'This book is primarily concerned with the mind/spirit/body pollution inflicted through patriarchal myth and language on all levels.' (p9)


The book Gyn/ecology¹ is a rite of exorcism. The demon possessing us is patriarchy itself, and Daly is the priestess ready to break his spell through the magical act of naming him. In other words, Gyn/ecology is about patriarchal myth, and Daly hopes to undo its power by revealing its disguises and describing it clearly.

Daly believes we need changes in thought and feeling, not merely in institutions. This is partly because of women who identify with men and do the work of patriarchy. They do so because they are trained by patriarchal myth. Daly says 'as long as that myth (system of myths) prevails, it is conceivable that there be a society comprised even of 50 percent female tokens: women with anatomically female bodies but totally male-identified, male possessed brains/spirits. The myth/spell itself of phallocratism must be broken.' (p57)

To undo the workings of patriarchal myth at a truly intuitive level, we must also utilise myth. Daly therefore creates her own vocabulary and symbolism. For example, the usual patriarchal definition of “hag” is an ugly, old, evil woman. But Daly reminds us that “haggard” also means wild and untamed—especially of hawks. It is fitting, then, that feminists be called hags, for they are wild and untamed.

One redefinition I object to, however, is Daly's use of “lesbian” for women who withdraw all their energies from men and have friendships and relationships only with other women (p26). She uses “gay women” or “homosexual females” to describe actual lesbians, who may or may not be feminists, let alone separatists. It is one thing to invent new words or rediscover old meanings, but this is an act of linguistic poaching—Daly has taken a word that is already in use by another group of people. In doing so, she reduces their linguistic resources for their own journeys and explorations. This is wrong, and it is one of the same reasons I object to the ameliorative redefinition of the word woman to include men who identify as such.

On the other hand, Daly says she doesn't see her book as finished or definitive, but as one step on an ongoing journey, one note in the song that we all contribute to. I think this is a beautiful way to view everyone's contributions, as it allows for disagreement without resentment. 'I had set free this book, this bird, in the hope that its song would be Heard and that it would harmonize with the works of other women, whose melodies, of course, were coming from different Realms of the Background.' (pxxx)

The book is divided in three “passages”. In the first passage, Daly names and reframes themes of patriarchal myth and culture. In the second passage, she considers five forms of extreme violence against women in different cultures across the world, and identifies seven characteristic features of this “gynocidal” violence. In the third passage, Daly describes the feminist journey and the steps we must take after losing our ignorance about patriarchy. We will look at each passage in turn. But first, an aside on war and “naming the enemy”.

AN ASIDE ON WAR Enemies and Allies

'It is men who rape, who sap women's energy, who deny women economic and political power. To allow oneself to know and name these facts is to commit anti-gynocidal acts.' (p29)

Daly writes that women are the enemy targeted by patriarchy and men in an endless global war. In a “patriarchal reversal”, feminists are accused of hating men and considering them the enemy. Daly says that naming male violence is treated as “anti-male”, and that we are encouraged to hide the awareness of male violence from ourselves. Even some feminists are 'unable to name their oppressor, referring instead to vague “forces,” “roles,” “stereotypes,” “constraints,” “attitudes,” “influences.”' (p29)

I think the war against women is a powerful framing. The demonstrably extraordinary scope of male violence against women doesn't seem to elicit the urgent response it deserves. Perhaps we desperately want to believe we are not under attack by our fellow citizens. So we tell ourselves it is in the past, or in another country, or it's those men but not these ones. But there is no woman who is reliably safe from male violence, and if all men who are willing to harm women wore a uniform, it would be the largest army on earth. But such men wear no uniform and we often mistake them for friends and allies, since they appear identical at first glance. It is an awful situation to reflect on, so we don't.

In response to this state of war, Daly invites women to completely withdraw their energies from men, and to prioritise women instead. I gather she is espousing what is now called political lesbianism or separatism. Unlike Greer, Daly never mentions the possibility of men resisting patriarchy or becoming allies to women. Nor does she share any vision of a post-patriarchal society in which harmony exists between men and women. Her favoured outcome is one in which women separate completely from men. This is unlikely to be appealing to women who have beloved fathers, brothers, sons, partners and friends. I believe that women need and deserve separate spaces in private and public, for our safety, dignity, privacy, consciousness raising and political organisation. I also feel that feminism must be for all women, including mothers and heterosexual women, who make up the majority. Although patriarchy may distort our search for sex, love and companionship, or the way we build our families, I don't think the search itself is constructed all the way down, or that it needs to be eliminated. That, too, would be a distortion. So separatism should be an option, but not a requirement.

Daly doesn't say it explicitly, but she seems to have no hope that men can change. I prefer Greer's more optimistic take on our future together. Even as I am aware of the long history and ongoing ubiquity of male cruelty to women, my best guess is that a large minority of men are violent or actively misogynistic, not a majority—though it seems a majority of men and women alike accept and reproduce at least some misogynistic values. This situation is bleak enough without assuming that men are innately and incorrigibly cruel. I believe we have some allies amongst men, but my suspicion is that, as with other issues, there will always be a few who do what is right regardless of cultural norms, a few who do what is wrong regardless of cultural norms, and a vast majority who mostly comply with social norms. Therefore, while I believe separate spaces and other strategies are needed to address male violence and domination, I also feel that changing our shared social norms is vitally important in the long term.

THE FIRST PASSAGE: PROCESSIONS Patriarchal Myth


Patriarchal myth is the core theme of the book. Daly says myth is defined as symbolism that opens up truth on levels that are usually inaccessible to us—intuitive or normative levels, perhaps. But she also points out that patriarchal myth closes off reality to us at these non-literal levels, and prevents us from accessing deeper truths. In the first passage, Daly examines some frequently found patriarchal, mythical themes. She replaces patriarchal framings with her own interpretations, inviting us to view them from a different, woman centred point of view. She focuses on western culture, especially ancient Greek and Christian myths, though she mentions some others. I will discuss a few of the themes that I found intriguing.

Athenas, token women and painted birds


A regularly occurring character in Daly's work is the “roboticized” or “tokenized” female who identifies completely with male interests. The ancient Greek goddess Athena is Daly's primary example. Born not from her mother but from her father, Zeus, she carries out his orders, wages his wars, and betrays other women and goddesses, siding always with males. In another example, Daly recalls a novel in which a man 'vents his frustration upon birds by painting their feathers.' (p333) The other birds no longer recognise their painted fellows, and attack them. But as Daly points out, under patriarchy, the situation is reversed; it is the normal state of women to be “painted” with cosmetics and other markers of femininity. Such painted women will attack feminists who free themselves. Daly says we are conditioned into this empty, male-identifying state as children, and receive regular “injections” of further mind control. Men are controlled, too, but they are given ego-inflating “uppers” while women are given ego-destroying “downers.” (p54)

I found this section very helpful. I have noted that some women call themselves feminists while they support the sexual objectification and commodification of women and girls as “choice” and “empowerment”. Self-identified “feminists” also passionately defend men who identify as women, applauding the poaching of women's language and encroachment on women's spaces as “inclusive”. Feminists who non-violently critique the sex industry and gender ideology are accused of being prudish, mean, cruel, bigoted, hateful, extreme, hysterical, obsessed, etc. Daly insightfully notes that 'In a social situation in which there is pressure to nod approvingly in the direction of feminism, it is highly probably that the Athena will call herself a “feminist.”' (p335) She further suggests that such a figure likely enjoys approval from contemporary patriarchal scholars (or is one, I might add!). Pseudo-feminists can be strict enforcers of patriarchal requirements, but their main weapon is the exhortation to be nice and accommodating and agreeable. I think Kate Millet² would say those are exactly and not coincidentally the traits needed to keep women subordinate. Daly would say they are electrodes of fear implanted in us to prevent progress on our journey.


Gender Bending “Escape”

Another theme that Daly explores is men temporarily escaping from masculinity by donning femininity. Daly explains that in ancient Greek myth, Apollo is the masculine god of rules and order, while Dionysus is the feminine (but still male) god of chaos. Some men seek relief from the Apollonian strictness of masculinity by playing at femininity for a time. They escape briefly into the Dionysian realm of playfulness, emotions, and sexual liberation. Women are also invited to partake. But Daly insists this is a trick, because the femininity offered by Dionysus is still man-made and serves male interests. Men can put it on for a while and play at being the victim, but they're still in charge. She says 'The phenomenon of the drag queen dramatically demonstrates such boundary violation. Like whites playing “black face,” he incorporates the oppressed role without being incorporated in it.' (p67) The fact that men can be feminine obfuscates the fact that femininity is a man-made phenomenon that serves men, regardless of who performs it. Like Millet, Daly uses “femininity” to mean the artificial and patriarchal conditioning of our appearances, behaviour and personality. She is clear that femininity is neither necessary nor sufficient for womanhood.


Daly discusses many other patriarchal themes in Christian and post-Christian myth. They include: the trivialisation and appropriation of traditional female goddesses, powers and symbols; the rape of the goddess, which can be symbolic of the overthrow of female culture and power; and the myth of “male auto-motherhood” in which the power of birth is attributed to men who birth or rebirth themselves.

Daly's interpretations of Christian themes are no more provable or disprovable than the original themes themselves, since they are symbolic expressions of values rather than statements about facts. Regardless, Daly's reframings were thought provoking and some resonated intuitively with me. Though in some cases she attributed motivations that were too specific and exaggerated to be persuasive, such as a patriarchal love of death or the desire to bring about doomsday. I feel that de Beauvoir's exploration of the mundane emotional benefits that men gain from their myths about women was more realistic and convincing.

In any case, I have rarely seen a serious attempt to counter and reframe patriarchal myth on the mythical level outside of fiction, and I thought it a very worthwhile and valuable exercise. I now believe that feminist work should involve not only rational argument and theory, but also deconditioning and reconditioning at the mythical and intuitive levels.

THE SECOND PASSAGE: GODDESS MURDER Patriarchal Violence

'The true sin under patriarch rule/ritual, that is, remembering that as long as we are alive, the Goddess still lives… The deed can be revoked by “forgetting” to kill female divinity, that is, our Selves.' (p111)


In the second passage, Daly looks at patriarchal violence against women, which she names gynocide, goddess murder, or the sado-ritual. Goddess murder is a key symbolic theme of patriarchal myth, but men and women are trained to act it out in reality, on the bodies of women and girls, in the form of torture, mutilation, rape and murder.

In five chapters, Daly examines five examples of patriarchal “traditions” in different regions: Indian suttee, Chinese foot binding, African FGM, European witch burning and American gynecology. She identifies seven components that characterise Goddess murder. First, there is an obsession with purity. Second, the conceptual framing of these acts erases male agency and responsibility, making it appear that the violence is required by god, culture, or women themselves. Third, the practices confer status and thus tend to spread, like fashion, from the elite to the middle and lower classes. Fourth, women are used as “token torturers”, which further disguises male agency and destroys female solidarity. Fifth, a focus on detailed ceremonies, rules, and regulations distracts participants from the true horror of their actions. Sixth, acts that would be obviously wrong in any other context become good and required through ritual and social conditioning. Seventh, “objective” patriarchal scholars legitimate the acts while pretending to disapprove them.



There are many useful insights in the second passage, but I want to focus on the erasure of male agency in “objective” Western scholarship. Using examples, Daly shows that male authors often prefer to define acts of violence against women and girls as “culture,” “tradition” or “custom”. For example, child rape by older men is described as “marriage” or “consummation”. Scholars also make it appear that girls and women choose and prefer the harms that are inflicted on them. 'The victims, through grammatical sleight of hand, are made to appear as the agents of their own destruction.' (p117) Bland and apparently neutral descriptions powerfully minimise male sadism and female suffering. Daly describes such pseudo-objective text as “writing that erases itself.” (p120)³ To be more precise, what it erases is awareness of its own powerful biases.

Daly shows that in the cases of footbinding and FGM, the violence is presented by scholars as a cultural, religious, or fashionable necessity that is demanded particularly by the mothers of girls. The focus is on the mothers who help meet men's demands, and never on the men making the demands; never on the fact that men have built societies in which women have few other opportunities to achieve safety and economic security. In one particularly odious example, Daly cites scholars David and Vera Mace who say that, although many widows who were burned to death in the suttee had no alternatives, it would nevertheless be 'gravely mistaken' and a 'grave injustice' for us to explain their sacrifice in terms of duty or lack of freedom, or to say they 'knew less of true love than their Western sisters.' (p124)⁴ Daly say the Maces want us to feel guilty for our natural abhorrence of violence against women, and they are manipulating our fear of appearing culturally or racially judgemental. To me it seems the Maces believe the primary crime is not the vicious murder of women and girls, but rather the feminist refusal to believe the flimsy cover story of noble choice. I notice that the exact same argument plays out today in “liberal” defences of the sex industry. In both cases, a thin notion of “choice” is held up as justification, while the electric fence of economic and social coercion that determines women's and girls' extremely limited “choices” is invisible, and the sadistic male demand that drives the industry is completely disappeared from sight and mind.


The European witchburnings also enjoy scholarly minimisation. Daly explains that the purpose of witch trials was not the control and “purification” of marriageable girls, but the torture and murder of unmarriageable, unmanageable women. With the justification of Christian demonology, it was spinsters, healers, wise women, and old women who were raped, tortured and murdered as witches. Daly quotes the scholar Midelfort, who says that the trials may have been “functional” and “therapeutic”, since they defined how much eccentricity was acceptable to society, and expressed society's fear of disruptive or “socially indigestible” women who were “without patriarchal control” (p184)⁵. (Midelfort wrote in 1972, in case the reader is wondering when it went out of fashion to openly admit that murdering women who are outside of patriarchal control is socially useful.)

Gynecology is again a different phenomenon. Under the term gynecology, Daly includes the literal meaning of medicine related to female reproductive health and sickness, but also psychiatry and psychotherapy (which she names “mind gynecology”). It may be counterintuitive to see medicine presented as a gynocidal crime, but Daly reveals a shocking amount of brutality done to women in these fields. For example, the doctor J. Marion Sims, father of gynecology, surgically experimented on enslaved black women and poor white women (without anaesthetic) to develop his techniques. Clitoridectomy was promoted in the late 1850s as a cure for female masturbation. Ovariotomies were promoted in the 1870s to cure “insanity” (AKA disobedience). Manifold interventions have been used on women although inadequately tested for safety, and the side effects have been concealed or ignored. Nor is this all in the past. There are unfortunately many recent scandals regarding medical mistreatment of, and dangerous experimentation on, women. Consider, as just one example, the fact that nonconsensual vaginal examinations on unconscious women who are in hospital for unrealted procedures (AKA medical rape) is legal in 45 states in the USA. For anyone who wants to know more about medicine's long, ignoble history of abusing women, there is a recent book Unwell Women⁶ by Elinor Cleghorn, on precisely this topic.

Daly admits there are some healers amongst the butchers and profiteers, but insists that they heal in spite of the medical paradigm, not because of it. For me, since the benefits of medicine are already generally well known and accepted, it was interesting to see how consistent and persistent the abuse of women has been: it never ends, it just changes. And we forget, over and over. While I would never write off medicine completely, due to its undeniable usefulness, it now appears to me that unconditional trust in medical authorities is inappropriate. The question, then, is how does a lay person develop the skills and knowledge to tell true healers and useful treatments from risky and harmful interventions and manipulative or careless practitioners? I don't yet have an answer.

THE THIRD PASSAGE: SPINNING The Feminist Journey

The third passage is about the feminist journey; about what happens after we lose our ignorance about patriarchal myths and violence. Though rage is a normal reaction to our discoveries, Daly says we cannot stay angry all the time, but need to begin our own journey, which decentres men, recentres female bonding, and calls forth our creative energy. 'If she does not constantly convert the energy of this rage to creativity it pro-occupies her, pro-posesses her.' (p348)


Daly introduces four concepts she calls spooking, enspiriting, sparking, and spinning.

“Spooking” is the subliminal patriarchal conditioning we're trained not to notice or name. Daly writes that male obscenity and fetishisation of women takes place through both direct misogynistic language, and indirect messages. One important form such messaging takes is pornography. Daly says the destruction of an image is a form of “sympathetic magic”, intended to harm the person whose likeness it is. This is what pornographic images do to women: 'These mutilate and destroy women's image, and the intent of this technological voodoo is to effect the death of the female-identified self.' (193) This and other sexism is the continual “background music” that fragments our consciousness, “spooking” us. We must exorcise the ghosts and refuse to be possessed. I love the fact that Daly gives a name to this phenomenon. With a clear label, it's easier to identify and resist the subtle ways in which sexism undermines our self esteem and wellbeing.

'Enspiriting is hearing and following the call of the wild… to transfer our energy to our Selves and Sister Selves.' (p343)

“Enspiriting” is when we start being authentic and withdrawing our cooperation from patriarchy. It is the process of letting go of implanted fear and guilt. 'The Self enspirits the Self and others by encouraging, by expanding her own courage, hope, determination, vigor.' (p340) Daly says hags can use new words, clothes, gestures, and body language on their journey, gaining a sense of power and control and escaping from limiting femininity. Hags become less dependent on male approval and prefer a natural, unpainted state to the “natural” look created by cosmetics.

Another important part of the journey is “re-membering”. Daly says the professions and academia disappear the women's movement, their achievements and their history. Women new to feminism have to rediscover everything. This perfectly matches my own experience. So often in my education, histories of ideas were presented as complete when they were in fact highly selective histories of male ideas and interests. Feminist work is treated as niche, rather than central, to moral and political theory. Meanwhile, libertarian and consumerist distortions of feminism were presented to me as the real thing, which prevented me from finding real feminism for some time.

Next, “sparking” is real female friendship and bonding, not self-sacrificing but self-accepting. Daly says that patriarchal male bonding is based on the humiliation and defeat of women. The solution is 'rejecting all identification with the myths, ideologies, and institutions which name our Selves The Enemy.' (p365) Daly notes that women are invited to join the male-initiated bonding, and indeed a key goal of patriarchy is to make women into feminized tokens for their army, which involves 'the radically unrewarding handing over of their identity and energy to individual males—fathers, sons, husbands—and to ghostly institutional masters.' (p375) The two ideals of tokenism and self-sacrifice must be exorcised.

Lastly, “Spinning,” according to Daly, is the feminist journey that begins with seeing and naming patriarchal violence, but continues with our own creative work. Daly writes that patriarchy splits the consciousness, and this splitting finds its expression in sadomasochistic culture. Spinning, on the other hand, is a process of regaining integrity and wholeness. An important aspect of our spinning work is naming and analysing things clearly. We must make explicit all the subliminal misogynistic messages, to reduce their power: 'We weave them into visibility/audibility/tangibility. We force them out of the shadows into our sight; we magnify the volume of their eerie whispers—removing their haunting inaudible mystery; we cool down their ghastly gases into puddles of liquid, so that we can bottle and label them, disable them. By this righteous objectifying of those whose intent is to objectify us we come to know the limits of their reality.' (p408)

I love the idea of feminist work as spinning, and I believe Daly is right about the need to actively name and describe patriarchal forces and unweave their effect on us.

CONCLUSION


There was a great deal of material I was unable to cover due to the length of the book. I appreciate how Daly dives deep into linguistics and mythology, presenting alternative, woman-centred framings. Anyone who needs to feel inspired and to undergo a spiritual cleansing from the “mind pollution” of patriarchy should read Gyn/ecology for this mythical/spiritual imagery and reframing.

Another treasure was Daly's revelation of the patriarchal nature of so-called “objective” and “professional” scholarship, and how it downplays patriarchal crimes, erases male responsibility and brutality, and elides its own bias, appearing “neutral”. 



I was surprised to see that Daly was so critical of the contraceptive pill, and that her opinion of health care is so universally negative. Her alternative to contraception is “Mister-ectomy”—eschewing men—but this depends on every woman becoming a separatist whilst simultaneously avoiding rape, which seems a rather insecure solution.

I have already noted that I disagree with Daly's poaching of the term “lesbian” to refer to separatist feminists, and that I feel that a life of complete separatism or political lesbianism is likely not the right solution for most women. I can, however, agree with Daly that we must make a conscious effort to prioritise other women in order to undo some of the damage of our patriarchal conditioning. Perhaps we can find out what issues most affect women in our country, and make this a priority when we vote, for example. Perhaps we could start treating the horrific global sex trade with the moral urgency it deserves. And we should defend women's right to separate spaces in many areas of public and private life, even if most of us don't choose total separatism.

