Sexual Politics

“Because of the perfection with which they ape and exaggerate the ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ of heterosexual society, his homosexual characters represent the best contemporary insight into its constitution and beliefs.”

Jean Genet’s early novels take place in underground homosexual communities in which the male characters take on brutally stark versions of hypermasculinity and hyperfemininity. This exaggerated presentation, based as it is in closely observed mimicry, provides a revealing reflection of the subject of its imitations.

“Quite in the same manner, a disinterested examination of our system of sexual relationship must point out that the situation between the sexes now, and throughout history, is a case of that phenomenon Max Weber defined as herrschaft, a relationship of dominance and subordination.”

Proving that sex categories have hugely important political implications is central to Millett’s thesis. At its most basic level, we can find proof of this in the fact that contemporary and historical relations between the sexes are characterized by males dominating females.

“When a system of power is thoroughly in command, it has scarcely need to speak itself aloud; when its workings are exposed and questioned, it becomes not only subject to discussion, but even to change.”

Patriarchal rule is extremely widespread and has been the norm in most societies for much of recorded history. As such, it is often seen as an unchallengeable monolith that cannot ever be overthrown. However, by analyzing it, making it the subject of discussion and dissection, it is possible to understand how it operates and how it may be changed.

“The chief weakness of the movement’s concentration on suffrage, the factor which helped it to fade, disappear, and even lose ground when the vote was gained lay in its failure to challenge patriarchal ideology at a sufficiently deep and radical level to break the conditioning processes of status, temperament and role.”

Although the Woman’s Movement achieved great results, so much of its energy was directed towards securing women the vote. While this was undeniably significant, it also meant that the movement did not have the time, energy, or resources to challenge patriarchy at a more conceptual level. As a result, the deep-seated patterns of socialization meant that patriarchy’s foundations remained unshaken by their efforts.

“Asking themselves how women allowed their subjection to overtake them, they responded with a naïveté characteristic of their era, claiming that women submitted willingly to the sexual and social subjection of pairing and then monogamous marriage because in fact women find sexuality burdensome.”

Bachofen and Engels both saw the acceptance of exclusive sexual bonding as women’s first step towards becoming chattel or property, which they identified as central to the rise of patriarchy. However, they also believed that women accepted this because they had no interest in, and took no pleasure from, sexual intercourse, highlighting the way that even anti-patriarchal men hold unconsciously patriarchal assumptions.

What Mill had thought to be a primordial evil, the inevitable consequence of man’s original savagery, Engels’ historical account transformed into an oppressive innovation, an innovation which brought with it innumerable other forms of oppression, each dependent on it. Far from being the last injustice, sexual dominance became the keystone to the total structure of human injustice.”

One of anthropology’s key debates is whether patriarchal social organization is a “natural” state, something that comes from a prehistoric past. Moderates like Mill felt that it was, and that moving away from such savagery to a more civilized future could end patriarchy. Radicals like Engels disagreed, insisting that patriarchy was an institution that was socially organized like all other abusive and restrictive institutions and could be tackled and dismantled in the same way.

“After a period of experimentation, it gradually instituted its own moralistic, inhibiting ideology, a new authoritarian structure, stressing its own kind of attitudes toward the sexes and sexuality, and its own standard of the masculine as the ideal and the norm, by continual adulation of militaristic achievements and the exploits of revolutionaries.”

Immediately after the revolution, the Soviet Union made serious steps towards ending patriarchy and freeing men and women from restrictive sex roles. However, they failed to offer significant psychological alternatives to such roles and to the traditional families that reinforced them. As a result, these ideals began to fade, and reactionary forces were soon able to push the Union towards even more extreme versions of traditional sex roles and attitudes.

“The real causes of the counterrevolution appear to lie in the fact that the sexual revolution, perhaps necessarily, even inevitably, concentrated on the superstructure of patriarchal policy, changing its legal forms, its more flagrant abuses, altering its formal educational patterns, but leaving the socialization processes of temperament and role differentiation intact.”

Given the rigid political structures and widespread abuse of the period, it is perhaps not surprising that the sexual revolution had to focus its energy on more material changes in these areas. However, doing so left patriarchal socialization patterns unchallenged, paving the way for patriarchy to launch a counterrevolution to reestablish dominance.

“The new formulation of old attitudes had to come from science and particularly from the emerging social sciences of psychology, sociology, and anthropology—the most useful and authoritative branches of social control and manipulation.”

With patriarchy’s foundations left unchanged by the sexual revolution, all patriarchal rule needed to reestablish itself was a new source of justification. This came in the form of the social sciences, especially the work of Sigmund Freud, which offered a veneer of scientific respectability that helped legitimize traditional patriarchal ideologies and sex roles.

“Now it can be said scientifically that women are inherently subservient, and males dominant, more strongly sexed and therefore entitled to sexually subjugate the female, who enjoys her oppression and deserves it, for she is by her very nature, vain, stupid, and hardly better than a barbarian, if she is human at all.”

Freud refused to consider the role of socialization or political oppression in the formation of his subjects’ “maladies.” Instead, he took the women’s conditions not as reasonable responses to unreasonable treatment but as proof that women are inherently defective and inferior. His “scientific” support of this old view gave it a new legitimacy, helping to further reinforce the idea that men are entitled to dominate and abuse women.

“Yet, as Lawrence sees the two, they are not very different things—a point of view much inline with our premise that in patriarchal cultural the relationship between the sexes is essentially political in nature. In Lawrence’s mind, love had become the knack of dominating another person—power means much the same thing.”

Part way through his career, Lawrence stopped believing in love and began seeing it simply as a means of exerting power over others, first women, and then weaker men. His inability to get beyond this conflation of sexuality, violence, and domination unintentionally supports Millett’s thesis that the sexes are deeply political categories under patriarchy.

