the role of servant to his lady,” Genet turns “this situation back upon its feet, and in the feudalistic hierarchy of prisons, […] it is the male partner who receives homage” (337). That is to say, the “heroes of his romances are king-sized hoodlums, the courtly lovers at their knees not masculine, but feminine, whores and queens” (338). This is significant because this “feudal system is simply more honest than that of our other authors in its open recognition of power” (338). Power in this setting revolves around masculinity and femininity, with powerful abusive pimps and murderers personifying extreme masculinity while the “whore and queens” (338), although themselves men, personifying extreme femininity. It is “hard to find a more brutal or unsavory definition of masculine and feminine” but this is because Genet’s is “simply an exaggeration of that in current use,” in which “[…] masculine is superior strength, feminine is inferior weakness” (340).

As homosexual art holds “insights into heterosexual life, out of whose milieu it grows and whose notions it must, perforce, imitate and repeat, even parody” (341), Genet’s brutal hierarchy of masculine and feminine offers reflections of heterosexual society. In the autobiographical novel The Thief’s Journey, Genet, a maligned and feminized figure within his culture, accepts his submissive role, suffering the abuse of a pimp because “It’s perfectly natural […] He’s a prick and I’m a cunt” (343). This is highly significant because when “a biological male is described as a ‘cunt,’ one gets a better notion of the meaning of the word” (343), stripping away the dubious “justification in an assumed biological congruity” to reveal that “masculine and feminine” are primarily “terms of praise and blame, authority and servitude, high and low, master and slave” (343). That is to say, because “both his groups are male, role new appears more than simply arbitrary, it is revealed as the category even the function of a nakedly oppressive social system” (343).

Although Genet’s masculine and feminine are brutal, exaggerated versions of those found in mainstream, heterosexual society, “Genet has jealously reserved intelligence and moral courage for his queens, for himself” (340). Indeed, he is “forever arranging things so that his own feminine shall be first, shall triumph somehow, even if it be the victory of despair and martyrdom” (344). In part, the victory is his own, for in his representation, “the pimp is a creature preternaturally stupid,” allowing Genet himself “a revenge truly feminine” by “undermin[ing] his masters” (346). In other ways, the victory belongs to the feminine heroine who “transcend[s] and outdistance[s] [her] overbearing males” (347), or who “corrupts and feminizes everything within reach” until “the mighty pimp is as effeminate as his mistress” (346). However, “to be a rebel is not to be a revolutionary” (349), and the tragic, masochistic, feminine martyrs of Genet’s prose only find moral victory, not true freedom. These concepts change notably in the writer’s last three plays, which represent his “final metamorphosis into revolutionary” (349).

In Genet’s novels, femininity is “abject abdicating martyrdom, broken by an undercurrent of sedition,” but in the plays it becomes “an attitude of rebellious intransigence” (350). Moreover, it is expanded to include “oppressed groups of both sexes: maids, blacks, Algerians, proles, all those who are in the feminine or subordinate role toward capital, racism, or empire” (350). The “feminine” characters now struggle against the “negative aspect of femininity as a slave mentality,” and do so with “increasing fury” (350). In the first of the plays, The Maids, the struggle in unsuccessful because the maids are “weighted down with self-hatred” (350) and “despising themselves, they despise each other” (351), unable to form bonds of solidarity because they still identify with their oppressors: males and rich women. The characters in The Balcony are also unsuccessful because their “revolution degenerates into counterrevolution” as the “insurrectionists fall into traditional follies regarding sex and power, sex and violence” (352). This limits women to restrictive, stereotypical roles: “goddesses or packhorses” (352), and “nurses, bitches or whores” (352-53). However, the heroes of The Blacks have “invented alternative values,” moving away from “defeated self-hate to dignity and self-definition. And, finally, to rage” (354). They claim identity and selfhood and form bonds of solidarity across the different marginalized groups, centering the “revolutionary passion” (356) in black women in particular. Of the writers Millett critiques, Genet is the only one who “has taken thought of women as an oppressed group and revolutionary force, and chosen to identify with them” (356). While Lawrence, Miller, and Mailer all “identify woman as a[n] annoying minority force to be put down,” Genet “has integrated her into a vision of drastic social upheaval where her ancient subordination can produce explosive force” (356).