Lastly, the book is upsetting and grim at times, especially when the reader is forced to acknowledge the sheer duration, intensity and breadth of violence against women. We often treat crimes against women as one-off examples of interpersonal violence by troubled or monstrous men. But Daly points out the pattern, explaining that male violence against women is not random but the inevitable expression of patriarchal values. Her conceptualisation of a global war, lasting thousands of years, is distressingly plausible. This isn't even a criticism. It's just my acknowledgement that sometimes, reading this book was uncomfortable.

In sum, I felt that Daly's Gyn/Ecology was powerful, shocking, and provocative, but also healing, nourishing, and enspiriting. It was not without flaws, but there is nothing else quite like it. I thoroughly recommend that everyone read it and find out if it sparks something.

1. Daly, Mary. 1990. Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism. Boston: Beacon Press.

2. Millett, Kate. 2016. Sexual Politics.

3. Daly notes that this term came up in a conversation with Jane Caputi

4. Mace, David, and Vera Mace. 1960. Marriage: East and West. Garden City, New York: Doubleday.

5. Midelfort, H. C. Erik. 1972. Witch Hunting in Southwestern Germany, 1562-1684; the Social and Intellectual Foundations. Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press.

6. Cleghorn, Elinor. 2021. Unwell Women: Misdiagnosis and Myth in a Man-Made World. New York: Dutton, Penguin Random House LLC.

'To be emancipated from helplessness and need and walk freely upon the earth that is your birthright. To refuse hobbles and deformity and take possession of your body and glory in its power… to be freed from guilt and shame and the tireless self discipline of women. To stop pretending and dissembling, cajoling and manipulating, and begin to control and sympathise. To claim the masculine virtues of magnanimity and generosity and courage' (p370).

The core premise of The Female Eunuch¹ is that femininity is an artificial construct that “castrates” women, sapping their energy and ambition. In each chapter Greer considers one harmful aspect of femininity, and makes suggestions about what we should do and be instead. The focus of the book is gender stereotypes, not the other, concrete mechanisms of women's oppression such as laws, economics, or physical force. When Greer wrote, women had already achieved the legal right to more freedoms than they cared to utilise. 'The cage door had been opened but the canary had refused to fly out' (p14). Greer believes women's emancipation failed because of feminine socialisation and the resulting choices women made. So her focus is on the cultural and social factors that shape women. She says in the foreword that she didn't focus on poor women because she didn't know them at the time she wrote. So the book will not describe the experiences of all women, only those of Greer's social class. But I believe it can still usefully illustrate how artificial, man-made notions of femininity can limit us, and reveal what alternatives we might choose instead.

The book proceeds in five sections, and so shall we: body, soul, love, hate, and revolution.

BODY female, exaggerated

Greer examines the meanings we impose on the body. It is true that men and women are different, but Greer believes we exaggerate the differences and falsely attribute superiority and inferiority to them. She proposes that sedentariness and excess nutrition influence women's bone structure and body fat, creating artificial difference from men. She says women are expected to remove body hair in order to downplay their sexuality and exaggerate their difference from men. And society exaggerates the difficulties of menstruation when it comes to determining women's fitness for public life, but downplays them when asked to take women's pain seriously.

I don't quite agree with Greer on this section. I did briefly research bones and discover that, as one example, pelvic structure indeed owes some variation to environment. But likewise, some of the variation is genetic. Other important differences are entirely prior to culture. For one, men can never conceive, gestate, deliver babies or breastfeed them. That is something only women do, and this fact is profoundly personally and socially significant to us, whether or not we choose childbearing for ourselves. In addition, as we discover more about the body, it seems there are a multitude of minor differences, for example in join laxity, immune function, metabolism, and susceptibility to various diseases. In Invisible Women² Criado-Perez describes some of these differences and explains why they matter for medical research and treatment. Lastly, although we exaggerate women's smaller size and weakness, there is a relevant average sex difference in strength and aggression. Ignoring it won't help us create a society that's safe for women, any more than exaggerating it ensures our freedom.

SOUL beauty and passivity

Greer's central hypothesis is that women are castrated by their socialisation into femininity. Feminine socialisation renders women inauthentic and impotent, crushes their natural passions and ambitions, and teaches them to deflect their energy, which results in destructive behaviour. Femininity is not womanhood; it is a sexless, inhuman impersonation. As such, Greer says women who do femininity successfully are similar to drag queens or transvestites—all are donning a costume of femininity. In fact, she writes that, as long as womanhood is defined by stereotypes of femininity, male transsexuals are our sisters and 'a casualty of the polarity of the sexes as we all are' (p72). This strikes me as inconsistent, since it is a core part of Greer's project to separate women from man-made femininity. Women would then be defined, presumably, as female people, rather than as feminine people. It is incongruent, then, to suggest that any male person is a woman just because he is (or longs to be) very feminine. In fact, Greer's more recent statements indicate that she either changed or clarified her views, and she very evidently does not believe male people can be women.

Greer focuses on two main feminine stereotypes; beauty and passivity.

beauty obligatory

'Her dominion must not be thought to entail the rule of women, for she is not a woman' (p68).

Greer says the image of beauty we see in the media is not human, nor female, and as such does not represent women's power in the world. Rather, it represents 'the inhuman triumph of cosmetics, lighting, focusing and printing, cropping and composition' (p68-69). The stereotypical beauty object is castrated because she has no desires, only existing to provoke desire in others. She is hairless, poreless, passive, pouting. She is created with expensive products and great effort; with cosmetics, undergarments, foundation garments, outer garments, hair products and styling, wigs, stockings, shoes and jewellery. I think Greer makes an excellent point here. Our cultural images of beauty (which blanket public spaces and our online environments) have little to do with flesh and blood women. In fact, beauty seems to be in many ways a rejection of our female bodies; think of the implants, false eyelashes, dyes, paints, surgeries to scoop out fat, shoes to alter the natural gait, and so on. And indeed, our cultural images of ideal feminine beauty now include cartoon women, CGI women, photoshopped women and male women (drag queens). Actual women don't seem to be necessary or sufficient for feminine beauty, so what are we really admiring and aspiring to when we worship and pursue this ideal?

As an aside, it’s worth noting that the media has recently become more diverse in its depictions of beauty. (Not out of the goodness of its golden heart, but because diversity is becoming profitable, I assume). We can now see a few black women and some older women and some women with different body types portrayed as beautiful in film and advertisements. But they still meet a quite narrow standard of beauty with the help of products, effort and digital image manipulation. The standards are somewhat broadened, but they are still presented as obligatory in order for us to have worth. More diverse standards are better then very narrow ones, but I hope one day we will redefine beauty on our own terms, rejecting the mass media and beauty companies entirely. More importantly, I hope our societies will develop love and admiration for women based on their achievements and character virtues, not merely their beauty. At present, it feels as though there is hardly any cultural space for old women, plain women, average women, or undecorated women, let alone ugly women, to be respected and to enjoy self respect.

passivity: energy destroyed

Greer believes girls and women are taught to deflect, repress, and subvert their natural energies. Instead of being encouraged in curiosity and passion, girls and women are taught to please and support others. This means that, even when women pursue career and education, the “feminine” pattern is already set and they tend to fall into supporting roles for men. Mere formal equality won't bring about women's liberation as long as women are taught passivity and choose to spend their energy on men rather than their own ambitions.

The crushing of women's energy starts young. Greer believes we deliberately increase babies' dependence on their mothers, and instil rules and fears that act as an “internal monitor” in their minds. We treat girls and boys similarly up to a certain age, then begin crushing the “psychic energy” of girls more intensely. Girls haemorrhage their energy at school in trying to stay still and quiet. We set up rewards and punishments that train girls to use their cuteness to manipulate others, instead of teaching them independence. Girls are supervised more, and taught to fear the world and think of themselves as victims. We rarely teach them to fight and defend themselves, however. There are many “tomboys” who rebel against feminine socialisation, until puberty thwarts them. But Greer thinks the girls most likely to submit early to their socialisation are those who are spoiled and flattered the most.

'What we ought to see in the agonies of puberty is the result of the conditioning that maims the female personality in creating the feminine' (p102).

Greer says adolescent girls are passionate and idealistic, but are gradually taught to conceal or disown their feelings, especially girls who have sexual and love feelings for other girls. Girls are taught to become sexually passive and objectify themselves. Their childhood adventure fantasies fade and are replaced with fantasies of being the passive object in a romance story. Girls' sexual interactions with males are based on their attractiveness as sexual objects, and since their own sexual desires would interfere with these interactions, girls suppress them. 'It is not uncommon for a girl seeking 'popularity' or approbation from boys to allow boys to take extraordinary liberties with her, while neither seeking nor deriving anything for herself' (p98).

Greer argues that adult women are taught to rely on others instead of seeking autonomy. The fact that femininity requires so much guidance proves it is artificial. It is also a terrible guide to a good life. The Freudian ideal in particular—woman as a lovely helpmeet to her man—doesn't allow a woman to be fully human, because her significance and life's meaning depend entirely on her husband and children.'Nothing is more chilling than such a spectacle of unremitting self-sacrifice' (p109).

Greer's account of crushed energy and internal monitoring resonates with me. I feel that modern schooling may crush the energies of many children, including boys. But I think feminine socialisation can be especially limiting because, at worst, it encourages selflessness and humility to a pathological degree, while sexual objectification and everyday disrespect rob us of self esteem. And while I feel that partnerships and childrearing can be parts of a good life for those who desire them, I agree with Greer that they should not be treated as a complete replacement for all other interests and ambitions.

LOVE and other substitutes

Real love, says Greer, emerges from narcissism. She doesn't mean the personality disorder. She means that we recognise sameness in others, something that makes them a reflection or extension of ourselves. We love what is alike to ourselves, and this has been understood as the basis for love when it comes to “the brotherhood of man” but not when it comes to love between men and women, where we assume the opposite; that opposites attract. But in fact, when the novelty wears off, difference becomes incompatibility: 'Feminine women… are formed to be artificially different and fascinating to men and end by being merely different, isolated in the house of a bored and antagonistic being' (p158). Meanwhile, women are crippled in their ability to love other women, because they are socialised out of this healthy “narcissism”. 'They cannot love each other in this easy, innocent, spontaneous way because they cannot love themselves' (p161).

Greer says young women cannot get enough of romantic fiction, in which they invent the male who is tender, masterful, and totally devoted. But romance is not love, and the romantic hero is not like real men. Infatuation and obsession are also not love. Greer argues that the myth of “falling in love” (i.e. developing an obsession) is used to rush women into marriage. Despite the evidence that so many women are unhappy in marriage, women cling to the myth and hope that their marriage will be the happy exception, just as some people hope to win the lottery. It doesn't occur to women to 'seek the cause of their unhappiness in the myth itself' (p242). Together with our cultural fantasies of romance, the false portrayal of love as obsession creates expectations in women that will be disappointed when they are actually settled in their marriages, and their husbands’ motivation for adulation and flattery is gone. 'Romance had been the one adventure open to her and now it is over…Romance is now her private dream' (p209-210). Greer's solution is that we must give up the fantasy of romance, and stop pinning our hopes for happiness on marriage. We must choose liberty and real love.

I found this section thought-provoking. Many 'romance' stories depict two people falling in love as an entire plot, but rarely do we see what happens afterwards. The book or film ends when the lovers get together, presumably because having a mate, even one you love, is not a life or a story by itself. Girls and women definitely need other stories, other pursuits and interests, as well.

egotism and altruism

Greer says men and women treat each other as extensions of their egos within relationships. Men jealously demand fidelity from women, since infidelity threatens their egos. Women are jealous because they fear abandonment. Both men and women like to show off a desirable partner to others, since they feel it reflects their own worthiness. But this is not love.

Altruism is also not love. Greer writes that women are encouraged to sacrifice themselves for others, but this can only ever be inauthentic and motivated by ulterior purposes: 'it is unfortunately chimeric. We cannot be liberated from ourselves, and we cannot act in defiance of our own motivations' (p169). Women who seem to be altruistic actually expect something in return. Mothers use it to guilt children and control them. And wives expect security and monogamy. 'It cannot properly speaking be called self-sacrifice at all. It is in fact a kind of commerce, and one in which the female must always be the creditor' (p171). In other words, women self-sacrifice with the specific hope that it will bind men to them and ensure their security. Greer says this will be a part of female behaviour as long as women are non-reciprocally dependent on men. Personally, I think this need to be the emotional “creditor” and not the debtor will be familiar to women, many of whom are trained into an intense fear of being deemed selfish or a “taker” rather than a “giver”.

family and security

Greer says that in the past, women's movement was restricted and they were carefully guarded in order to prevent infidelity and ensure paternity (at least when there was private wealth to bequeath to heirs). Greer says modern women make voluntary promises of fidelity as part of a contract exchanging assurance of paternity for economic support.

I don't think this is the whole story, though. Don't both parties to a marriage expect fidelity, emotional support and companionship? It's not immediately obvious to me that jealousy and monogamy are unnatural or socialised—after all, fidelity and promiscuity are both found in animal species, which suggests neither is a human invention. Greer says that we should learn from older women's experiences that marriage doesn't work. I wonder if she is only opposed to traditional, inegalitarian marriages, or to all long term partnerships between men and women? The practice of marriage seems to have changed over the last decades, while the word has remained the same. So I can’t know if second wave feminists would object to, say, the most egalitarian of today’s sexual partnerships. Personally, I think finding a long term mate is important to many people, and I don't see this changing any time soon. I do think women should be picky and develop other aspects of their lives instead of placing their hopes for happiness solely on another person, however. If women and girls are unhappy and unwilling to be alone, then they will not be in a strong position to refuse bad partnerships.

Greer thinks the nuclear family is isolating, and locks couples into a pattern of household spending and consumption that makes them conservative and reliant on their employers. She thinks we could arrange things differently. Not all women must have children, and not all mothers must be the primary caretakers of the children they do have: 'Most societies countenance the deputizing of nurses to bring up the children of women with state duties. The practice… did not result in a race of psychopaths. A child must have care and attention, but that care and attention need not emanate from a single, permanently present individual' (p262-63).

Greer says women try to attain security through marriage. By trying to fix everything in its place we instead achieve 'the denial of life' (p270). Security can mean restriction; a wife and family trap the male worker with a mortgage and household consumption. And women are not made secure by marriage any more than a worker who accepts lower pay for the promise of lifelong employment. They could be “laid off” at any time. Nor can marriage deliver emotional security, because that 'is the achievement of the individual' (p275). We sneer at insecure women, but women are merely aware of the fact that they could be abandoned. When we ask women not be insecure, we ask them to pretend that they are secure and to take no measures to protect their interests. Greer says women should give up the false security offered in the bargain of marriage, and choose free associations instead.

I partly agree with Greer here. I think it's quite normal to seek financial and emotional security, and the problem is not that we seek it, but that women are encouraged to place responsibility for their security in men's hands and not their own. Women should have sources of happiness other than their mate and children, and they should take steps to ensure their material security and independence, too. If their partnership goes as well as they hope, they will be no worse off. If it goes badly, they will not be trapped.

HATE men hating women, women hating themselves

'Women have very little idea of how much men hate them' (p279).

Greer says that men view available women as 'slags' and unavailable ones as 'bitches'. They fear being trapped in marriage. Male writers pretend that women are secret sluts whose distress at men's harassment is actually a thin disguise for their passionate desire to be degraded. She writes that men see ejaculation as disgusting and they project this disgust onto their partners. They treat women as spittoons, receptacles to empty themselves into and then distance themselves from. While I don't personally know any men who reveal such attitudes, such men can certainly be found without great difficulty, and indeed it is scarcely possible to use the internet without encountering them.

Greer says rape is not the result of uncontrollable lust but of murderous hatred. 'A certain kind of male imagines that women are all the time flaunting themselves to inflame his senses and deny him, in order to build up their deficient egos. He imagines that women get away with outrageous exploitation of male susceptibility' (p301). I don’t know if this characterises all misogynists or rapists, but Greer’s description here perfectly foretells the kind of rhetoric used by “incels” (online misogynists who are enraged by women denying them sexual attention).

Greer writes that our culture is steeped in “cunt-hatred”. At around the turn of the 20th century, doctors in America treated female masturbation with clitorectomy, though 'such a remedy for male masturbation has never been suggested' (p291). Female genital mutilation and particularly infibulation are similarly hateful and punitive. Learned self-loathing is a factor in some women's “compulsive self-abasement”, which includes invitations to men to degrade them. Women apologise for their bodies, try to change them, and are disgusted with themselves. We might add to Greer's list the increasing rate of women seeking labiaplasty, probably driven by the airbrushed female genitals in pornography (for a detailed critique of labiaplasty, see Sheila Jeffreys' Beauty and Misogyny³).

Greer lists common insults that reduce women to their genitals and describe these in the most crass terms. She also lists both friendly and unfriendly terms for women that describe them as foods or animals. She notes that it's common to joke about murdering women out of frustration with their failings. 'Another kind of humorous insult that women take in good part is the drag artists' grotesque guying of female foibles' (p304). Though some drag acts are done in love and celebration and show that femininity is arbitrary, artificial, and has nothing to do with femaleness, others are hateful caricatures of women. If we want these insults to stop, Greer says women must give up femininity and the affectations of silliness and helplessness they use to charm men.

Personally, I'm not that giving up femininity would work, since misogynistic men have as much animosity and as many insults for women who reject femininity as they do for those who conform. I also wonder what Greer would say about the very popular television show, Ru Paul's Drag Race, which has played a central role in introducing drag queens into mainstream culture. I'd say it consists mostly of sexist caricatures, and that it could nevertheless reveal the artificiality of femininity, if people were to view it critically (they don't). My full thoughts on the show are here.

ineffective rebellions

'It is not a sign of revolution when the oppressed adopt the manners of the oppressors and practice oppression on their own behalf' (p353).

Greer says that rebellion must be consciously chosen and justified in order to be effective. It cannot be a mere reaction.

Betty Friedan, according to Greer, was not radical, because she wanted women to have the same things that men suffer from: university, career, and stress-induced heart attacks. But we need more than equal opportunity; women must learn to desire opportunity rather than fearing it. And we don't just need equal pay for equal work because the conditions of work must change.

Greer insists that violence is not a solution but a red herring. And it only makes sense to identify men as “the enemy” so long as they act out their masculine role within patriarchy. 'Men are the enemy in much the same way that some crazed boy in uniform was the enemy of another like him in most respects except the uniform. One possible tactic is to try to get the uniforms off' (p335). Joining male-led leftist organisations is not a solution, since they reproduce male hierarchies and put women last. Celibacy and political lesbianism are not solutions, since separatists find relief from the status quo but have little effect on it.

First, I like that Greer identifies men's behaviour as the problem rather than men, innately. Although it is important to be able to identify men and woman as classes, and to describe their collective interests, it is also true at the individual level that our behaviour is what makes us allies or enemies of women's liberation. There is no logical reason why men cannot refuse to understand their interests in the narrow, selfish way suggested by patriarchal values, and reconceive their interests in harmony with women's. And indeed some do. Second, although separatism may not be practical as a large scale solution for all women, having the option of separate living enhances women's bargaining power so they will be in a better position if they do choose to remain involved with men. Women-only spaces and communities could also be fertile ground for experimenting and developing other, non-hierarchical forms of social life. And many women could find it very valuable to spend at least some time in separate spaces, for healing and consciousness raising. And lastly, separate social spaces might be particularly valuable as a haven to lesbians, who can come under intense social pressure to be involved with men against their wills. We should therefore support and fund separate spaces, even as we continue trying to change the rest of society in other ways, as well.

Greer has listed everything she thinks is not revolutionary, so what is?

REVOLUTIONS

'The first significant discovery we shall make… is that men are not free, and they will seek to make this an argument why nobody should be free' (p371).

Greer says we can't wait for the destruction of private property and socialism; we have to rescue our lives right now and make what we can of them. But people don't give up their cherished gender roles just because the law changes. We need to actively resist, by withdrawing our cooperation. We must refuse to do things, and refuse to want to do them. Women should stop admiring and rewarding violent men. They should give up their insistence on 'marrying up' or matching with 'superior' men as a prop for their egos. With regards to sex, we should take the emphasis off male genitals and endorse a holistic human sexuality for which women take their share of responsibility.

