Sexual Politics

“The reader is given to understand that by murdering one woman and buggering another, Rojack became a man.”

Norman Mailer’s works are preoccupied by an understanding that masculinity is never assured or guaranteed but rather has to be proven and earned. However, while Mailer recognizes this, he does not critique and analyze it, instead offering celebratory examples of men “earning” masculinity through the conflation of male sexuality and violence.

“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.