Sexual Politics

Three of the key writers discussed in the book, Lawrence, Miller, and Mailer, have reputations as literary rebels who challenged the prudish attitudes of their times by writing about sex in radical, progressive ways. However, all three are actually highly reactionary figures who are deeply threatened by true sexual liberation. Lawrence’s work is full of efforts to return men and women to traditional sex roles. Fixated on the idea that men and women had become powerless and lost their bearings, he regularly tries to find ways to undo the damage of the sexual revolution and attempts to manipulate and resubordinate female sexuality. Miller is likewise celebrated as challenging puritanical ideas about sex. However, his work is actually parasitically dependent on conventional morality which is reflected in the brutality of his language around sex. Far from advocating true sexual freedom, Miller simply reflects a cultural attitude that regards sexuality with disgust and contempt and retells a familiar narrative oriented around guilt, female purity, and moral indignation. Much the same is true of Mailer. At one time, Mailer presented himself as a champion of the sexual revolution. When he realized the revolution was incongruous with his own chauvinism, Mailer began to undermine women’s liberation and support male supremacy in his writing.

How power relationships in homosexual art mirror and satirize heterosexual relations is another of the book’s important motifs and helps to clarify Millett’s argument that sex roles are socially-constructed categories. This is most apparent in the works of Jean Genet. Genet’s early novels present a brutal homosexual subculture in which different characters (all men) take on both hypermasculine roles as pimps and abusers and hyperfeminine roles as sex workers, queens, and victims of abuse. This is significant because his construction of masculine and feminine is an exaggeration, rather than a transformation, of actual social roles. Genet’s work honestly recognizes the power structures that shape and define sex., overtly engaging with the idea that contemporary sex roles revolve around the domination of the feminine by the masculine. Because Genet’s characters are all men, these power structures are stripped of their biological justification, that is, the idea that men dominate women because they are inherently stronger, superior, and have phalluses.