(Here I should include a brief aside on sexuality. In the foreword to the 21st anniversary edition, Greer explains that when she wrote the book, she thought it most important to emphasise women's freedom to express themselves sexually. Now, though, she thinks it equally important to emphasise 'a woman's right to reject male advances' (p10). There was a similar caveat in McKinnons’s foreword to Millet's Sexual Politics. It is interesting to see how feminist understanding has evolved. It seems to me that women's sexual liberation has not eliminated everyday male sexual predation—harassment, coercion, assault, and so on. With the normalisation of pornography and its entry into mainstream culture, women scarcely lack freedom to express sexuality, at least in ways that are compatible with male interests. The more urgent task now, as McKinnon and Greer suggest, is establishing women's rights: to boundaries; to be viewed as people and not sexual objects; to non-sexualised time and space; and to freedom from male sexual demands.)

Greer says women shouldn't marry. But married women are an important part of the movement for women's emancipation and cannot be excluded. They must simply set aside their guilt and fear, and use what bargaining power they have. Women must refuse to be chief consumers of the household. They must buy less, or unbranded, and share things like washing machines. It is fine for women to use cosmetics and clothes expressively, but not to cover their imperfections in order to bring them up to a minimum standard of acceptableness: 'Cooking, clothes, beauty and housekeeping are all compulsive activities in which the anxiety quotient has long since replaced the pleasure or achievement quotient' (p366). Such things can be done for fun but the key is spontaneity, pleasure and rejecting the norm. (How interesting! I had picked up the impression that all radical feminists are staunchly opposed to makeup. Greer, it seems, is not.)

Finally, women must be honest and courageous, and take joy in the struggle. Cajoling, pleading, politeness and pretending are ineffective and demeaning.

REFLECTIONS

Greer admits that she doesn't write about poor women. This book, then, is about middle class women with formal legal equality and some economic opportunities, who nevertheless get trapped in performances of femininity that encourage them to make the wrong choices in life. In that sense, the book is similar to Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique, even though Greer criticises Friedan as not radical. Greer is more radical in that she criticises love, marriage, and family. But her argument takes a similar course, identifying cultural expectations of femininity that limit women. The difference is that Friedan clearly identified some of the cultural agents who were most responsible for generating the culture of femininity at the time (Freudians, functionalists, advertisers, magazine writers). Greer mentions some specific sources of the ideas she discusses: advertisements, books and film/tv, popular discourse, drag queens, and men generally. But for the most part her focus is not on the agents who create culture, but on women's responsibility to resist and choose differently. Women must reject the messages, the conditioning, the temptations, the exhortations, of our culture.

I think this is an important argument, and a part of the solution. We can easily get caught up in resentment and feelings of powerlessness if we focus on what our culture does to us (with good reason). But obviously the culture makers won't change on their own initiative. So our own feelings and behaviour are one possible point of leverage. However, I do not think that the choices and feelings of individual women can be the primary solution to cultural sexism or to sex based injustice. There are still considerable economic and legal barriers to many women's liberation, even if Greer is reasonably well off in that regard. Men's violence against women is also a serious injustice. There is no pretending that this is a problem of women choosing stereotypical femininity, and I was a little uncomfortable about Greer's dismissal of the threat of male violence as mostly for show, and easily turned aside. Violence is something that men choose to do, and that our governments fail to effectively prevent and sanction as they do other crimes.

Also, culture does not simply generate itself from our choices. It is deliberately designed and promulgated by culture makers with extraordinary wealth and calculated strategies to influence our behaviour. Advertisers, for example, do not merely have an idle liking for femininity and glamour. Rather, they have concrete plans to undermine our self esteem and manufacture desires in order to nudge us to spend money on their products. In the face of massively funded, ubiquitous, tightly orchestrated and ruthlessly calculated efforts to influence our behaviour, our response must be equally strategic. An individual choice not to comply can be part of the plan, but other responses are needed, too.

What was most useful about The Female Eunuch? Firstly, I appreciated Greer's very clear criticism of feminine beauty as an artificial, man-made stereotype having little to do with real women. It provoked me to think about what we're really valuing when we value feminine beauty (not women, I think). Greer's explorations of romance, love and marriage were also useful. She says that girl's fantasies change from stories of adventure to the story of 'falling in love' that we want to relive over and over. That tracks with the experience I had of the narratives presented to me in film, television and books as I was growing up. The falling in love story is popular but… what happens afterwards? Like achieving beauty, it feels like a dead end. Girls need different stories, more active stories, to grow up with. Greer also insightfully ties traditional marriage to consumerism, and explains how nuclear families get trapped in cycle of consumption and earning.

Lastly, I greatly valued Greer's uninhibited, unselfconscious style of writing, and the fact that she was not prevented from opining honestly by the fear of making mistakes or giving offence. Whether or not I agree with Greer on every point, she is a role model for courageous, forthright speech.

'The key to the strategy of liberation lies in exposing the situation, and the simplest way to do it is to outrage the pundits and the experts by sheer impudence of speech and gesture' (p368).

1. Greer, Germaine. 2006. The Female Eunuch. London: Harper Perennial.

2. Criado-Perez, Caroline. 2019. Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men. New York: Abrams Press.

3. Jeffreys, Sheila. 2015. Beauty and Misogyny: Harmful Cultural Practices in the West. Second edition. Women and Psychology. Hove, East Sussex ; New York, NY: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group.

The topic of drag came up while I was reading Germain Greer’s The Female Eunuch. I have a lot of thoughts about the popular television show, Ru Paul’s Drag Race, and wanted to write them down. It isn’t a book, and this isn’t a book review. But the topic seems relevant to my broader feminist project. So here’s what I think of Ru Paul and his “girls”.

Radical feminists have at times criticised drag harshly (and not without reason). But many people including liberal feminists seem to love drag, and view it as positively subversive, rebellious, and progressive. The television show Ru Paul’s Drag Race is worth discussing because it has become so popular, and because it is generally seen as a force for good due to the focus on gay acceptance and pride, yet its effect on women is never discussed. The show is a drag competition, and it is viewable on the popular streaming platform, Netflix. It has quite the following, and is credited with bringing drag to a mainstream audience. The contestants are drag queens—gay men who impersonate women with a great deal of clothing, prosthetics, wigs and makeup. Paradoxically, they often say this product-intensive imitation allows them to be authentically themselves.


Note well: this isn’t a criticism of people who watch the show or enjoy it (clearly, I watched several seasons). Nor is it a commentary on how entertaining or skillful the show is, or on any of its other qualities. This is solely my analysis of whether drag, as done on Ru Paul’s Drag Race, is progressive, or sexist, or a little of both.

The contestants, with very few exceptions, make frequent and unembarrassed use of misogynistic language. They constantly refer to each other as bitches, but also describe themselves as whores, hoes, and sluts, and use the term “fishy” (referring to the alleged smell of women’s genitalia) to compliment drag queens who look very feminine. The acronym “Charisma, Uniqueness, Nerve and Talent” (CUNT) is a favourite term, coined by the creator and main judge of the show, Ru Paul. There is exactly zero reflection on the significance of men using these misogynistic slurs. Perhaps they believe, as some liberal feminists do, that we can “reclaim” such slurs and make them terms of empowerment. But I don’t see the queens taking the same approach to slurs against any other socially disadvantaged group. Why does the “reclaiming” strategy seem to apply mostly to women’s issues? In any case, even those in favour of reclaiming slurs would say it’s not allowed unless you’re a member of the relevant subordinate group. It’s not progressive when men use misogynistic insults for women, regardless of whether those men are straight or gay.

Another harmful aspect of the show is the negative stereotyping of women and girls. The drag queens flippantly depict women as nymphomaniacal prostitutes, parasitic trophy wives, air-headed bimbos, sexy schoolgirls, etc. When non-glamourous or non-sexualised women are portrayed it is almost exclusively for comedic effect. For example, I have seen the contestants play abrasive butch lesbians, nagging middle aged wives, and older women desperately holding on to their fading beauty with botox and plastic surgery. It’s rare for any of these stereotypes to be presented in a way that could prompt critical reflection on our society’s valuation of women, and the contestants never mention any thoughts about what these stereotypes do to women and girls. They don’t think about how the myth of the eager prostitute helps conceal the fact that the vast majority of prostituted women are financially or otherwise coerced, and that what men do to them is exploitative and traumatic, not sexy and fun. They don’t think about what happens to schoolgirls (or indeed any women) when they are regularly portrayed as hypersexualised objects for male consumption. It’s not critical or subversive for men to reproduce sexist stereotypes about women, and it doesn’t somehow become progressive when gay men do it. I’ve heard it argued that such depictions are ironic or critical, but I see no evidence of this. A critical use of stereotypes would be one that prompts the viewer to think about where the stereotype comes from and whom it serves. There would have to be a level of serious engagement underneath the comedy, and there isn’t.

As well as the stereotypes, the show is strongly focused on sexualisation and sexual objectification. The contestants add prosthetic female body parts—such as hips and breasts—and present themselves in a hypersexualised manner for the judges and audience. For example, they once held a “wet t-shirt contest” in which they swung, squeezed, jiggled and slapped their massive fake breasts and poured water over themselves while making orgasmic expressions, for a laughing male audience. One queen was noted for frequently squeezing his fake breast while making a honking noise. (Charming! So respectful of the female form!) There is nothing progressive or liberating about this. It may be fun for men to visit the realm of sexual objectification voluntarily and temporarily, but it is a terrible place for women to live. Women cannot set down the burden of sexual objectification and return to being (hu)man at the end of the day, as the drag queens do. Men continue objectifying us even if we don’t endorse the standards and stereotypes: Worse, the cultural objectification of women undoubtedly has a disinhibitory effect on straight men, making sexually exploitative and predatory behaviour more cognitively and emotionally available to them. It’s not critical or progressive when gay men reinforce the idea that women are sex objects for the consumption of straight men.


A last offensive feature of the show is the episodes (several, that I saw) in which contestants imitated pregnant women, or the very act of giving birth. One man made a grotesque facial expression, squatted, and dropped a baby doll covered in red paint from under his skirt. It was crass and ugly, clearly meant to draw laughs rather than express awe for women’s power to create human life, or respect for the considerable sacrifices they make in order to do so. In my view, most of the drag queens are thoughtlessly, ruthlessly mining female experience to extract material for sexual titillation or comedic effect. Although all artists and comedians collect material from real life, what’s hurtful about Ru Paul’s drag queens is their relentless conversion of women’s experiences into stereotypes, mockery and sexual objectification. There is very little respect for women. The men sometimes express love for their mothers (if they are supportive of their drag practice) or admiration for female celebrities (usually in fashion, music, film, etc.). But there’s hardly any serious or respectful reflection on women’s experiences generally, and absolutely zero consideration of how women are impacted by the stereotypes and and constant sexualisation that the drag queens rely on for their fun.

It has been said that drag can undermine patriarchal values by subverting them. If viewed critically, the drag queens demonstrate (perhaps unwittingly) that femininity, beauty and glamour are consumerist and artificial. But I do not think the show is ironic or that its viewers are critical, as I explained above. The show might slightly broaden men’s options for self expression—it is not totally unimaginable these days to see a man with nail polish or a skirt. But the effect on women’s beauty standards has been more thorough. For example, contouring—the use of light and dark makeup to create the illusion of a different facial structure—is now very common for women, though it used to be reserved for drag queens. And the body types created by the prosthetics and corseting seem to be influencing women, as well. One distressing example was guest judge Nicole Richie (a celebrity noted for her alarming thinness) fawning over the body of super-model-shaped contestant Naomi Smalls. He was very tall (6’5”) and very thin, with long, slender legs, visible ribs and no hips or breasts. Richie said he had her “ideal chest”. She saw Smalls’s male body as inspiration for herself, not as a standard for men. In his makeup and dress, he was interpreted as an example of female beauty, not male beauty. (I fear that girls watching the show could learn that the ideal figure for a woman is that of a male giraffe.)

I believe women watching the show apply the depicted beauty standards to themselves, not to their boyfriends. I believe men watching the show will interpret the stereotypes and beauty standards as applying to women, not men. Drag queens enforce standards of womanhood, not manhood, perhaps because they create a visually convincing illusion of femaleness, and because they are given special dispensation by society to be temporarily considered as women. The contestants are called “gentlemen” while out of costume, but “ladies”, “women” and “girls” when in costume. It’s clear that these men define “women” as their own invention, a role they can step into and out of at will. They don’t even have a word for female people who exist independently of their roleplaying.

Drag could potentially be subversive, if the men were to appear in glamorous dress as themselves, as men, but such rebellion is comparatively rare on the show. It has happened a few times, not coincidentally from the men whose drag was less sexualised and more creatively fashionable, but it was discouraged by at least one main judge, who said she didn’t want to see “boy drag”.

I think Ru Paul’s Drag Race is very unnecessarily misogynistic. The constant slurs would be completely unacceptable on any other television show, but I believe that viewers suspend critical judgement because of their desire to be supportive and accepting of gay men (as we should be). No one wants to criticise a poor young man who was bullied for his femininity and homosexuality as a boy, and who tearfully confesses to the cameras that only drag allows him to truly be himself, express himself, find himself, and finally be authentic. Of course, an activity or a costume is not an identity or a self. I suppose that what the contestants really mean when they say such things is that they really, really enjoy roleplaying, performance and dressing up, that it’s their favourite activity, and that it’s painful and distressing to be criticised for it. (Alas, criticising misogynistic practices is what allows me to find myself, express myself and be authentic. I’m just trying to live my best life here, you know?)

Men dressing up as women don’t automatically subvert gender norms. In fact they’re more like to reinforce them, especially when they make efforts to be perceived as female while performing femininity. In addition, there’s a fundamental difference between how standards of femininity affect women and how they affect men. When women do femininity, they are attempting to meet standards that are harmful and limiting, that serve men’s interests and not their own. There is always an element of coercion to these standards, because women are rewarded for conformity, and punished for non-conformity. But when drag queens or transvestites do femininity, they are slipping into the same socially created roles voluntarily and temporarily, while exaggerating them for entertainment and sexual titillation (either their own, or the audience’s). We need to create cultural space for women to be considered fully human, to be admired for their achievements and characters, and to be considered worthy without an effortful, exacting performance of beauty, femininity, sexual availability and objecthood. Drag as performed on Ru Paul’s Drag Race does the opposite—it reinforces the association between women and femininity, and hammers home the message that womanhood is all about glamour, beauty and sexual objectification, all the time, to the max, with no reprieve—unless the queens are impersonating an old or ugly woman for comedic effect as a lesson on what not to be. (Or unless it’s one of the more rare and rebellious queens who appears in creative “boy drag”.) The show as a whole is not subversive. It is a celebration of sexist stereotypes and the sexual objectification of women. In depicting the most exaggerated stereotypes for the sake of erotic and comedic material, Ru Paul’s drag queens help tighten the net of cultural pressures around women and girls. The mere fact that the performance is done by gay men does not reduce the misogyny one iota—it merely engages our empathy for the contestants so that we are reluctant to criticise their behaviour.

'Sex is a political category with status implications' (p24)

Sex is political. That is to say, sex is not merely a biological category but a political one, and relationships between men and women are structured by systematically unequal power. In Sexual Politics¹, Millet reveals this political system and explores the mechanisms by which it is enforced. She illustrates its long reach through history, and its deep roots in our culture and psychology. Although Sexual Politics was published in 1969, it remains relevant because it exposes the underlying mechanisms of patriarchy, not only its historically and culturally contingent details.


In this review, we’ll roughly follow the shape of the book. Firstly we’ll look at Millet’s theory of patriarchy, in which she outlines eight different aspects of the system. Next we’ll consider the first wave of the sexual revolution, which began in the 1800s. Lastly we’ll look at the anti-feminist counterrevolution that followed in the early to mid 1900s.


All quotes are Millet's unless otherwise stated.

THE ELEMENTS OF PATRIARCHY


In this first section, Millet aims to set out a comprehensive theory of patriarchy and how it is enforced. She examines eight aspects of sexual politics: ideology, biology, sociology, class, economics, force, myth, and psychology.

IDEOLOGICAL roles, temperaments, statuses

'Male supremacy, like other political creeds, does not finally reside in physical strength but in the acceptance of a value system.' (p27)

Millet explains that patriarchy is maintained through a mixture of violence and consent, as with all hierarchies. Force alone does not prop up the patriarchy. Nor is male muscular strength a sufficient explanation for male domination. Rather, consent to patriarchy is achieved by socialising men and women into temperaments that are appropriate to their divided roles, both of which justify their differing statuses. Millet argues that “masculine” traits are those traits that men value in themselves, or that are useful for the roles of leadership, achievement and ambition: 'aggression, intelligence, force and efficacy'. Meanwhile, the traits that girls are socialised into are those that fit them for the role of service and subordination: 'passivity, ignorance, docility, “virtue,” and ineffectuality' (p26). Higher status is attributed to the masculine temperament and role, but someone who is attributed high status is also likely to develop the dominant temperament suitable for dominant roles.

(NOT) BIOLOGICAL gender identity

Millet argues that strength differences between males and females cannot explain patriarchy, just as they cannot explain class and racial hierarchies. All three class systems are enforced and maintained in other ways.

'Although a technological and capitalist culture puts a very low salary value on the muscle it attributes to the male, it never for a moment relinquishes male control. In fact, muscle is class—lower class.' (p225)

She says we won’t know to what extent men and women are innately psychologically different until we treat them alike—something we have never done. She believes that “gender identity” is arbitrary and learned, not innate. She derives this conclusion from sexologists Stoller and Money², who claimed to have shown that babies were psychologically identical at birth and developed gender identity by the age of 18 months (one wonders what evidence can be gathered from babies, other than stereotypical behaviour). But what is gender identity? Stoller defines gender as the psychology that is related to anatomical sex, but not identical with it³. Millet uses the term “psychosexual personality”. She seems to mean an individual’s affiliation with a gendered role and temperament, caused by social conditioning. Her assertion that gender identity is learned (but nearly impossible to change) differs from the claim of modern trans activists that gender identity is innate and independent of socialisation, such that a male person can have a female/feminine gender identity even if they were raised and socialised as male from birth.

I would point out that not all development that occurs after birth is learned. Puberty is an example of a non-learned, delayed, sex-specific development. But there is no doubt that we are deeply socialised into gender temperaments and roles. In fact, Millet proposes that men’s and women’s life experiences are so different they should be understood as two separate cultures. She says masculinity and femininity appear natural partly because the socialisation starts so young, and the expectations are often self-fulfilling. There is now some evidence for this assertion; in Delusions of Gender⁴, Fine’s chapters on children expose just how early gendered expectations of children begin, and how insistent they are. Fine explains how babies eagerly absorb all clues about how they should behave, making them astute “gender detectives”. There should be no doubt that gendered temperaments and roles are highly socialised, though we cannot yet know what innate differences might exist beneath them.

SOCIOLOGICAL the family unit

'Patriarchy’s chief institution is the family. It is both a mirror of and a connection with the larger society; a patriarchal unit within a patriarchal whole.' (p33)

Millet writes that in patriarchal societies, the state and the family support each other in order to function. Traditionally, males have been considered the head of the family, and have had control and ownership over wives and children. The family is an important site of patriarchal socialisation into the required masculine and feminine temperaments, though schools, the media, peers and other sources also contribute to the training. Millet says that although reproduction and socialisation could theoretically be separated, revolutionary attempts to alter the family have failed because the family serves the interests of the patriarchy so well. 



I think marriages have become significantly more egalitarian, at least in some progressive spheres, since Millet wrote. But economic insecurity and gendered expectations still prevent many women from forming fully free and egalitarian partnerships. I also think the media and corporations have become very significant sources of gender training; heavily gendered products and advertising help firms to manufacture profitable insecurities and desires. Meanwhile, there is a seemingly unlimited thirst for entertainment media in which women are sexually objectified and men earn status through violence and domination—apparently even nominally egalitarian societies have trouble giving up these addictive fantasies. Parents attempting to raise their children in a more egalitarian way are therefore working against considerable outside influence.

CLASS male supremacy as a palliative

Some women enjoy higher economic class status than some men. This can obscure the political dynamic of male superiority and female subordination. Millet is clear that patriarchy places some men over other men, as well as placing men generally over women generally. Neither class nor racial privilege completely neutralise a woman’s lower sex status, or alleviate the psychic injuries of living in a male supremacist society. Millet says a lower class man 'has always his “manhood” to fall back on. Should this final vanity be offended, he may contemplate more violent methods.’ (p36) In other words, male supremacy gives men a palliative ego boost, which is why so many men defend it so vigorously. Millet also notes that lower class men 'may still participate in the joys of mastery through the one human being any male can buy—a female as boss.' (p21) They can also engage in misogynistic bullying, a 'psychological gesture of ascendancy' (p36). Such bullying doesn’t threaten the class system, but it does help reinforce male supremacy. In short, male supremacy provides compensatory benefits to men that dissuade them from developing class solidarity with women.