“For in their bond of masculine solidarity there is also a clause which demands, via the ineluctable logic of Lawrence’s psychology of power, that should their relations assume an erotic character, one must be subjected to the other.”

The characters of Aaron and Rawdon in Lawrence’s Aaron’s Rod provide one of the more interesting reflections of the way patriarchal understandings conflate male sexuality with domination. Although the men have turned away from women, thinking to find solace in male community, they cannot get past the understanding that sexuality revolves around dominance and control and soon fall into a bitter power struggle.

“What Miller did articulate was 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. And women too; for somehow it is women upon whom this onerous burden of sexuality falls”

Miller is often hailed as a literary rebel who challenged America’s puritanical attitudes to sex and sexuality. However, his real contribution was that he recorded the often violently misogynistic and sex-negative attitudes that were widespread in society yet unexplored in literature.

“The Lawrentian hero sets about his mission with notorious gravity and ‘makes love’ by an elaborate political protocol. In the process, by dint of through careful diplomacy and expert psychological manipulation, he effects the subjection of the woman in question. But Miller and his confederates—for Miller is a gang—just ‘fuck’ women and discard them, much as one might avail oneself of sanitary facilities—Kleenex or toilet paper, for example. Just ‘fucking,’ the Miller hero is merely a huckster and a con man, unimpeded by pretension, with no priestly role to uphold.”

Miller considered himself to be a disciple of Lawrence, carrying out similar work to “liberate” repressed and puritanical sexuality. However, his approach was radically different. Lawrence was intimidated by modern woman’s independence and wanted to use her growing sexual freedom as another means to psychologically manipulate her into compliance, while Miller simply reduced women to objects, lacking any personality or psychology to manipulate.

“It is not even bodies who copulate here, let alone persons. Miller’s fantasy drama is sternly restricted to the dissociated adventures of cunt and prick”

It is very much in keeping with the fact that Miller truly only reflected contemporary America’s disgust and squeamishness about sex that he rarely discusses the bodies of men or women or takes any artistic or aesthetic pleasure in nudity. Rather, he reduces intercourse to the connection of genitals alone, avoiding the discomfort of acknowledging the bodies, let alone the humans, involved in the act.

“His strenuous heterosexuality depends, to a considerable degree, on a homosexual sharing.”

Miller’s sexual encounters are less to do with the actual intercourse than with acquiring “conquests” as a kind of currency used to prove and display his masculinity in much the same way as acquiring money. Central to this is the fact that he brags about these conquests to other men and, indeed, to the male reader, demonstrating the central role of homosexual (or at least homosocial) relationships in his overt displays of heterosexuality.

“Under the brash American novelty is 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.”

Underlying Miller’s contempt for the women with whom he has sex is an old puritanical belief that sex degrades women, making them “impure” or “tainted.” Following this belief, he feels that any woman who desires sex is thus already degraded and is deserving of his contempt and ill-treatment.

“What he offers for our edification is 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.”

Mailer is deeply aware of how masculinity operates in contemporary society and the forms of behavior—such as violence and sexual abuse—that develop from this. Despite recognizing this, he is unable to reasonably critique the issue, still less free himself from the pressure to conform.

“A rapist is a rapist only to the ‘square’: to the superior perceptions of Hip, rape is ‘part of life,’ and should be assessed by a subtle critical method based on whether the act possesses ‘artistry’ or ‘real desire.’”

In Mailer’s “Hipster” period, he continues to fetishize male violence and begins confusing abusive, antisocial behavior for acts of rebellion or revolution. In this understanding, sexual violence becomes a mark of “hip” modern masculinity and an objection to rape becomes a symptom of outmoded attitudes to sexuality.

“Diverting his efforts to a war between the sexes in defense of male supremacy, he blossomed into an archconservative. ‘Sexual liberty’ might, after all, apply to women as well, might even threaten the double standard and the subtle way in which ‘shame’ is manipulated to control women.”

In his early career, Mailer saw himself as a great proponent of the sexual revolution. However, he quickly realized that sexually liberated women might not be as easy to exploit, abuse, and dominate. At this point, he became increasingly conservative, channeling his energy towards defending male supremacy.

“For against the logic of virility, it is pointless to reason, pointless to raise any serious objection to ‘masculine aggression,’ since to do so is to frustrate nature itself, and, paradoxically to demoralize culture as well.”

Traditional ideas that males are inherently aggressive have long been a part of society and were given a new legitimacy by the social sciences during the counterrevolution’s reactionary attack on the sexual revolution. By the time Mailer is writing, they are well established once more and shape his refusal to question the association of male sexuality with violence and domination.

“The heroes of his romances are king-sized hoodlums, the courtly lovers at their knees not masculine, but feminine, whores and queens.”

Genet’s early works take on a distorted form of chivalrous romance. In this setting, however, it is not the gallant knights and courtly males who supplicate themselves before their fair ladies, but abused queens and sex workers who abase themselves before pimps and abusers, providing a more honest presentation of power between the sexes.

“The idea of ‘femininity’ as presented in the novels: abject abdicating martyrdom, broken by an undercurrent of sedition, takes a new course in the late works for the theater, becoming an attitude of rebellious intransigence, which with Genet’s expanding sympathy and humanity, his increasing interest in politics, rows into an identification with oppressed groups of both sexes: maids, blacks, Algerians, proles, all those who are in the feminine or subordinate role toward capital, racism, or empire.”

Genet’s work has always championed the female or feminine characters, ensuring that, against the odds, they are victorious. However, in his early works, such victories are usually the moral victories of martyrs. It is only in his later works that the feminine characters truly embrace the revolution and seek the victories of liberation and self-determination rather than martyrdom.