Millet writes that economic class also divides women and makes them conservative, as they associate their survival with the wellbeing of the males who support them. She says that white men have traditionally attributed higher status to their own women than to black men, but she believes that as racism erodes, men will continue protecting male supremacy and we may see racist “protective” attitudes to white women disappear. It’s an interesting hypothesis. I don’t think racism has eroded yet, but it does seem to be at least nominally unacceptable in some progressive social milieus in which explicit sexism is still very much allowed (in the form of misogynistic slurs, sexual objectification of women, and the slander and silencing of radical and gender critical feminists).

ECONOMIC provisional inclusion

'Since women have always worked in patriarchal societies, often at the most routine or strenuous tasks, what is at issue here is not labor but economic reward.' (p39)

Millet writes that economic control of women has been one of patriarchy's most effective tools. Even when women are allowed to do paid work, they still do most of the unremunerated domestic and care work. Millet proposes that capitalist societies merely use women as a “reserve” labour force: women enter the professions in economic expansion or wartime, and are laid off during recessions. It’s remarkable that this is still relevant today; the COVID-19 lockdowns have disproportionately affected women, as mothers are more likely than fathers to give up paid work in order to take care of children when schools are closed. Women’s entry into paid work, then, seems provisional, not assured. Millet also contends that when women enter a profession previously reserved for men, the prestige and monetary rewards drop! 'The humanities, because not exclusively male, suffer in prestige.' (p42) This contradicts the explanation I usually see for the wage gap, namely that women choose less highly paid fields. I would love to see some empirical evidence on this matter.

FORCE rarely needed but always available

'Control in patriarchal society would be imperfect, even inoperable, unless it had the rule of force to rely upon, both in emergencies and as an ever-present instrument of intimidation.' (p43)

Millet observes that patriarchy doesn’t need to be enforced with violence, since our socialisation into the required temperaments is so effective. The plausible threat of violence suffices, even if it is not carried out very often. (Not that male violence against women is especially rare!) Millet says that we tend to interpret patriarchal violence as “individual deviance”, concealing its relationship to an ideology and political system. Millet writes that reproductive control of women is an indirect form of violence, since many women die in illegal abortions. But she says patriarchal violence is 'realized most completely in the act of rape' (p44) Patriarchal societies associate sex with cruelty, masculinity with sadism, and females with victimisation. 'In rape, the emotions of aggression, hatred, contempt, and the desire to break or violate personality, take a form consummately appropriate to sexual politics.' (p44) Hostility is also expressed in sadistic pornography or misogynistic literature, and Millet lists a range of brutal historical and current practices such as foot binding, suttee, FGM, child marriage, prostitution, and segregation that have existed in various cultures. Some of these forms of violence are still common today.

MYTH & RELIGION men rationalising male supremacy

'Under patriarchy the female herself did not develop the symbols by which she is described… The image of women as we know it is an image created by men and fashioned to suit their needs.' (p46)

Patriarchal myths about women help to justify their subordination. Millet says that myths about women begin as taboo and magic in primitive societies, then are upgraded to religion, ethics, literature, and finally scientific rationalisations in advanced cultures. Two of the most nakedly self-serving myths are those of Pandora and Eve. In the ancient Greek myth of Pandora’s box, a woman wilfully gives in to temptation/curiosity and unleashes all evil and suffering upon the world by disobeying a command to not open a box. In the Myth of the Fall, Eve wilfully gives in to temptation/curiosity and brings all evil and suffering upon mankind by disobeying a command not to eat a fruit. In both cases, curiosity/knowledge is a metaphor for sexuality and sex. In both, men have written stories in which women take the blame for everything, thus justifying their subjugation. Millet notes that these attitudes still reverberate in our modern attitudes to sex and women. Patriarchal culture attributes sex to men when it is to be celebrated as virile, and attributes it to women when it is to be abhorred as sinful and unclean.

PSYCHOLOGICAL ego damage

'As the history of patriarchal culture and the representations of herself within all levels of its cultural media, past and present, have a devastating effect upon her self image, she is customarily deprived of any but the most trivial sources of dignity and self-respect.' (p54)

Millet writes that each of us internalises the patriarchal values in our history, culture and religion, and these continue to affect us deeply, even where women have made legal advances in terms of bodily freedom and economic freedom. She says ego damage to women is caused by: language that attributes humanity to the male and not the female; frequent denigration; patriarchal media and images; and daily discrimination. As a result, 'women develop group characteristics common to those who suffer minority status and a marginal existence… having internalized the disesteem in which they are held, women despise both themselves and each other.' (p55) We internalise misogyny.

Millet says the psychological traits of women and other oppressed groups include self hatred, self rejection, and insecurity. In addition, women apply harsh judgement and double standards to other women, swiftly denouncing any member of their group who might portray them in a negative light. Women adopt tactics of ingratiation, concealment, appeasement, and supplication. These are not feminine traits but the behaviour of subordinated people. As with other groups, a small number of women may be allowed to achieve higher positions, but must make apologies through public displays of deference to male power.

Millet regrets that there is little research on the psychological effects of patriarchy on women, probably because we mistake the status quo for natural and inevitable: 'Perhaps patriarchy’s greatest weapon is simply its universality and longevity. A referent scarcely exists with which it might be contrasted.' (p58)


In my view, this entire section on the theory of patriarchy was fantastic. I especially valued the insights about temperament and ego damage. Recently, I have seen “feminist” analyses stating that sexism is not the existence of differences per se, but the fact that we undervalue femininity. The implication seems to be that we are all somehow naturally feminine or masculine and the solution to patriarchy is to value femininity more highly, whether we find it in women or men. This proposal is a scam, and Millet has driven it home for me by explaining that “feminine” traits are in fact the traits of subordinates in a hierarchical system. In addition, I feel as though many people lazily assume that whatever women “choose” is good enough and cannot be criticised. I have heard it said that the idea of “adaptive preferences” or “false consciousness” is paternalistic or fails to take women’s agency seriously. But Millet explains that consent is always extracted from subordinate people by various means. Socialisation is one of the most powerful tools of women’s subordination: it makes force unnecessary most of the time, and it makes “choice” a dubious metric for justice.

THE SEXUAL REVOLUTION (FIRST WAVE)


Having set out a theory of patriarchy to illuminate the political nature of sex relations, Millet turns to the history of the sexual revolution and counterrevolution.

THE WOMAN'S MOVEMENT education, work, the vote

The Woman’s Movement began in the USA in the 1840s. Women first gained experience fighting for abolition. Millet says working for other causes before their own 'fulfilled the “service ethic” in which they were indoctrinated.' (p80) It also taught them some skills in political organisation. Eventually women in the USA and England got the vote, but since 'public feeling, together with party practices…combined to prevent candidacy or election to office for women, the vote grew more and more meaningless.' (p83)

Education for women was at first part of the patriarchal plan—it was intended to make them sweeter and more agreeable companions to men. But proper education did eventually open to women, and it was hugely important for the women’s movement: 'Even the taste of knowledge was sufficiently revolutionary to spark an enormous unrest.' (p76) In addition to education, investigations into the working conditions of women and children prompted outrage and triggered changes in labour laws that benefited all workers, including men.


Millet writes that for seventy years, opposition to the Woman’s Movement was so unrelenting that the feminist movement collapsed in exhaustion after winning the vote. They had failed to upset our socialisation into patriarchal roles, temperaments and statuses. Patriarchy was deep seated and resilient enough that it was merely reorganised slightly. Reflecting on this, Millet says changes of mind may be even more important that changes in institutions: 'The arena of sexual revolution is within human consciousness even more pre-eminently than it is within human institutions. So deeply embedded is patriarchy that the character structure it creates in both sexes is perhaps even more a habit of mind and a way of life than a political system.' (p63)

Millet explores three schools of thought about women that arose during the first phase of the sexual revolution: historical materialism, chivalry, and the rational approach of J. S. Mill.


HISTORICAL MATERIALISM patriarchy as reproductive and sexual exploitation

In The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State ⁵, Engels uses the historical materialist approach to try to explain how patriarchy came to exist. He asserts that patriarchy began with the invention of private property, particularly ownership of women. It was the first form of slavery and the first class divide.

He says that patriarchy brought about the existence of marriage and prostitution. Patriarchal marriage was invented to ensure heirs of known paternity to whom private property could be bequeathed. Monogamy entailed chastity for wives (not for husbands), which meant men’s demand for extramarital sex could only be met elsewhere. Thus, marriage gave rise to prostitution, as an underclass of women was set set aside for commercial sexual exploitation. Engels writes that as long as women are economically dependent on men, and have to barter sex for security, marriage will remain a patriarchal and coercive contract. As an alternative, he envisions full economic participation for women, free and voluntary sex-love associations between economic equals, and professionalised childcare. Millet agrees, saying that as long as women are obliged to be the primary caretakers of children, they won’t be completely free. This sounds like the best case scenarios in our time—those countries and situations in which affordable childcare is readily available, and hetero- and homosexual couples enter into voluntary romantic and sexual partnerships as legal equals.

Millet writes that Engel’s analysis of the family is valuable, because if the family is historically contingent, then it can be criticised and perhaps changed. 'The radical outcome of Engels' analysis is that the family, as that term is presently understood, must go.' (p127) That is indeed radical, though it is reassuring to hear that voluntary partnerships shall be approved.

Millet wonders why recent economic advances and the relaxation of sexual taboos have not led to a reduction in prostitution. She suggests that a need to 'affirm male supremacy through the humiliation of women seems to play a leading role.' (p123) I agree, since first hand testimony from prostituted women reveals that men visit them to act out violent or degrading acts they have seen in pornography. Humiliating women is central to the sex industry, not incidental. Men pay for access to women who have little to no bargaining power, because they want to perform acts and express attitudes that no free woman would willingly endure. In addition, women’s economic advances have not been universal. The majority of prostituted girls and women are still from economically vulnerable and socially marginalised groups.

CHIVALRY chauvinism with a pretty paint job

Millet writes that undisguised chauvinism gave way to chivalry in the Victorian era. Chivalry is still patriarchy, but disguised with romance and sentiment as a palliative to women to compensate for their low status.

Millet analyses Ruskin⁶, a chivalrous art critic and writer from the Victorian era, to demonstrate how chivalry works. Ruskin eschews clear descriptions of women’s material conditions, instead waxing poetic about “nature” and the doctrine of separate spheres. Separate spheres is the idea that men and women are equally worthy, but different, and have different roles in life by nature. Ruskin’s poetic writing disguises the power relations between men and women, and inflates the influence women have over men, calling it power. He says women are men’s conscience and that they guide men (from within the home, obviously). He flatters women as “queens” but in his ideal world no concrete power is given to women. As Millet notes, he 'pretends to forfeit status through semantics. Yet no forfeiture is involved.' (p102)

Ruskin paints sentimental pictures of domestic tranquility. He assumes male benevolence and deems women’s demands for legal protections unnecessary. Millet says part of the chivalrous mythology was that 'woman was superbly well cared for by her “natural protector.”' (p66) But as she points out, the beautiful picture of chivalrous relationships assumes that all women are middle or upper class ladies who enjoy protection and courtesy. It ignores the unprotected poor, and the underclass of prostitutes. Ruskin declines to speak of these, pretending prostitution is an unsavoury matter of personal morality rather than the brutal result of male supremacy.

'One begins to understand how tactically vital is the chivalrous posture… an attempt to beautify the traditional confinement of women at any cost.' (p79)

RATIONALITY unmasking chivalry

John Stuart Mill, whom Millet describes as the “rational” counterpart to Ruskin’s chivalry, wasn’t deceived. Mill presents clear descriptions of women’s material conditions with humanist arguments for equality⁷. He argues that we cannot know what women’s temperaments are like “naturally”, because women are so shaped and constrained by society; femininity is artificial, distorted, repressed in some regards and cultivated in others. Mill says every man except the worst brute wants more than a servant from his wife—he wants a pleasant, favoured companion whose mind and feelings belong to him, too. For this reason, women’s entire education is designed to create a temperament sympathetic to men.

While Ruskin focused on happy families, Mill points out the worst case scenarios of (legally permitted!) brutality against wives. Not every husband has to use his legal right to violence in order for the law to be wrong, or for the threat to shape women’s behaviour and social position. Further, Mill claims that the sexual politics of subordination, and the incredible selfishness and self-interested behaviour it encourages in men, is the psychological basis of all oppression. It is an interesting theory, and one that would require empirical investigation. But as Millet notes, we tend not research patriarchy’s psychological effects on people since we do not view it as a contingent situation. Of the insincerely chivalrous claim that women are the purer half of humanity, Mill retorts that there is no other scenario in which we consider it right and normal for the worse people to rule over the better ones.

Millet argues that we cannot excuse people like Ruskin as merely ignorant, or as products of their time. They could have taken the path of rationality and justice, as Mill did. They chose not to.


THE COUNTERREVOLUTION


Next Millet considers the counterrevolution—a period in which patriarchy reasserted itself after the incomplete sexual revolution. She looks at authoritarian states and the patriarchal “social sciences” that arose in universities. She also explores the cultural flavour of the backlash in a literary analysis of four authors.

AUTHORITARIAN SOCIETIES Nazi Germany & the Soviet Union

Millet writes that Nazi Germany made a very deliberate attempt to create patriarchal conditions through policy and propaganda. Nazis infiltrated and overtook existing women’s organisations. Motherhood was chivalrously exalted. The government made a quota policy to keep women out of universities, and drove women out of parliament. They implemented loans and taxes that penalised spinsterhood or childlessness and rewarded childbearing. They limited when women could work, restricted sale and advertising of contraceptives, outlawed abortion (except for eugenic purposes), denounced homosexuality, and allowed prostitution (controlled by the police, for the privilege of higher ranking Nazis).

Millet points out that states that wish to increase their population can motivate motherhood by making it agreeable, or they can legislate to make it inescapable. Nazi Germany opted for the latter. Millet argues that it would have been rational to allow women to be doctors, lawyers, and judges, in order that the maximum number of men could be free for military service. But the Nazis’ patriarchal tendencies were not merely pragmatic; they were preferred. Nazis were devoted to male supremacy independently of its usefulness for their economy and military.

Millet reports that the Soviet Union first attempted to free people from the patriarchal family. They declared every person’s right to 'economic, social, and sexual self determination' (p168) and promised childcare centres, nurseries and collectivised housekeeping. They did nothing to eliminate habits of patriarchal thought and temperament, though, and the childcare centres were never delivered. When the Soviet Union took an authoritarian turn, it completely reversed its position on women and the family, and began engaging in chivalrous exaltation of family and motherhood. The government outlawed abortion, penalised homosexuality, punished divorce, stigmatized illegitimacy, and described Engles’s view on love and family as irresponsible.



ACADEMICS & EXPERTS Freudianism & functionalism

'As the major trend of the sexual revolution had been to de-emphasize traditional distinctions between the sexes both as to role and to temperament, while exposing the discrepancy in status, the most formidable task of reactionary opinion was to blur or disguise distinctions in status while re-emphasizing sexual differences in personality by implying that they are innate rather than cultural.’ (p221)


Millet says that fresh ideological support for patriarchy came from the social sciences: 'Psychology, sociology, and anthropology—the most useful and authoritative branches of social control and manipulation.’ (p178) Freud was a major inspiration for anti-feminist ideology. He observed women’s distress at their inferior status, and concluded that it was caused by sexual inhibition at the individual level, rather than by social oppression. He determined that women’s personalities were innately masochistic, passive, and narcissistic, and that their psychological lives developed out of penis envy—not a metaphor but literal envy of the male organ.

Millet argues plausibly that girls learn about their inferior status long before they first observe penises. They learn it from school, family, media, religion, and everywhere else. They envy the freedom, power and status denied them due to their sex, not penises as such. And their masochism, passivity and narcissism are the results of female socialisation. But this explanation didn’t appeal to Freud, who felt threatened by feminism. Millet points out that his apparently apolitical work is actually a defence of the unjust status quo: 'A philosophy which assumes that “the demand for justice is a modification of envy,” and informs the dispossessed that the circumstances of their deprivation are organic, therefore unalterable, is capable of condoning a great deal of injustice.' (p187)

Functionalism was the second academic branch of the counterrevolution. It was a sociological approach whereby researchers described how society functions. The problem, as Millet explains, was that description became prescription. Since they measured and preferred “stability”, functionalists praised and prescribed the status quo. Functionalists approved patriarchy and separate spheres, deciding they were natural, biological, and necessary. The biological argument somehow led the Freudians and functionalists to “discover” that a university education and intellectual career are male pursuits, for which women are unsuited.

Although we usually assume that the prestige and remuneration of work is determined by its innate value, Millet insists this is untrue: 'In a culture where men weave and women fish, just as in a culture where men fish and women weave, it is axiomatic that whichever activity is assigned to the male is the activity with the greater prestige, power, status, and rewards.' (p224) Millet also examines a list of supposedly masculine and feminine traits compiled by functionalist researchers. Masculine traits include tenacity, aggression, ambition, originality, while the feminine traits include affection, obedience, friendliness, and being sensitive to approval from adults. Again, Millet argues that these are simply the traits a ruling class finds valuable in itself, and useful in its subordinates, respectively. She writes that the lie would be perfectly clear if we swapped man and woman for aristocrat and peasant, or white and black.


LITERARY penis worship and quivering fear of being unmanned

Millet analyses the literature of four authors whose work illuminated the sexual politics of patriarchy in some way—D. H. Lawrence, Henry Miller, Norman Mailer and Jean Genet. I have not read these authors, so these are Millet's impressions, summarised.

According to Millet’s analysis, D. H. Lawrence is a devoted believer in male supremacy and the need for women to be subject to male power. He also cherishes hierarchy between men, and Millet describes his favoured world: 'every female abject before every male; most males abject before the super-males.' (p279) Lawrence describes women as base and animal, yet he is also aware that due to the Woman’s Movement, women are gaining power and dignity. This is why Lawrence is so concerned with humiliating women—he wants to destroy their new-found ego and sense of self in order that they might be shoved back in their place. The citations from Lawrence reveal a man who is deeply convinced of his entitlement to superior position (yet simultaneously anxious about whether he truly is a great man) and profoundly angry that women have desires of their own that do not involve worshipping him and his penis.

'Miller’s genuine originality consists in revealing and recording a group of related sexual attitudes, which, despite their enormous prevalence and power, had never (or never so explicitly) been given literary expression before.' (p295)

Henry Miller has done us the favour of saying the quiet parts out loud. He views sex as a zero sum game in which one wins or loses. Women are to be tricked, cheated, used and discarded. To be emotionally involved is to lose status. So Miller reduces women to objects by having his characters constantly refer to them as “boss” (an interchangeable commodity). Sexual pleasure seems to be secondary to him—the main point is humiliation and subjugation. His work oozes hostility toward sex and toward women, who for him, represent sex itself. Describing Miller’s obsession with toilets and elimination, Millet writes 'the unconscious logic appears to be that since sex defiles the female, females who consent to sexuality deserve to be defiled as completely as possible. What he really wants to do is shit on her.' (p309) Unfortunately, even a distant acquaintance with modern pornography (which frequently involves men eliminating bodily fluids onto women, especially onto their faces) renders Miller’s analysis plausible.

'In Mailer’s work the sexual animus behind reactionary attitude erupts into open hostility.' (p315)

Millet’s literary analysis of Norman Mailer reveals a truly disturbed mind that associates sex with violence and violence with sex. Mailer treats rape as “hip” and sees creativity and artistry in violence. He creates a semi-religious worldview in which masculinity and sex are a test; the male must prove himself by avoiding “capitulation” to women. He portrays 'society as a female intent on destroying courage, honesty and adventure' (p329) and seems to feel that masculinity is in constant peril. Mailer is afraid of sexuality since, like Miller, he believes one party must be the victor, while the other is the victim.

'When a biological male is described as a “boss,” one gets a better notion of the meaning of the word.’ (p343)

According to Millet’s analysis, Genet recognises the arbitrariness and artifice of gendered temperaments, statuses, and sex roles. He makes this clear by writing about homosexual men; in his novels, men play both the masculine role (sadism, domination, virility) and the feminine role (passivity, subordination, humiliation, masochism). Genet’s feminine male characters “rebel” by fully accepting their status as bosses and queens, reclaiming the insults that were intended to dissuade them from femininity. But Millet reponds 'To be a rebel is not to be a revolutionary. It is more often but a way of spinning one’s wheels deeper in the sand.’ (p349) Nevertheless, she values Genet’s exploration of the psychology of the dominated. He shows how ‘oppression creates a psychology in the oppressed… how thoroughly the oppressed are corrupted by their situation, how deeply they envy and admire their masters, how utterly they are polluted by their ideas and values, how even their attitude toward themselves is dictated by those who own them.’ (p350)


Genet’s characters sink to “female” status by being sexually dominated. This isn’t rebellious, in my view. It’s regressive and offensive to define womanhood in such a way. Unfortunately, it’s not uncommon. Men with transvestic fetishism or autogynephilia are sexually aroused by playing feminine roles or imagining themselves as women. This reaches its ugliest form in sissy porn, a pornographic genre in which men to fantasise about becoming women (defined by stereotypical femininity) and being sexually abused and humiliated as women.

Men have always defined women in the ways that serve them, and this is no exception. While gendered roles are very real and have profound effects on us, women are not the roles they are forced or coaxed into. We are female people, and we have a very strong political and personal interest in not being defined by men’s sexual role-playing preferences, regardless of whether those men are straight, gay, or trans.

THE REVOLUTION

Since Millet believes the sexual revolution was never completed, what does she believe would be involved? Firstly, she says sexual taboos, double standards and exploitation would end and be replaced by 'a permissive single standard of sexual freedom, and one uncorrupted by the crass and exploitative economic bases of traditional sexual alliances.' (p62) She says extra-marital and pre-marital sex would be allowed, as would homosexuality and adolescent sexuality, but not prostitution, which is commercial exploitation. We would need to abolish male supremacy and our socialisation into gendered temperaments, roles and statuses. Once the moral authority and economic structure of the family is gone, it might be replaced with voluntary associations and the professionalisation of childcare.

I have a minor objection here. The concepts of adolescent sexual freedom and bodily autonomy are sometimes used as part of apologies for pederasty, as we saw in Firestone’s Dialectic of Sex. In addition, it is now a standard tactic to dismiss legitimate feminist critiques of harmful sexual practices as “sex negative,” “kink-shaming” or “prudish”. But as Catherine McKinnon writes in the foreword to this edition of Sexual Politics¹, more sexual permissiveness for men is probably not the answer to our problems. Men's sexuality is not repressed. Indeed, there is scarcely any aspect of their sexuality they cannot express: 'For dominant groups in any event, it is and has been expressed and expressed and expressed.' (p.xiii) Today, women are certainly allowed to express their sexuality in ways that are compatible with male interests. They are more likely to encounter difficulties when setting boundaries against unwanted, abusive or predatory male sexual behaviour.


However, I like some of Millet’s other proposals, especially voluntary love associations and professionalised childcare, which are already happening to some extent. Sadly, we seem to be nowhere close to eliminating socialisation into patriarchal temperaments and ideology. Commercial sexual exploitation is thriving, and has spilled into mainstream culture in the form of rampant sexual objectification of women in the media. Some women have made considerable economic and legal gains, but many women are still very economically vulnerable. Outright hatred of and violence toward women are mostly unacceptable in polite and progressive spaces, but they remain an option for men, and are always a background threat in women’s lives. And although chivalry is largely out of fashion, new ideas and language have been invented and used to continue camouflaging gendered differences in power and status while justifying and naturalising differences in temperament and role. Today, sexual politics even hides from examination and critique under the guise of “feminism” and “empowerment”, allowing people who consider themselves progressive to unreflectively continue supporting patriarchal institutions and ideology.

CONCLUSION

There was so much fantastic material in this book. Modern Western cultures still do a fair job of disguising the political aspect of how men and women relate to one another, emphasising the individual perspective while concealing the hierarchical background structures. But Millet describes the background conditions clearly, giving us a framework and terminology to understand and discuss what she calls sexual politics.

 Millet explores how patriarchy works, especially through socialisation and ideology. She gives us the useful terminology of temperaments, roles and statuses to explain our training into patriarchal patterns. And she emphasises that “masculine” and “feminine” characters are neither biological nor random, but are quite specifically the traits required of dominant and subordinate groups. She explains how masculinity is a palliative to lower status men, while chivalry is a palliative for women. And she draws our attention to the fact that violence is rarely needed to enforce patriarchy because our socialisation is so thorough that it generates “consent”. She argues for the need to better understand internalised misogyny and the ego damage done to women by our socialisation and by thousands of years of male supremacist culture.

She finishes the book by saying that the sexual revolution must go beyond economic and political reorganisation and involve a cultural revolution, a deep alteration in our psychology. She hopes the second wave will achieve this.

Sadly, I don’t think the second wave quite finished the job. But there seems to be a renewed interest in feminism—real feminism—which is why I’m here, reading from the treasure hoard of the second wave. Millet’s Sexual Politics is a most illuminating volume, and it was too packed with valuable details for me to convey its full depth. I therefore recommend it be read by everyone, immediately.

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1. Millett, Kate. 2016. Sexual Politics. New York: Columbia University Press.

2. Robert Stoller was a psychologist who worked on gender identity. John Money was a sexologist who experimented with sex-reassignment for intersex children.

3. Stoller, Robert J. 1968. Sex and Gender. New York: Science House.

4. Fine, Cordelia. 2011. Delusions of Gender: How Our Minds, Society, and Neurosexism Create Difference. Norton paperback. New York, London: W.W. Norton & Company.

5. I haven’t read it, but here is an English version.

6. Ruskin, John. 1902. Sesame and Lilies, “Of Queen’s Gardens”. Chicago: Homewood.

7. Mill, John Stuart. 1869. The Subjection of Women. 2nd ed. London : Longmans, Green, Reader and Dyer.

In The Dialectic of Sex¹, Firestone sets out with the goal of explaining women’s oppression. She intends to create a material analysis of women as a class. But her analysis is frequently metaphorical rather than material. She leans heavily on Freudian psychoanalysis, which is incapable of providing material explanations of social classes, since it focuses on individual and family psychology. Firestone extrapolates from the individual to the societal level using metaphors about the family, examining topics she believes are central to women’s oppression: biology, race, children, love, and culture. She has valuable insights at times, but she also makes some serious mistakes.

In the second half of the book, Firestone sets out her hopes for the revolution and utopia she believes we could build after we achieve total mastery of nature through technology. She imagines the elimination of parenthood and the family, envisioning group marriages, and childcare distributed evenly to all adults. I’m sorry to say her utopia includes a defence of pederasty, in the guise of total “sexual freedom” for children. I reject this vehemently. I also disagree with other aspects of her utopia that we will examine in detail later.

Despite my disagreements, what I valued about Firestone’s work is her boldness in reaching into themes and issues that seem settled, natural, or inevitable, and upending them with hitherto unasked questions. Firestone is the only writer I have read so far who truly believes we can abolish sex—not social gender, but biological sex and its social implications. This is indeed radical. While I do disagree with Firestone on many points, The Dialectic of Sex has still been an interesting read and provides important background information as I try to understand the history of feminism. Firestone has some valuable insights about this history, so we’ll begin with the past before moving on to her future utopia.


All quotes are from The Dialectic of Sex unless otherwise noted.

A PROLOGUE 
a little history

“The myth of Emancipation operated in each decade to defuse the frustrations of modern women… they had most of the legal freedoms, the literal assurance that they were considered full political citizens of society — and yet they had no power.” p28


Firestone writes that when the suffragettes won the vote, men extended token rights to women but kept the real power for themselves. Women were encouraged to believe themselves fully free, and “healthily selfish” radical feminist historical figures were deliberately forgotten in favour of more conservative or selfless female role models. The first wave of feminism fizzled out. Women were encouraged to find individual solutions in the “feminine mystique” of the 50s, or from the sexual liberation of the 60s. They joined other movements and groups, most notably the civil rights movement, the anti-war movement, and the left. Firestone describes three camps of feminists from this era. The “politicos” were loyal to the left and treated men’s issues as universal, but women’s issues as niche. The “conservative” feminists wanted superficial changes within the existing system—such as the same legal right to paid work that men had. The radical feminists were disillusioned leftists and moderates who saw women’s liberation as central.

I think this is an important history, because similar patterns exist today. Women are assured they already have full equality, and are encouraged to seek private, individual responses to distress at their political situation. There are “liberal feminists” who focus on gaining more power for (educated, middle-class) women while largely playing by the rules of the male-centric, neo-liberal system. But this approach leaves economic class structures intact, failing poor and working class women, and prostituted women and girls. It also leaves intact the social arrangements that penalise mothers and primary caretakers. Leftists rally behind every progressive cause yet still somehow manage to put women last when it really matters. Feminists joke grimly about the concealed misogyny of these “woke blokes”. who love porn, support prostitution, advocate for the dismantlement of sex-specific legal protections in the name of “inclusivity”, and reach for misogynistic insults and stereotypes when confronted with real feminist critique. And of course there are still radical and gender critical feminists, disillusioned by the left and centre, who prioritise women in their politics. They still endure criticism, ridicule, and silencing from “progressives” and “conservatives” alike.

For me, it was valuable to realise that my frustrations with other leftists have been shared by feminists for decades. Recognising the “progressive” pattern of putting women last and falling for individualistic solutions instead of class analysis means I can make a conscious decision to do otherwise.

BIOLOGY dependence, division

“It is everywhere. The division yin and yang pervades all culture, history, economics, nature itself; modern Western versions of sex discrimination are only the most recent layer.” p3

In The Dialectic of Sex, Firestone intends to explain women’s subordination using the historical materialist method of analysis. Where previous thinkers had merely abhorred economic inequality without being able to explain its causes, Marx and Engels’ historical materialist approach was meant to identify concrete mechanisms of oppression and create an explanation of economic class division that would be predictive enough for the purpose of devising solutions. The same is true for feminism: without an understanding of the concrete mechanisms of women’s subordination, we cannot create solutions. Our culture tends to obscure the political aspects of power and status in relations between the sexes, with myths of gender both romanticising and naturalising difference and inequality. But in 1884, with the publication of The Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State, Engels made a serious attempt to treat women’s position politically. Since then, understanding women as a class or caste has been the keystone of radical and socialist feminist thought.

For Firestone, sex is not just a class, but the original class. She begins with a call for us to realise the sheer scale of the problem: sex division is “the oldest, most rigid class-caste system in existence.” p15 It goes deeper than ordinary politics and deeper than economic class or race, since it begins before history in our animal nature. Knowledge of this fact is so painful, and the problem seems so intractable, that many women give up, or decide they don’t want to know. I agree with Firestone on this. So often I have the feeling that people are looking past the scope and depth of injustice against women and girls; the frequency of sexual assault, the fact that it shapes women’s lives and fears, the global industry of sexual exploitation, and the profound misogyny online, for example. I have seen people point out some of the few ways that men are worse off than women—usually due to male aggression, restrictive gender stereotypes, or identity politics that de-prioritise white men—and conclude that we finally live in an egalitarian society, or perhaps even a misandric society. We have a serious cultural tendency to ignore or downplay harms to women. So it’s cathartic to see Firestone write without caveat that women’s subjection is a profound and massive crisis.

“Unlike economic class, sex class sprang directly from a biological reality: men and women were created different, and not equal.” p8

Firestone asserts that the first cause of sex castes is biology. In the “biological family”, women are dependent because of menstruation, pregnancy, childbirth and breastfeeding. There has never been a society in which children were not dependent on women, or in which women were not dependent on men or the community. This biological inequality and dependence created the first division of labour and the first caste discrimination, as well as a “psychology of power” that we will explore later. As well as the biological family, there is also the social institution of family—for example, the nuclear family. Firestone says the nuclear family, while not biological, “intensifies the psychological penalties of the biological family.” p10 So far, this sounds plausible to me. Natural differences probably did cause the original division, even if thousands of years of male supremacist politics and culture have made it into something far worse.

Firestone rejects the natural values suggested by our biology. She thinks women should seize control of reproductive technology and social institutions, and use them to eliminate the division of reproductive labour—that is, to separate reproduction from the female body, eliminating biological difference. “The end goal of feminist revolution must be…not just the elimination of male privilege but of the sex distinction itself.” p11 Firestone, then, is a true sex abolitionist. This distinguishes her from postmodern queer theorists or some modern trans rights activists who deconstruct the concept of sex, or suppress reference to it, even though the underlying material reality is unchanged.

Firestone’s desire to use technology to radically alter human nature also makes her a transhumanist—a position I am wary of. I have little faith that human design will be less catastrophic than nature. Firestone’s main focus is ex-utero gestation and the elimination of pregnancy and childbirth. I wonder what she would say to the young women currently attempting to escape womanhood (and its attendant low status) with “transition” involving double mastectomies, hysterectomies, and anabolic-androgenic steroids. Perhaps she would hail this superficial erosion of sex difference. To me it is a tragedy that Firestone or anyone believes we need to eliminate femaleness in order to escape male violence and domination. I would prefer to imagine and plan for a society that ensures basic goods (financial security, freedom from violence, the social basis of self respect) for everyone, regardless of what gifts and vulnerabilities nature has given us.

I believe technological alterations to the human body should be considered carefully from both individual and societal perspectives. At the individual level we must be aware that our “solutions” might interfere with something that is needed for human flourishing, which is inevitably linked to our evolved psychology and physiology. I was once challenged by a transfeminist who asked me why “endogenous” puberty is better or safer than “exogenous” puberty. (That is to say, why puberty is better than artificially stopping puberty with puberty blocking drugs like Lupron and inducing some changes in secondary sexual characteristics through artificial steroids or oestrogen). I feel that only a severely ideologically compromised person could equate the natural development of our species, which has produced mostly healthy adults for our entire evolutionary history, with a set of profoundly invasive, under researched and potentially dangerous medical interventions whose long term effects are uncertain, and at best include lifelong reliance on further exogenous hormones. At the political level we must recognise that individual technological solutions can reinforce class and sex based social disadvantage. For example, ex-utero gestation might be used primarily to allow middle class women to continue working in a system designed for men, while poor women are still penalised by motherhood. IVF has helped lesbian or infertile heterosexual couples who can afford it, but has also allowed wealthy people to exploit poor women through commercial surrogacy (whereby people pay for women’s reproductive labour and buy the fruit of said labour—their babies).


FAMILY the psychology of power

“The separation of sex from emotion is at the very foundations of Western culture and civilization.” p55

Firestone began with a promise of material analysis, and with the division of sex by biology. But from here she proceeds along Freudian lines, into error. Central to her Freudian-inspired beliefs is the assertion that the dependence and division of labour caused by biological inequality creates a “psychology of power” within the family, and that this is the cause of social injustice generally.

What is the “psychology of power”? Firestone takes a Freudian view on psychosexual development, but with a feminist lens focused on power. Her story is this: small children first identify with their primary caretaker (usually the mother), and then eventually covet the power and freedom of their fathers. Children are powerless, but at some stage the boy transitions to manhood and gains power, leaving his mother behind. Girls, realising they are female and not destined for the same fate, can either “start using feminine wiles for all they’re worth” (p49) in an attempt to rob the father of his power, or they can deny that their female sex will result in powerlessness when they are adults. They can continue to deny their impending womanhood and attendant low status until puberty refutes them. I don’t think this explanation is implausible. It is less obviously ridiculous than Freud’s “penis envy” and “oedipal complex”. It also closely mirrors Simone de Beauvoir’s explanation of girls’ upbringing and psychology. But Firestone goes further.

Marx asserted, and Firestone agrees, that the psychological dynamics of the family are played out on a larger scale in society and our institutions: “he observed that the family contained within itself in embryo all the antagonisms that later develop on a wide scale within the society and the state.” p12 Firestone believes that the sex division and the biological family are the ultimate causes of social injustice. Accordingly, she believes we must destroy the family in order to destroy oppression: “Unless revolution uproots the basic social organisation, the biological family — the vinculum through which the psychology of power can always be smuggled — the tapeworm of exploitation will never be annihilated.” p12 Firestone has not explained to my satisfaction how family psychology translates into social institutions. The idea is new to me and I would like to see a more detailed explanation. While I might be convinced that there is a link between family structures, psychology and politics, it’s not clear to me that the family causes class politics as a whole. Hierarchies can be observed in so many animal species that I fear the psychological tendency to dominate and extract resources goes deeper than sex into the very evolutionary struggle for advantage. So I don’t know that biology is to blame or that abolishing it using biotechnology will cure injustice.


Drawing further inspiration from Freud, Firestone discusses the incest taboo (Freud asserted that children want to have sex with their parents, but that we repress it for social reasons and thereby develop neuroses). Like Freud, Firestone believes the incest taboo is not biological, but social, and is required for the stability of the family structure. On her view, children’s first love/sex feelings are for their mothers. They are forced to repress their sexual feelings for their mother in order to gain her approval. This requires the unnatural separation of sex and love. The separation later causes neuroses, including the madonna-whore complex: for men, the need to avoid sexualising the mother creates the separation of good (non sexual) women and bad (sexual) women, and “whole classes of people, e.g., prostitutes, pay with their lives for this dichotomy.” p54 While I agree that we do often separate love and sex, I don’t think it’s necessarily a problem—I love rather more people (friends, family, pets) than I would be willing to have sex with. I also don’t think it adequately explains some men’s mistreatment of the women they have sex with. I don’t believe anyone wants to have sex with their parents, and I think there must be another explanation for the madonna-whore complex. Perhaps it comes from the male obsession with purity and chastity (useful for ensuring paternity when you have a fortune to bequeath) and the conflicting desires of male supremacists to degrade and separate women and enforce their low status, but also to be sexually intimate with them.

Moving on, Firestone suggests that homosexuality and heterosexuality are equally limited and dysfunctional. She refers to Freud’s hypothesis that infants, prior to socialisation, all have a naturally “perverse, polymorphous” sexuality. She says if we did away with the incest taboo, we might all be healthy transexuals (“pansexuals” in today’s terms). 
So if I understand her correctly, Firestone believes that biology creates dependence and division of labour. This results in the family structure and the accompanying incest taboo, which leads to the separation of love and sex, and a psychology of power. These psychologies play out on a societal level and are the original cause of all class-based oppression. Therefore, Firestone wants to use technology to destroy the biological family and to erase the incest taboo. She hopes we will revert to a naturally polymorphous sexuality and shed the psychology that causes us to reproduce hierarchical relations in our societal arrangements. I don’t think I have exaggerated her views. She says:

“If early sexual repression is the basic mechanism by which character structures supporting political, ideological, and economic serfdom are produced, then an end to the incest taboo, through abolition of the family, would have profound effects.” p55

I am disappointed. Firestone promised a material analysis but delivered a suggestive ink blot. Freud’s views were often metaphorical, frequently unfalsifiable, and reproduced stereotypes while presenting them as universal truths. Freudian psychology (if it even counts as psychology rather than narrative) is incapable of explaining women’s oppression. For that we need an understanding of economics, institutions, law, and many other mechanisms and dynamics. Although psychology has a part to play in the explanation, we need evidence based psychology, not self-sealing, evidence-repelling fictions.

But things are about to get worse. Let’s see what Firestone writes about children.

CHILDREN another oppressed class?


For Firestone, children are relevant to women’s liberation because women’s association with children—our responsibility for bearing and rearing them—are hindrances to our freedom. In addition, Firestone believes children themselves are an oppressed class of people who deserve freedom.

Firestone proposes that childhood itself is a recent invention. Drawing on Phillip Ariès’ Centuries of Childhood², Firestone reports that before the 1500s, children were considered small adults, and spent their time in the adult world. Their main difference from adults was their physical inferiority and economic dependence. Schools helped create childhood as they “effectively segregated children off from the adult world for longer and longer periods of time.” p75 Firestone proposes that society invented childhood to justify the nuclear family, in particular the husband and wife unit. She claims that the invention lengthens children’s period of dependence, as well as the mother’s period of being tied to the child and the home. I think Firestone is wrong about schools. If anything, standard school hours in western countries allow both parents to work outside the home, and are particularly useful for mothers who would otherwise almost always be the primary carers of school aged children. (As we see during the COVID-19 pandemic, women are more likely to take on the burden of childcare during lockdown, even if they were fully employed beforehand).

Firestone believes children, like women, are a subordinate class of people whose status is based on physical and economic dependence. She also thinks they are sexually repressed! Firestone believes (apparently from reading Freud) that children have a naturally “polymorphous” sexuality that we repress. She believes children deserve the freedom to have sex with each other and with adults. I can’t believe I have to write this, but to be absolutely clear: children shouldn’t have sex with each other or with adults, and Firestone is horribly wrong.

Firestone is treating Ariès’ Centuries of Childhood as accurate. The briefest internet search, however, suggests that Nicholas Orme successfully refuted Ariès’ claims in his history Medieval Children³. Our conceptions of childhood have changed somewhat over time, but childhood itself was not “invented” recently. Besides, simple observation reveals that children are irrational, impulsive, inexperienced, and generally in need of control and guidance to an extent that would be totally inappropriate for adults of normal capacities. Although there is some debate to be had about how much freedom children should have (see “helicopter parents” vs “free range children”), no one with even a fleeting acquaintance with childhood should mistake children for small adults.


RACISM more family metaphors

Firestone believes racism is also a sexual phenomenon that relates back to the family. In her Freudian metaphor, white men are the father and have the power. White women are the mother, oppressed alongside the children. The black man is the son who identifies with the mother but is expected to take up the mantle of manhood and side with the father. The black woman is the daughter who has no option of attaining male power, so her only recourse is seduction of the father/white man. According to Firestone, this family dynamic pits white women, black men and black women against each other as they struggle to get some of the father’s power and sympathy.

Although I think it’s possible that subordinated groups can indeed turn against each other and compete for power, I’m unconvinced that the family metaphor adequately explains the mechanisms that create and perpetuate racial injustice in the USA. It seems to me that slavery, not Freud, should be central to a historical material explanation of racial relations in the USA—along with post-slavery laws, economic mechanisms, and the persistence of white supremacist culture.

LOVE AND ROMANCE the search for security and worth

Firestone makes the bold claim that love is even more central to women’s oppression than childbearing. She says that everyone has a need for emotional security and social recognition. In a male dominated society, however, the path to recognition through career and achievement is barred to many women, so they seek male romantic and sexual approval instead. This imbalance in power is incompatible with authentic love, which can only occur between freely associating equals. Firestone notes that many men want sex or emotional warmth from women without giving any commitment in return, so they play games to keep women hanging while they leave their options open. In response, women have always had strategies to get as much commitment from men as they can. Firestone says the sexual revolution of the sixties encouraged women to discard their demands for commitment and choose “free love”. But women’s economic and social vulnerability had not improved, and men never stopped playing their games (using women and dropping them). So the sexual revolution made women more sexually available to men, while women were “cheated out of the little they can hope for from men” (p128) in terms of commitment, economic support, and emotional security. This is an interesting take on free love and the sixties, which I am accustomed to seeing portrayed as an ideal, carefree era of peace and love and acid.

Firestone writes that society’s contempt for women is so great that men are obliged to make a special exception for any woman they associate with: “A man must idealize one woman over the rest in order to justify his descent to a lower class.” This is a pattern I recognise; misogynists flatter individual women by telling them they’re not like other women. And some women will accept the “compliment”, agreeing that they’re not gossipy, bitchy, shallow, vain, etc. (the well known “not like other girls” phenomenon). In my experience, this kind of interaction doesn’t happen with men who believe that women are their peers. But perhaps such egalitarians were rarer in Firestone’s era.


Firestone also observes that women are encouraged to express their “individuality” by, paradoxically, meeting the same narrow beauty standard as everyone else. Women are gratified by compliments on their appearance, not realising that they are being treated as interchangeable with other beautiful women. Our struggles to conform to the same narrow beauty standard enable men laugh at women, who “can be more easily stereotyped as a class: they look alike, they think alike, and even worse, they are so stupid they believe they are not alike.” p136

If this seems too cynical, perhaps I should draw the reader’s attention to the modern humiliation of “basic bosses”—that is to say, women whose interests and appearance are too mainstream and popular. The vitriol reserved for such conforming women is totally disproportionate to their crime. And when women get older, the contempt intensifies: one only has to visit the internet to find material dedicated to abhorring and wishing violence on “Karens”. The term was allegedly coined to describe badly behaving middle aged white women, but has rapidly expanded to include any middle aged white women. This is the problem with female-specific slurs; once a word has been loaded up with contempt and violence, misogynists will gleefully apply it to any women, regardless of the original meaning. Gaining male approval by abusing “Karens” or “basic bosses” is a strategy with a limited life span, however. As Firestone says, “there comes a day “when the ‘chick’ graduates to ‘old bag’, to find that her smile is no longer ‘inimitable’.” p135 Repudiating other women is a most insecure basis for self respect or respect from others, as are beauty and sexual appeal. Firestone would have us do the harder work of developing character. On this, we are in perfect agreement.

Today, women have more options for career, achievement, and financial security. Many men see women as their peers, and do not engage in manipulative games with them (though many still do). However, much has remained the same. Women are still economically vulnerable if they have children, and they are still encouraged in a billion messages from birth to seek their worth in sexual and romantic approval from men. Even comparatively egalitarian western societies have not reduced misogyny or the sexual objectification of women sufficiently to ensure a solid basis for respect and self-respect for women. Instead we are shepherded toward the cheap compensation of attention and admiration from others, which we can earn by self-objectifying, pleasing and appeasing. The patterns Firestone identified are no longer universal, but they are still readily observable, and the chapters on love and romance are, for me, amongst the most valuable sections of the book.

CULTURE technology and art, divided

“The machine of empiricism has its own momentum, and is, for such purposes, completely out of control. Could one actually decide what to discover or not discover?” p164

Firestone defines culture as the attempt to transform our imagined ideals into reality. It consists of art (in which we imagine ideals and try to represent them in artificial mediums) and science (whereby we gain knowledge of the laws of nature in order to manipulate the world to match our ideals). Firestone says women have been so completely excluded from science that many attribute it to an innate preference. She says the two modes of culture—“aesthetic” and “technological”—clearly correspond to male and female, and that this separation of culture sprung from the sex binary. I think there is a better explanation for why women have entered art more easily than science in the 20th century. Art or writing, for example, can be done fairly easily by women if they have time and some money or financial support. But science requires a specific education, special lab equipment, and mostly happens within institutions, not in writer’s cafes or makeshift studios. It is simply harder to access without the right connections and support. In any case, Firestone believes the division of art and science is artificial and morally dangerous: “As long as man is still engaged only in the means… to his final realization, mastery of nature, his knowledge, because it is not complete, is dangerous.” p163 I can agree that our technology sometimes develops faster than our morality—this is one of the reasons I am so wary of Firestone’s transhumanism.


Firestone believes we will eventually achieve total mastery of nature. That sounds dangerous indeed. But she believes it’s our only option; it’s too late to conserve nature, so we must fully master it instead, and create an artificially designed balance. Firestone believes ecological and feminist movements have the same aim; to “free humanity from the tyranny of its biology” p175 and to create something new and humane. Firestone hopes that with biotech, we will master artificial reproduction, eliminate childhood, ageing, and death, destroy the cultural divisions of sex, and eliminate the psychology of power that springs from the sex binary. We will get rid of pregnancy, which is “barbaric”. Firestone hopes artificial wombs will be created that will totally eliminate pregnancy except as a rare, unusual personal choice.

Along with reproductive technology, Firestone believes “cybernetics” will eliminate most human work—or at least the drudgery. It would be disastrous if this technology were invented while the current power structures still exist (which is already happening, in our own time). She says we have not yet thought seriously about how we will cope with a change in “humanity’s basic relationships to both its production and its reproduction.” p183 We will need a new culture, new relationships, and the elimination of both economic classes and the family. And she has some ideas about what the utopia will look like.

THE UTOPIA
 cybernation, biotech, and households

“If male/female—adult/child cultural distinctions are destroyed, we will no longer need the sexual repression that maintains these unequal classes.” p187

In order to understand Firestone’s utopia, let us briefly revisit the core points of her worldview. Recall that Firestone believes the following: nature created a sexual inequality that led to a division of labour. The structure of the family required us ban incest, to split emotions from sex, and to repress our naturally “polymorphous” sexuality. This generated a “psychology of power” that causes class divisions and social injustice. Ergo, to get rid of social injustice and class based hierarchies, we must eliminate the social/biological family and its attendant divisions and psychology. Firestone says previous revolutions and utopian projects failed because they didn’t go far enough. She doesn’t promise that she has perfect solutions to replace existing structures, since these must “arise organically out of the revolutionary action itself” (p203), and we have scarcely started imagining them yet, let alone transformed our psyches in the ways that would be necessary. But she makes some suggestions:

1. Women should be released from childbearing, and child rearing duties should be spread evenly across all members of society. Childcare and daycare centres are a “timid if not entirely worthless transition,” since they “ease the immediate pressure without asking why that pressure is on women.” p185

2. Economic independence and political autonomy must be ensured for women and children. Integrating women into the existing capitalist system’s workforce won’t be sufficient, since the system relies on women’s unpaid domestic and reproductive labour. Hence full integration into the workforce will be impossible without both artificial reproduction and automation of labour.

3. There must be complete integration of women and children into society. All segregated institutions, including schools, shall be destroyed.

4. Women and children shall have total sexual freedom. Firestone believes current cultural limits on sexuality are due to capitalism/patriarchy. Non-reproductive sexual activity is discouraged because women need to create new humans for the species to survive. Free love is discouraged (at least for wives) because it calls paternity into question. She also thinks child sexuality is repressed in order to maintain the integrity of the family. With these pressures relieved, “humanity could revert to its natural polymorphous sexuality—all forms of sexuality would be allowed and indulged.” p187

Firestone has some suggestions for what our lives might look like in practice. Firstly, many people will take up single, celibate professions that will attract respect. Like monks or astronauts, there are some roles that work better for unattached individuals, but women have been excluded from most of them. Secondly, instead of marriage, multiple people will enter into a “non-legal sex/companionate arrangement.” p205 Firestone imagines non-sexual “roommate” arrangements and group marriages. It doesn’t sound outrageous… until Firestone says there could be group marriages involving older children.

Thirdly, when it comes to childrearing, Firestone imagines “households” of several adults and some children. They will apply for a licence for a limited time. But children would have the legal right to transfer into a different household if they didn’t like their current one. All adults would have some responsibility for childrearing. We would replace “the psychologically destructive genetic ‘parenthood’ of one or two arbitrary adults” (p214) with a system in which responsibility is evenly spread. Firestone says this wouldn’t succeed as long as we still have natural childbirth, because “a mother who undergoes a nine-month pregnancy is likely to feel that the product of all that pain and discomfort ‘belongs’ to her.” p208 (What Firestone calls “possessiveness” I would call a dedication and connection that cannot easily be substituted). Firestone also believes that because everyone cares for the child equally, he won’t even prefer his mother and won’t “choose her as his first love object.” Even if he does, “there would be no a priori reasons for her to reject his sexual advances, because the incest taboo would have lost its function”… Furthermore, “relations with children would include as much genital sex as the child was capable of — probably considerably more than we now believe.” p215

So we now have a “utopia” with no parenthood, no motherhood, but with incest and pederasty, and in which children have the legal right to change households if they aren’t allowed to, say, eat lego pieces for breakfast, which is their right as perfectly rational small adults. Alas, the utopia is looking quite dreadful to me. I have no problem with alternatives to traditional marriage, as long as they don’t involve children, but I am not impressed by the proposal to eliminate motherhood or give children the same legal status as adults. To be fair, Firestone admits these are only ideas, and that we might not be in a position to imagine the utopia yet, since we’re still obviously shaped by patriarchal/capitalist values. “We would do much better to concentrate on overthrowing the institutions that have produced this psychical organization.” p216 Happily, apologies for pederasty seem to have gone out of fashion since Firestone wrote her book, so perhaps we’re one very small step closer to being psychologically prepared for the utopia. 



CONCLUSION thanks, but no


It should be obvious that my most urgent objection to Firestone is her defence of pederasty and incest. I trust we are agreed, and don’t even need to review the reasons why this is terrible. Suffice it to say that she is outright wrong about children being small adults.

I reject Firestone’s utopia. While I strongly support the use of technology to make pregnancy a freely chosen option for women, and to make it much much safer and more comfortable than it is at present, it’s not obvious to me that eliminating parenthood is feasible or desirable. Children need the protection of a smaller number of adults who are specifically invested in their wellbeing. Of course we can and should think our current social and economic arrangements, which place an intense burden on single carers, usually mothers. But that doesn’t mean that parenting responsibility can be shifted to wholly unconnected adults—not when we know that a minority of men are either preferential pedophiles or opportunistic sexual predators. We also know that employers will exploit children for labour wherever laws do not prevent it. I strongly disagree with Firestone that getting rid of the family would eliminate these behaviours, because I don’t believe they are caused by Freudian psychosexual processes. For now, parenthood, rather than being “possessive” and “arbitrary”, may well be one of the best, if imperfect, defences against child mistreatment and exploitation.


I also have a general problem with Firestone’s transhumanism—her view that we should use biotech to radically alter our human natures. We have proven ourselves very bad at designing societies and environments around our psychology. As Firestone notes, our morality lags behind our technology, but I believe our insight into our own nature trails even further behind. For this reason I view all transhumanist and utopian plans as worthy of intense scrutiny, though I don’t rule out bio-engineering categorically.

My final objection to The Dialectic of Sex is this: the book doesn’t deliver what it promises. Firestone set out to create a historical materialist analysis of sex as a class system. She did provide some valuable insights, especially about the history of the feminist movement, and women’s search for security and recognition through romance and love. But these do not constitute a systematic overview of women’s situation or its causes. Instead of material analysis, Firestone got trapped in Freudian metaphor, which is not evidence based and is thus ill-suited to reveal the causes of women’s subordination, let alone the solutions.



I did find valuable material in The Dialectic of Sex. There were worthy insights scattered throughout. And even if I strongly disagree with Firestone, she did force me to consider an interesting question: “should we use technology to eliminate sex?” As she says in the introduction, we are not obliged to take nature’s values as our own. At the very least, imagining alternatives may help us to clarify our values. It is good to cast our gaze a little further into the future sometimes. And since reproductive technology is indeed advancing, it behooves us to ask what the consequences might be if completely external gestation were one day possible—if babies could be grown outside women’s wombs. We should also be thinking about what consequences the automation of work will have on women and families, and whether society could be arranged to lighten the burden of childbearing and childrearing. Fully considering the implications of these technologies would require another essay, so I simply want to point out that unless we achieve greater economic equality, biotech and automation will likely further entrench existing class structures, and unless we eliminate child exploitation of all kinds, getting rid of the biological/social family will make children incredibly vulnerable. My own hope is that we will one day arrange society to achieve justice for women without repudiating the female bodies bestowed on us by nature.

The Dialectic of Sex was a book with a lot of surprising material, but I’m glad I read it. It’s important to know our feminist history. The view of feminists are diverse, it seems. I hope we shall be emboldened to further clarify our own feminist philosophies in response.

1. Firestone, Shulamith. 2015. The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution. Paperback edition. London New York: Verso.

2. Ariès, Philippe. 1962. Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life. New York: Vintage Books.

3. Orme, Nicholas. 2003. Medieval Children. New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press.

“No… I don’t want four different kinds of soap.” (p277)

Friedan wrote The Feminine Mystique¹ in 1963. Her aim was to reveal a deep, pervasive cultural trend that was harming women—in particular, middle class American women. You may be familiar with cultural images of the 1950s housewife. It’s an ideal that many girls and women aspired to at the time. Yet when they achieved it, they were infamously unhappy about it. Today, it’s seen as the epitome of sexist, limiting stereotypes. But at the time, when people were living inside the myth, they couldn’t see those harms as clearly as we do. It seemed natural, true, unquestionable. In The Feminine Mystique, Friedan did the difficult work of questioning this myth, from the inside.

Betty Friedan’s book was about (presumably white?) middle class women who were discouraged from working, not poor women who worked due to financial necessity. Gail Dines² has described Friedan as a liberal feminist, and distinguishes her from radical feminism by explaining that Friedan focuses on individual empowerment for privileged women, rather than the collective, class interests of all women. The distinction between individual empowerment and material class interests will be crucial for understanding radical feminism. Knowing that The Feminine Mystique refers to a specific culture, era, and class, we might wonder how salient the book is today. Despite the current trend of “tradwives,” who extol the benefits of traditional gender roles, it doesn’t look as though the feminine mystique is making a big comeback. So is Friedan’s work still relevant?

Yes, it is.

It’s relevant because anti-feminist myths still prevail in every culture, and defeating patriarchal myths is central to the radical feminist project, so it is not only a liberal feminist concern. Although the specific content of the myths has changed, many of the “myth-making” mechanisms are the same. Friedan attempts to chart the causes of the myth: who invented it, how did it become so popular, why did it overpower earlier feminist sentiments, and why was it so persistent despite the unhappiness it caused? How did women get trapped in the myth, and what would it take for them to break free?

As we work through The Feminine Mystique, therefore, we will be keeping an eye out for insights about how cultural change and cultural stagnation can occur around women’s roles. Hopefully we’ll get some clues about where to search for the modern myth-makers and -propagators.

Firstly we’ll look at what Friedan said about the mystique itself, and see how it was a step backward after a period of feminist progress. Secondly, we’ll look at who and what she thought was responsible for the mystique; particularly magazines and other media, Freudians, functionalists, educators and advertisers. Thirdly, we’ll consider Friedan’s view on what women should do with their lives instead of baking twelve different desserts. Finally, I’ll try to spin out as many lessons as I can that might be relevant for our feminist work today.

There are some parts of the book I disagreed with, such as some Freudian-inspired homophobia, but it isn’t relevant to the main themes, so I will not belabour it. With that caveat, let us see what Friedan has to offer.

All quotes are from Friedan, from the book, unless otherwise noted.

WHAT IS THE MYSTIQUE?

“Young and frivolous, almost childlike; fluffy and feminine; gaily content in a world of bedroom and kitchen, sex, babies and home… where is the world of thought and ideas, the life of the mind and spirit?” (p23)

The feminine mystique was a cultural image of womanhood that shaped the lives of middle class women in the 1950s in America. “Mystique” is Friedan’s term for a set of gendered stereotypes—what de Beauvoir would call a myth of womanhood. The feminine mystique in particular is the picture of women as exclusively domestic caretakers: women whose sole purpose in life is as housewife and stay-at-home-mother. It incorporates all the cultural pressures that shepherded women into these roles (and away from careers) and trapped them there despite their unhappiness.

Friedan describes how, in the fifteen years after the second world war, women devoted themselves to home, husband, and children with great fervour. Society—in the form of experts, advertisers, manufacturers, TV, newspapers and magazines—encouraged them vigorously. The ideal of the sweet, happy housewife was held up as a model for women and girls, and they emulated it. Magazines for women give some idea of what was expected of them; Friedan lists common topics including homemaking advice, beauty advice, and advice on how to catch a man (tip: lose at tennis! Your man will not be charmed if you defeat him!) But the magazines contained no mention of politics or the outside world, because editors insisted women didn’t understand them, weren’t interested in them, and wouldn’t read them. Short stories were mostly about young women finding love. They very occasionally portrayed career women, but only in order to show them realising their mistake and giving up work in order to settle down. The stories also suggested that men are allured by feminine helplessness. Women were encouraged to exaggerate their own ignorance, weakness, and timidity in order to flatter men and prevent them moving on to more convincing rescue projects (that is, more “feminine” women who “needed” their help).

Women and girls were, according to Friedan, enthusiastically complicit. They made the search for a husband central to their lives, beginning in high school. They married young, or took light, half-hearted courses at university as a way to kill time before marrying. They had more babies than generations before. They devoted their lives to family and housework. This was supposed to make them happy and fulfilled: “Women heard in voices of tradition and of Freudian sophistication that they could desire no greater destiny than to glory in their own femininity.” (p5) Women and girls were so devoted to achieving feminine fulfilment that they avoided anything that might interfere with their femininity. For example, Friedan tells of girls who refused classes in physics, and women who refused a cancer medication with “unfeminine” side effects!

But the promise of fulfillment was a lie. Many women in this role were desperately unhappy, and Friedan notes the high incidence amongst housewives of depression, alcoholism, psychosis, suicide attempts, and a variety of fatigues and other physical ills that doctors couldn’t explain. Women took tranquilisers and saw therapists. But without the benefit of an analysis that could explain their common experiences, women interpreted their problems within the framework of the feminine mystique. Each woman assumed that “something must be wrong with her marriage, or with herself. Other women were satisfied with their lives.” (p8) Because femininity was said to be enough to make them happy, those who were unhappy concluded that they had failed at their “feminine adjustment”.

“This is not what being a woman means, no matter what the experts say. For human suffering there is a reason; perhaps the reason has not been found because the right questions have not been asked, or pressed far enough.” (p15)

I believe there are a few key lessons we ought to understand about the feminine mystique and how it came about. Firstly, the mystique followed a cultural era of feminist values, which it overwhelmed. We must try to understand how this regression happened. Secondly, the social sciences, medical experts, and educational institutions played an important role in propagating the mystique. It’s dangerous to assume that institutions and experts will always be progressive, especially when it comes to women. Thirdly, the mystique might never have had the reach and persistence it enjoyed without millions of dollars in advertising money and carefully researched tactics of manipulation. It’s so easy to see the destructive effect of these manipulations when we know, in retrospect, that the myths they promoted were harmful. Why, then, do advertisers receive so little criticism today?


A HISTORICAL SET-BACK Progress is Not Inevitable

“The ones who fought that battle won more than empty paper rights. They cast off the shadow of contempt and self-contempt that had degraded women for centuries.” (p76)

The feminine mystique was not merely a seamless continuation of historical sexism. It was a backwards step on what Friedan calls “the passionate journey”. Friedan recalls how the first wave of feminists fought for the right to vote and to receive an education. Afterwards, women also started trying to describe new images of womanhood. Examining short stories in magazines, Friedan finds a sharp change in portrayals of women from about 1950 onward. In the 1940s, there were stories of adventurous, clever, independent young women who met men as peers whilst on journeys to discover themselves. But from 1950 onward, these heroines were replaced with girls seeking only love and marriage. Independent and adventurous women came to be seen as aggressive and neurotic.

“Words like ‘emancipation’ and ‘career’ sounded strange and embarrassing; no one had used them for years.” (p8)

From Friedan’s description of the first wave, it seems that most women were not feminists. The feminists were widely ridiculed as unfeminine, bitter, man-hating, unfulfilled, shrill harpies—by men and women alike. That ridicule never ceased, even when the vote was won and the justice of women’s suffrage was generally accepted. Younger women, even while enjoying their rights, looked back on the older feminists with scorn or embarrassment. “The feminists had destroyed the old image of woman, but they could not erase the hostility, the prejudice, the discrimination that still remained.” And that hostility was reanimated in new forms.

Friedan quotes an anti-feminist book that was very influential in her time, Modern Woman: The Lost Sex ³: “Feminism, despite the external validity of its political program… was at its core a deep illness.” Imagine agreeing with the feminists, and nevertheless repeating this slander against them! It is hardly surprising, then, that most of the daughters and granddaughters of that generation would not be feminists, either. And so it seems feminists did not succeed at passing on their values and images to new generations nearly as well as anti-feminist cultural movements did.

“Subtle discrimination against women… is still an unwritten law today, and its effects are almost as devastating and as hard to fight as the flagrant opposition faced by the feminists.” (p148)

When the older feminists retired, they were not refreshed—they were replaced. Friedan talks to an older magazine editor, who remembers the days when stories about independent women were in fashion. She says those stories were written by women. But those women dropped out of work to have babies, and younger men moved in, writing the blueprint for the new “feminine” stories of romance and domesticity. Younger women joined the magazines, but they were only successful if they could write according to this formula. Though women helped reproduce the new image, men had shaped it—men who came home from the war and yearned for the comforts of home. The new image was exactly like the old image: woman=domestic. But it was covered with a veneer of sophistication by an array of “experts”.


FREUDIAN & FUNCTIONALIST ANTI-FEMINISM Respected Expert Nonsense

“Ideas are not like instincts of the blood that spring into the mind intact. They are communicated by education, by the printed word.” (p35)

Although the image of woman as a domestic servant was an old one, it was dressed up in charming and fashionable new attire. Friedan identifies two main intellectual sources of inspiration for the new image: Freudianism and functionalism.

In the forties, “Freudian and pseudo-Freudian theories settled everywhere, like fine volcanic ash. Sociology, anthropology, education, even the study of history and literature became permeated and transfigured by Freudian thought.” (p98) Friedan believes psychoanalysis was popular because, by focusing on the individual, it provided a distraction from the anxiety-provoking politics of the time; the war, the atom bomb, McCarthyism. Freud had one positive effect, which was to unearth the topic of sex and bring it into public discussion. Friedan says “In an earlier time, the image of woman was also split in two — the good, pure women on the pedestal, and the boss of the desires of the flesh.” (p31) Freud’s image of the femininely adjusted woman at least allowed women to have legitimate sexual desires.

Unfortunately, Freud’s thinking on women was harmful in other ways. He thought them inferior, incomplete versions of men whose natural role was to serve as pleasant companion and helpmeet. Instead of sex, women's forbidden desire was independence. Freud asserted that all women had penis envy and this could be eased via “adjustment” to the feminine role of wife and mother. Career women were in denial, “sublimating” their penis envy into their career ambitions. As Friedan points out, Freud’s theory was immune to evidence. By interpreting career women as psycho-sexually disordered, Freud could dismiss them as counterexamples to his assertion that women were naturally unsuited for careers. The same blindness showed up in his personal life. He believed that women are naturally sweet and subservient, and on the other hand, Friedan finds in his private letters the following admission regarding his wife: “I have been trying to smash her frankness so that she should reserve opinion until she is sure of mine.”⁴ If women were naturally, innately subservient, the smashing would be quite unnecessary.

Freudian thought gathered a halo of authority, as though it were a new natural science. Friedan explains how this aura prevented critique: it was said only experts with years of training could understand it. Besides, it was unfalsifiable: it was said to be a truth, and one that “the human mind unconsciously resists.” (p79) If you disagree, you’re in denial. Even the unhappiness of housewives, when it became apparent, was absorbed into this theory, explained away as insufficient “adjustment” to the feminine role. And what could cause such a failure in adjustment? Why, career and education, of course.

“When questions finally had to be asked because something was obviously going wrong, they were asked so completely within the Freudian framework that only one answer was possible: education, freedom, rights are wrong for women.”
 (p97)

Next, Friedan describes functionalism, a second intellectual trend that arose in sociology and anthropology, and that fed the feminine mystique. Social scientists invented functionalism “as an attempt to make social science more ‘scientific’ by borrowing from biology.” The intent was to avoid cultural bias by studying social institutions in terms of their “function” within a society. But they ended up mistaking facts about how society was, for a guide to how society should be. They treated men and women as different but complementary, and warned women that adjusting to a man’s role—a career—might undermine the character they needed for a happy home life. They drew on the work of Margaret Mead⁵, the famous anthropologist who studied various pre-industrial cultures.

On the one hand, Mead’s observations showed that roles for men and women were highly flexible and culturally specific. On the other hand, Friedan accuses her of glorifying the female reproductive role; apparently Mead wrote that while men have to work in order to gain a sense of achievement, women can gain it from bearing children. Mead’s insights were not all received with equal attention by the functionalists: they ignored her conclusions about the arbitrariness and plasticity of human sexuality and sex roles, and enthusiastically adopted the idea that having children can justify women's existence. Like Freudianism, functionalism’s commitment to myths about femininity was curiously immune to opposing evidence.

“Facts are swallowed by a mystique in much the same way, I guess, as the strange phenomenon by which hamburger eaten by a dog becomes dog, and hamburger eaten by a human becomes human.” (p154-55)

Still, Friedan says this was a step on the “passionate journey” since it enabled “educated women to say ‘yes’ to motherhood as a conscious human purpose and not a burden imposed by the flesh.” (p116) It’s not Mead’s fault that the cultural mystique around childbearing became so strong that other creative pursuits for women were sidelined.


Friedan next explains how educators—in both schools and universities—reinforced the feminine mystique. Influenced by Freudianism and functionalism, they believed that the primary goal for young women was adjustment to their roles as wives and mothers. They feared that too much education or career could hinder this adjustment. So they discouraged girls from taking hard classes, and instead offered light and fluffy courses like “advanced cooking”, or functionalist indoctrination like “Mate Selection”, “Adjustment to Marriage” and “Education for Family Living”, in which critical thinking was suspended and class was conducted via role playing. The training began alarmingly young: Friedan finds a course on dating for girls of eleven to thirteen years old! And of course, when unhappy women went to therapists, they were helped with their “feminine adjustment” problems.

ADVERTISERS AS MYTHMAKERS Motivated and Powered by $$$

Intellectuals may have helped design the feminine mystique, but advertisers promoted it with an efficacy and vigour motivated by the possibility of making money. Loads of money.

“Why is it never said that the really crucial function, the really important role that women serve as housewives is to buy more things for the house?” (p166)

The advertisers knew women better than the academics did. (Is it because they didn’t indulge in grand and unfalsifiable theories, but aimed to collect predictive data they could act on?) And they manipulated women with breathtaking cynicism in order to sell more things. It’s not that they were devoted anti-feminists. As Friedan points out, there was no conspiracy, just a profit motive that happened to impact women far more negatively than it did men.

“The dilemma of business was spelled out in a survey made in 1945… The message was considered of interest to all the companies that, with the war about to end, were going to have to make consumer sales take the place of war contracts.” (p167-68)

Friedan interviewed one of the “hidden manipulators” of the marketing world, who revealed some of the surveys and research done on women, and the strategies used to manipulate them. Judging from the material Friedan shares, the advertisers were clearly aware that housewives lacked a feeling of identity, were bored, and felt guilty because their work didn’t stretch their abilities or take up all their time. Advertisers deliberately manipulated those feelings to sell the housewives products, knowing that the products could never, ever meet those women’s real needs. In fact, they spoke openly about needing to discourage women from becoming career oriented, as this was unhealthy for their profits (career women didn’t buy as much stuff).



Housewives were guilt tripped over not cooking a great enough variety of treats for their families so that they would buy more food products. They were guilt tripped over “hidden dirt” so that they would engage in deep cleaning operations every few weeks. The pretence that applications and products could be used creatively was used to alleviate the housewife’s feeling that housework is drudgery. She was manipulated into thinking that having a new and specific tool for each different household task made her an expert. Advertising researchers noted that “professionalization is a psychological defence of the housewife against being a general ‘cleaner-upper’ and menial servant for her family.” (p173) They talked about ways to create the illusion of achievement and individuality, to exalt the housewife as “protector” of her family, and to pretend that housework required knowledge and skill. Products were to be linked with spiritual feelings, a sense of security, and achievement. “The problem was to keep at bay the underlying realization which was lurking dangerously.” (p177) Namely, the realisation that most women don’t like housework, that it doesn’t require much expertise or dozens of products, and that no amount of spending is going to change this.

Friedan writes that the advertisers had an even easier time targeting teenagers in the fifties. Married teenaged girls who had never worked or studied at university “were more ‘insecure’, less independent, and easier to sell to. These young people could be told that, by buying the right things, they could achieve middle-class status, without work or study.” (p177)

The researchers understood perfectly well what was wrong with American women, and they chose to use this knowledge to try to keep women trapped in their unhappiness, in order that their misery might be used to motivate purchases. The advertisers didn’t create the feminine mystique, but they deepened and promoted it ingeniously, ruthlessly and unrelentingly.

“It is their millions that blanket the land in persuasive images, flattering the American housewife, diverting her guilt and disguising her growing sense of emptiness.”

IDENTITY, WORK, SELF-REALIZATION What is a Good Life for Women?


Friedan believes that every young person must undergo a crisis of identity as they leave childhood and decide what to do and what to be as adults. When women’s reproductive biology settles this question for them, they avoid the crisis, but also the personal growth that comes with it. Friedan sees liberty and independence as frightening but necessary steps in a good life in which a person develops a secure, meaningful identity. Because men will agree to “keep” them, women can evade this fearful and painful growth and choose more or less permanent immaturity through dependence.

“What if those who choose the path of ‘feminine adjustment’ — evading this terror by marrying at eighteen, losing themselves in having babies and the details of housekeeping — are simply refusing to grow up, to face the question of their identity?” (p57)


In addition to the inherent discomfort of freedom and growth, many women discovered that, after the war, workplaces became hostile to their advancement. Friedan explains that women were frequently passed over in favour of men, saw credit for their work go to men, or if they did advance, had to endure bitterness from the men who thought the job should have been theirs instead. She asks: what woman would want to struggle onward in a job, facing such hostility, when every intellectual and cultural voice tells her that it is right and good and natural for her to leave her job and go home?


“When a culture has erected legal, political, social, economic and educational barriers to women’s own acceptance of maturity — even after most of those barriers are down it is still easier for a woman to seek the sanctuary of the home.” (p165)

Friedan believes that working to your abilities—including intellectual and creative abilities—is a sign of human maturity, and is necessary for a good life. She cites the famous psychologist Maslow, who says that our human capacities should actually be understood as needs: “Capacities clamour to be used, and cease their clamour only when they are well used. That is, capacities are also needs.”^{6 Friedan argues that housework just isn’t challenging enough to stretch the capacities of most adult women. She says that housework, instead of being drawn out and expanded to create a full time job, should be finished as quickly and efficiently as possible, so we can use our energy for better things.}

Some of Friedan’s contemporaries exalt housework. Friedan quotes newspaper columnist Dorothy Thompson, who writes to am insecure housewife: “You don’t realize you are expert in a dozen careers, simultaneously. ‘You might write: business manager, cook, nurse, chaffeur, dressmaker, interior decorator, accountant, caterer, teacher private secretary — or just put down philanthropist.” But Friedan isn’t convinced, saying that this romanticisation of housework is in direct proportion to the emptiness of the position, and is necessary to convince the chronically underchallenged housewife that her drudgery is actually “mystically creative”.

“The less real function that role has, the more it is decorated with meaningless details to conceal its emptiness.” (p195)

Friedan notes that flattery and exaltation is simply a new tactic to justify women’s inferior social position, one that has become necessary since feminist consciousness raising has rendered unviable the earlier tactic of insisting that women are inferior. So society moved from saying that women should stay home because they’re unfit for public life, to saying that women should stay home because it’s wonderful… either way, women are at home.

INSIGHTS AND LESSONS


What general principles or lessons can we draw from Friedan’s historically specific analysis? How can we apply them to our current situation? I want to say five things that occurred to me as I read.


Lesson One: Progress Can Stall

Progress is neither linear, nor guaranteed. Change can happen demographically, not only individually, without a single person changing their mind. In Friedan’s story, when one generation of feminists retired, they were replaced by men and younger women who didn’t share their values. So the transmission of feminist values to younger generations is a crucial task.


Lesson Two: Power Patterns Persist

As Friedan points out repeatedly, there need not be any conspiracy in order for women to be negatively affected by social phenomena. The consequences of new social arrangements are likely to fall along, and to reinforce, existing patterns of privilege and disadvantage. That is, unless we specifically design them not to. We must therefore develop the habit of always asking how women specifically are affected by social and economic change. Policy must explicitly address material and historical differences between men and women, as a matter of course, in order to avoid exacerbating disadvantage.


Lesson Three: Choice Isn’t Enough

Choice is an inadequate metric for measuring women’s wellbeing. Women chose the feminine mystique enthusiastically, according to Friedan, and many were unhappy. We are not less susceptible today. We internalise the prevailing norms of our cultures, whether they’re good for us or not. Women unconsciously incorporate norms of femininity into our desires and self-images, and a rational critique of these norms, even if it is available, is not always sufficient to loosen their hold on us. An exclusive focus on choice is unhelpful because it disappears the entire causal chain of social influences on us, right up until the last moment when our hand hovers over the four types of soap or two shades of lipstick.

We need to be more deliberate about what kind of society we’d like to build. We should be trying to produce flexible yet substantial ideas about what kinds of lives are good for women, and designing policy around them. If we don't, advertisers and other myth-makers will fill the void, and they are unlikely to have our best interests in mind. For her picture of the good life, Friedan drew on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and his ideas about self-realization, but I hope to find further discussions on this topic as I continue my second wave readings.


Lesson Four: Dispelling the Glamour

“Consider… the housewife wearing eye makeup as she vacuums the floor… Why does ‘Occupation: housewife’ require such insistent glamorizing year after year?” (p47)

Vacuuming needed glamour because most people feel that vacuuming sucks, that’s why. Our next job is to look carefully at our own modern cultural myths. What aspects of femininity are heavily romanticised or glamourised by the media? I’m not saying everything that is promoted is bad, just that it is worth casting a critical eye on whichever aspects of femininity advertisers and the media are “spruiking” most vigorously to us. We cannot assume they are motivated by our wellbeing. We must ask who profits, who benefits, from different myths of femininity.

One obvious example is romantic portrayals of prostitution, which differ so jarringly from the first person accounts of trafficked women that I have read. Another example is the popularisation of consensual violence during sex, including non-fatal strangulation (an aspect of BDSM euphemistically referred to as “breath play”). The normalisation of this form of violence as a mere “kink” has led to the rise of the “rough sex” defence, used in court by men who have killed their lovers.

Another example worth examining is motherhood. Motherhood receives great flattery that nevertheless stops short of real respect in many contexts. The exaltation consists of flowers, cards and presents, and almost exclusively positive media portrayals of motherhood. Respect would be excellent healthcare, maternity leave, affordable childcare, extensive and high quality research into maternal health and mortality (especially for black American women, for example, whose maternal outcomes are markedly worse than those of white American women) and working arrangements that help primary caretakers to succeed at their careers. I do not argue that motherhood is bad; I think it is a significant component of the good life for many women. But romanticisation makes motherhood seem like a better deal than it is under the current conditions, and takes the pressure off societies to arrange things more justly.


Lesson Five: Resisting “Expert” Mystification

Experts, including intellectuals and medical professionals, are human and thus prone to error. Some of the theories they create persist not because they are good, but because they are impervious to evidence and critique. We should pay attention whenever it is claimed that theories about women’s nature or role in society are “too complex” for ordinary women to understand, or when such theories appear to be immune to counterexamples.

One such attempt at “expert” mystification is the insistence by some (not all) trans rights activists and theorists that biological sex doesn’t exist—that male and female are social constructions at best, or meaningless and incoherent concepts at worst. If you think that male and female are useful, sensible categories, it’s only because the topic is far more complex than you can understand (with your primary school biology, lol). Or so they say. This is mystification. In fact, the problem is not a scientific one but a conceptual one: namely how to categorise biological sex given that a few people per thousand are not easily categorisable as male or female due to mixed or ambiguous physical features. There could be more than one conceptual approach to this fact, but entirely discarding the categories of male and female is neither necessary nor sensible, since they have serious explanatory and predictive power. In fact, disappearing sex is a profoundly anti-feminist move, since it renders us unable to describe, analyse or address sex-based injustice and disadvantage. In any case, it’s important to note the mystification tactic, namely the insistence by some activists that everyone who disagrees with them is ignorant or stupid, and that the truth is more complex than we can understand.

And Finally

If we’re going to talk about good lives, we should look at how this affects all women, not just middle class and wealthy ones. Friedan decided that our wellbeing hinges on our identity, which revolves around meaningful work. If this even approaches the truth, then one of the most important tasks for feminism is to fight for economic equality and protections for workers in order to raise up all women. Choice and satisfaction in one’s career are simply incompatible with dire financial insecurity, and with the vastly unequal bargaining power that currently exists between many employees and employers. This is something Friedan doesn’t talk about in her book—her focus is on the middle class women and the myth that trapped them unhappily in the home. Nonetheless, I feel this conclusion springs inexorably from my reading of her work.

The happy housewife is a stereotype of the past, but that doesn’t mean modern myths of femininity don’t shape our lives today. It’s harder to recognise a cultural myth from inside the culture that produces it. But Friedan has given us some useful clues about where to look. She has also given us an important lesson about what can happen if we fail to pass on our feminist values to younger women.

So squint suspiciously at the varieties of femininity your culture sells you, and engage the youth!

1. Friedan, Betty. 2010. The Feminine Mystique. Modern Classics. London: Penguin.

2. Dines, Gail. 2019. “The Battle Lines between Radfems and (Neo) Libfems around Porn and ‘Sex Work.’” Presented at the The Radical Feminist Theory Conference, London.

3. Lundberg, Ferdinand, and Marynia Farnham. 1947. Modern Woman: The Lost Sex. New York: Harper & Brothers Publishers. pp142 ff

4. Jones, Ernest. 1953. The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud. Vol. 1. New York. pp110 ff

5. Margaret Mead wrote a lot of material and I believe she developed more complex views on sex and gender than are addressed in The Feminine Mystique.

6. Maslow, Abraham H. 'Some Basic Proposition of Holistic-Dynamic Psychology,' an unpublished paper, Brandeis University.

Let the radical education commence! The Second Sex came out in 1949, well before the other texts I’ll be looking at, which are mostly from the 70s and 80s. Still, it seems to belong to the second wave, since the first wave had already achieved their goal of women's suffrage at the time de Beauvoir wrote. De Beauvoir wanted more than the vote. She wrote to explain the mechanisms of women’s subordination—for she thought women’s inferior status was not inevitable or innate, but caused by their situation—and her analysis might be seen as the first paving stone in the long and winding path of feminist theory. Let’s take off our hats, then, and respectfully explore The Second Sex.

The Second Sex is exceedingly long. It is 782 pages, in fact. I have skipped over a great deal, including generalisations of women’s lives that I feel are no longer accurate, and de Beauvoir’s existential philosophy, which I disagree with and feel is unnecessary in reconstructing her best arguments. I have tried to extract some of the insights that are both central to her work, and relevant for our feminist education. (All quotes are from the book¹). I’m going to make my way through her work in sections:

1. The Conceptual Binary of Man/Woman
2. Reproductive Biology

3. Women as a Class
4. History
5. Mythology
   
6. Emotional Service
7. Girls’ Upbringing

8. Meaning and Purpose in Women’s Lives
9. Conclusions

1. THE CONCEPTUAL BINARY OF MAN/WOMAN men are human, women are female

“The definitions ‘the man is a male human being, the woman is a female human being’ were asymmetrically mutilated; psychoanalysts in particular define man as a human being but woman as a female: every time she acts like a human being, she is said to be imitating the male.” (p61)


In the Second Sex, Simone De Beauvoir sets out to discover why women have always, historically, been subordinated. She refuses explanations based on the innate character of women, insisting that the “eternal feminine” has never existed and that women’s characters are determined by their situations. She examines material and cultural factors to discover how women’s domination by men came about, and how this state of affairs is perpetuated.

A central thread in her work is the concept of woman as the Other (this is perhaps the one existentialist concept we might recognise and find useful today). De Beauvoir thinks humans have a psychological tendency to think in a Self-Other binary. The two statuses are reciprocal—I see myself as Self and I see you as the Other. For you these positions are of course reversed. But according to de Beauvoir, between men and women there is no reciprocity, no acknowledgement of women’s status as Self. In every culture, men are the positive and the neutral in a distorted dichotomy in which women are only the negative. Men are human, women are female. Men are essential, primary, complete in themselves. Women are additional, secondary, complementary to men. Men have never acknowledged that women are also Self or that we also experience them as Other; they persistently and in bad faith replace our perspectives with their own meaning, needs and intentions. Women’s freedom, then, necessitates that we assert ourselves as full human subjects, and demand that men recognise us as peers.

Is Simone overstating things? Men’s cultural domination may have been more absolute in 1949 than it is today. Today, many men do treat women as peers. But our viewpoints are still frequently ignored or overruled by men’s ideas about us, and many well-meaning men have never been forced to consider their reciprocal “Otherness”—women and men alike still treat men as the default, though we don’t often realise it. (Caroline Criado-Perez’s Invisible Women² is a revelation on man’s ongoing status as the default human, and what this means for women.)

De Beauvoir decides that men’s material interest in continuing inequality renders them unfit to write impartially about women. Therefore she, de Beauvoir, will do so. She seeks the facts that can explain women’s oppression in biology, economics, history, culture, and upbringing.

2. REPRODUCTIVE BIOLOGY anatomy isn’t destiny, but it matters—a lot

“Certain differences between man and woman will always exist… her relation to her body, to the male body and to the child will never be the same as those man has with his body, with the female body, and with the child.” (p782)

De Beauvoir explains that in all sexually reproducing species, individuals are subservient to the needs of the species. Reproduction is often costly and sometimes fatal to the individual. It’s a good thing we are not bees, because bee reproduction sounds quite dreadful. De Beauvoir writes that human women are heavily burdened by their reproductive role; they are penetrated and then grow an alien life form within them, and later feed their offspring from their own bodies. Women are smaller and weaker than men, and they experience menstruation, pregnancy, childbirth, and lactation, all of which are physically costly. Men, on the other hand, are relatively free to pursue personal projects without regards to the good of the species, since the male reproductive role—insemination—hardly interferes with a man’s life, his body, or his freedom.

It was interesting for me to be reminded how inconvenient menstruation must have been before modern products were invented. It’s worth noting that even in modern times, periods still keep girls out of school in some countries. I like that de Beauvoir doesn’t downplay how personally and physically costly women’s reproductive role can be—even for those who want to become mothers. Many women seem to think they need to downplay the physical differences between men and women in order to argue for equality or to extract respect from men, but I think this shortchanges us.

“The woman’s body is one of the essential elements of the situation she occupies in this world.” (p49)

De Beauvoir writes that the facts of physical sex are crucially important to women, because each of us experiences and understands the worlds through our bodies. But anatomy is not destiny! Society could be arranged either to lighten women’s physical and reproductive burdens, or to exacerbate them. De Beauvoir contends that men have done the latter, and that this seriously limits women’s ability to participate in public life and pursue their other projects. She says that men justify these arrangements with the excuse that they are “natural”. This is a lie; sexual difference is natural, but society is malleable. Women’s freedom could be greatly enhanced with contraception, abortion, paid maternity leave, childcare, and other solutions.

“Men universally forbid abortion; but they accept it individually as a convenient solution; they can contradict themselves with dizzying cynicism; but woman feels the contradictions in her wounded flesh.”(p545)

De Beauvoir believes there are few subjects on which society is more hypocritical than abortion, and calls men’s arguments on the topic a “monument of bad faith” (p539). She says those people who find the unborn foetus so worthy of life have no interest in it after it is born, and they have little use for the sanctity of life when they send men to war. Instead, the motivation must be found in the “masculine sadism” that refuses any relief of women’s hardships. De Beauvoir says making abortion illegal simply ensures illegal abortions, since no punishment will suffice to prevent women seeking them. She says many men condemn abortion but will hypocritically make exceptions for their lovers if they don’t want to marry them or provide financial support. Such men exalt motherhood and new life as long as it hampers women’s freedoms. When their own freedom is under threat, they will find abortions suddenly justifiable, and even pressure their lover to have one. “In an instant, the man, to keep his freedom and not to handicap his future, in the interest of his job, asks the woman to renounce her female triumph. The child is no longer a priceless treasure: giving birth is no longer a sacred function.” (p545)

Seventy years later, I feel the anti-abortion position is just as hypocritical as it ever was. Very few people who claim the sanctity of life are equally desperate to protect and save the lives of the already-born no matter the cost to other individuals. Many of us could think of one or two anti-choice politicians who chose abortion for their mistresses without any moral agony. I feel “male sadism” is an inadequate explanation, however. Certainly, a profound lack of empathy seems a necessary condition for obliging women to go through unwanted pregnancy and childbirth. But I believe in the USA, for example, politicians have promoted this issue in a cynical bid to distract voters from other issues that could unite them, such as economic inequality. Some people are anti-abortion because they believe this is required by religious piety. Others—men and women both—would perhaps prefer a return to old fashioned roles and rules because they derive feelings of personal worth from fulfilling them.

3. WOMEN AS A CLASS Marxism and the historical materialist explanation of women’s status

The historical materialists, Marx and Engels, have given a little thought to the causes of women’s subordination, and de Beauvoir examines their explanations. Engels thought women’s status is linked to their productive capacities—that is, their ability to work. In hunter gatherer societies, women’s strength was adequate to their share of the work, so they were more or less equal with men. With the invention of farming, techniques and tools like the plough were invented that required men’s strength to operate, so women’s relative productive capacity dropped. This, together with the invention of private property, inspired men to enslave other men to take advantage of their labour, and to enslave women as domestic workers. With industrialisation and the invention of machines, women are once again strong enough to do most work (we can push buttons as well as anyone!), and as soon as we get rid of the last vestiges of capitalist culture and consciousness, Engels thinks women will be equal with men again, as workers. De Beauvoir appreciates Engel’s insights and the historical materialist method of analysis generally. But she objects that women are not merely small workers. Our reproductive capacities are as economically and personally important as our productive capacities. If class were abolished, sex differences would still matter. And it is by no means clear that women would be better off if their reproductive capacities were controlled by the state instead of by husbands.

We should stop and reflect for a moment. Although this section is short, it is hugely important. Understanding women as a sex-based class was a major breakthrough in feminist theory, and it forms a core component of second wave thinking. It’s a shame that modern feminism seems to have returned to an atomistic focus on individual choices and preferences. This “structural blindness” makes it near impossible to identify remaining sex based injustices, let alone describe their causes. Bring back class politics!

4. HISTORY keeping women down since forever

“It is when woman is probably the most emancipated that the inferiority of her sex is proclaimed.” (p105)

De Beauvoir overwhelms the reader with historical examples of societies in which women’s legal rights and economic opportunities were restricted. Women were passed as property from father to husband, children were the father’s property, assets were held and controlled by the men, women had limited economic and legal rights, and men controlled law and wrote culture. De Beauvoir say women's freedom is assailed from two directions: even when women have more legal rights, cultural expectations intensify and they cannot find concrete economic opportunities outside the home. 
Perhaps a good example from after de Beauvoir’s time is the mass return of middle class women to the domestic sphere after the second world war in America, as described in Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique³. Women had worked during the war, and many attained university educations. They were not legally forced into the home. Rather, men took back the jobs, women’s economic opportunities shrivelled, and a new cultural exaltation of homemaking arose. An economic-cultural pincer manoeuvre, as it were.

De Beauvoir argues that the invention of marriage required the invention of prostitution. Chaste, monogamous wives were necessary to produce heirs and ensure men didn’t accidentally bequeath their property to someone else's offspring. Prostitutes were to be used for whatever sexual demands couldn’t be met by wives, and to allow men to act out their most depraved and violent desires with impunity. De Beauvoir gives examples from her time of prostitutes being thrown into rivers by university students in the winter, or dumped, naked, in the countryside by buyers. She notes that many women and girls are coerced or manipulated into prostitution: they turn to prostitution as an escape from exploitation as household servants; they continue into prostitution after an early, non-consensual sexual experience makes unwanted sex seem normal to them; their families, husbands or boyfriends force or pressure them into it; they begin because they urgently need cash. But even if they intend to do it only briefly in order to alleviate a temporary financial crisis, women often find themselves controlled, abused, penniless and trapped. But de Beauvoir reminds us that the ultimate cause of prostitution is men’s demand, plus a world in which unemployment and poverty exist.

Having read testimony from modern prostitutes, I don’t think much has changed. Prostituted women and girls are still manipulated, coerced, and desperate. They enter prostitution because of economic desperation, homelessness, manipulation by family and “boyfriends” who are actually professional groomers. They become trapped by drug addiction, threats of violence, economic coercion, and the grinding down of their psyches by physical, sexual and emotional brutality. They are overwhelmingly more likely to be murdered than any other demographic, to say nothing of other, non-fatal assaults. Men do not merely have sex with prostituted women and girls—they hurt and humiliate them in a creative variety of ways that I am unwilling to recreate using the written word. So it seems that a legally and culturally unprotected underclass of women and girls remains useful to satisfy men’s sadism. Of course I don’t mean all men. I mean just enough men to ensure a massive global industry that today contributes significantly to many countries’ economies.



Back to de Beauvoir. She says that although that women’s situation has improved thanks to contraception and participation in paid work, their rights are still slow to accumulate. She argues that women, more than other oppressed groups, have had trouble developing class consciousness, partly because we cannot remember women's freedom before male domination; there is no untouched, male-free women's culture or history to look back on which could illuminate the wrongness of our current situation. In addition, women are “dispersed” amongst men and have closer relationships with fathers and husbands than with other women. They have conflicting class interests, and are not practised at doing politics or advocating for themselves. Finally, as long as society seems hostile to women's independence and success, parents will teach their daughters to expect, hope and prepare for a man to marry and look after them. This is one of the most dangerous obstacles to full equality. “Men’s economic privilege, their social value, the prestige of marriage, the usefulness of masculine support—all these encourage women to ardently want to please men.” (p159) De Beauvoir points out that women are more complicit in their oppression than any other subordinated group, because they live and make families with men, and benefit from their support in a hostile world.


This is still true, as far as I can tell. Many men and women strive to maintain either traditional or updated gender roles, maybe because they derive some feeling of personal and social value from them, or because they are so familiar as to seem inevitable? Some women today play their expected gender role reluctantly, others enthusiastically. Some defend their performance of femininity as “feminist” or “empowering”, since these words have been diluted to mean any choice a woman makes that she feels good about. If there were no benefit to conformity, no “carrot” to complement the “stick” of patriarchy, male domination would be less stable, I think.

5. MYTHOLOGY femininity and other nonsense that we project onto women

“If the definition given is contradicted by the behaviour of real flesh-and-blood women, it is women who are wrong: it is said not that Femininity is an entity but that women are not feminine: Experiential denials cannot do anything against myth.” (275)

Material factors alone cannot explain women’s subordinate position, since society could have been arranged to lighten her burden and promote her freedom. But it has not. This can only be explained by our values, and de Beauvoir believes values come from the philosophical and psychological tendencies of mankind. She writes that man wants to define himself in comparison with the Other. But the Other can’t be something unconscious and indifferent, like nature. Nor can it be a peer, another man, who makes reciprocal demands on him. Woman is perfect because she is conscious, not indifferent, does not demand reciprocity like other men, and “it seems possible to possess her in the flesh.” Having established woman as the Other, man attaches meaning and symbolism to her.

I’m not an existentialist, and I’m not convinced this explanation of man’s psychological tendencies is correct, but it is undeniable that womanhood attracts a great deal of myth and symbolism. Manhood does, too, in my experience, but De Beauvoir never examines this. Read Michael Kimmel’s Manhood in America⁴ if you’re interested in a partial history of the shifting mythology of masculinity.

De Beauvoir explains that the mythology of womanhood is difficult to describe, because it is contradictory, serving different needs at different times: “He projects onto her what he desires and fears, what he loves and what he hates.” (p219-220) It is a matter of personal psychology which aspect of the myth any individual man is drawn to. De Beauvoir says women are variously associated with life and death, purity and sin, innocence and scheming. They are nature, flesh, immanence, emotion, where man is culture, spirit, mind, and intellect. The fact that woman gives birth ties her symbolically to nature, and to death, since it is our physical birth into a body of flesh that entails our mortality. Men’s sexual desire for women makes obvious their own fleshly existence and animal nature. Furthermore, Christianity introduces the connection between sin and the flesh. These associations cause fear and hatred of women, especially their sexuality.

De Beauvoir suggests that men aren’t subject to the same requirements of youth and beauty as women, because “normal men do not experience other men as flesh; he has only an abstract solidarity with these autonomous and foreign bodies,” (p184) whereas woman, who exists for man, should disguise all signs of age and mortality. Ideals of female beauty are designed to impose physical limitations on women: “The Chinese woman with bound feet could barely walk, the Hollywood star’s painted nails deprived her of her hands; high heels, corsets, hoops, farthingales and crinolines were meant less to accentuate the woman’s body’s curves than to increase the body’s powerlessness.” (p182) De Beauvoir also examines a few specific authors’ depictions of women. Some of their mythological Woman figures are charming and delightful, others despicable and inferior. Regardless of the exact archetype, however, Woman still exists for man: “The only earthly destiny reserved to the woman equal, child-woman, soul sister, woman-sex and female animal is always man.” (p273)

I think some of these associations have lost a little of their vividness in recent years, but they are by no means forgotten, and I don’t think they have been replaced with something better. Rather, I think that the sexual objectification of women dominates our media environment so completely that little space remains for other myths. A cultural survey would be needed to explore all our current associations with womanhood, but I believe a quick glance at ordinary media would suffice to demonstrate the ubiquity of woman’s portrayal as a sexual object for the pleasure of men. You can’t go out in public or consume media in the privacy of your home without seeing sexually objectified women (or female body parts) being used to sell things or pretty up films. Women are so underrepresented in film that humorous tests exist—like the Bechdel test or the Sexy Lampshade test—that set the bar for women’s representation in film hilariously, impossibly low… and yet many films don’t meet even these sarcastic non-standards. There are, of course, women characters who do more: politics, blowing things up. But just ask yourself how often they are allowed to do this instead of being sex objects and love interests, and how often they are merely permitted to do them them as well.

6. EMOTIONAL SERVICE ego rescue and attention owed

“What an alibi scorn is when it wallows in itself!…. It is sufficient for him to denounce their foolishness to believe he is intelligent, to denounce their cowardice to believe himself brave.” (p230)

De Beauvoir looks at some of the emotional services that Woman, as a mythological other, provides for men. Some men, frightened to compete with other men, revile women in order to shore up their self esteem. A man who doesn’t want to risk comparison with other men can establish his status simply by abhorring women as stupid, weak, immoral, worthless, or whatever. The high status man doesn’t need to posit woman as worthless. He can afford to show everyone respect. But a man of low status needs women to be even lower: “He intends to trample in her the ever possible proof of his own insufficiency; he asks scorn to save him; woman is the ditch in which he throws all the monsters that inhabit him.” (p272)

Another important role women play for individual men is mirror and audience to their merits. Many a man expects women to reflect his personal worth by giving him attention, praise, admiration, and agreement. A woman must have a little freedom in order to create the illusion that she chooses him and acknowledges his merits (it's less convincing when a slave tells you how splendid you are). The problem is that if women have too much freedom, they may use it in an off-label manner: “the hero’s wife listens to his exploits indifferently. The muse yawns, listening to the verses of the poet who dreams of her. Out of boredom, the amazon can refuse combat; and she can also emerge victorious…here is the ransom man pays for having posited himself in bad faith as the sole essential.” (p214)

I think this bad faith expectation is still recognisable in some men today, as is the inferiority complex that seeks relief in scorn. Consider modern “incels”. These self-declared low status men are perpetually enraged because they feel ignored and unnoticed by beautiful women. Then there are “nice guys”; men who think a brief and superficial display of feministy chivalry should be enough to impress the pants off women, but who quickly drop the facade and devolve into apoplectic tantrums when rejected. These men flock together online to share their fury at their unjustly neglected “needs”, and to rail against beautiful women and high-status men. Decent men who see women as peers may be disappointed when they are rejected, but they do not feel shocked and betrayed, or respond with self-righteous vitriol and violence. Incels and “nice guys”, however, behave as though they have fulfilled their part of a bargain that women as a class have agreed to (we haven’t) and that individual women must honour (nope). When women don’t meet their unreasonable expectations, they correct the women and not the expectations. For a treatment of the emotional contract that such men think we have entered into with them, read Kate Manne’s Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny.⁵

According to de Beauvoir, another ego service women serve is to display their husbands’ status: “In bourgeois society, one of woman’s assigned roles is to represent: her beauty, her charm, her intelligence and her elegance are outward signs of her husband’s fortune, as is the body of his car. If her is rich, he covers her with furs and jewels. If he is poorer, her boasts of her moral qualities and her housekeeping talents.” (p199) I take it my readers are familiar with the concept of trophy wives, so seventy years later this isn’t completely out of date.

Lastly, De Beauvoir says that two myths have special utility for man. Firstly, Woman as nature gives man an excuse not to create a society that alleviates women’s physiological burden (and in fact to increase it) because that is what nature has intended for them. Thus do manmade injustices masquerade as inevitable. Secondly, Woman as mystery gives men a cover for ignorance; when women are unknowable, there is no reciprocity, and no need for empathy and understanding.

7. GIRLS’ UPBRINGING crushing ambition and encouraging complicity

“Most little girls feel the same indignation and despair when they learn that the accidental conformation of their bodies condemns their tastes and aspirations… the future woman naturally feels indignant about the limitations her sex imposes on her.” (p434)

De Beauvoir spends the remainder of the book looking at girls’ upbringing and women’s lives, as well as the ways in which women seek freedom and meaning despite being trapped in unfulfilling roles. Her work seems specific to middle class housewives, and is sometimes outdated, but there are nevertheless useful insights to extract.

De Beauvoir writes that boys are trained from a young age to be independent. Although painful, this sets them up for a future with more opportunities. Girls, meanwhile, are prevented from climbing, roughhousing, and other physical forms of play and exploration, and this lack creates physical and emotional timidity in them as adults. Girls learn from a young age that history and culture has been created by men, that their future as women will be seriously limited, and that their destiny is to chosen, loved and married by a man. They are encouraged to make themselves pretty and pleasing. They internalise a male perspective of themselves, learning to see themselves as objects. A woman who says she dresses up solely for herself is mistaken, but it would also be a simplification to say women dress up only to please men: “she does not separate man’s desire from the love of her own self.” (p361) By cherishing her appearance, she attempts to reconcile the fact that she spontaneously understands herself as a subject, but is also required to become the object of men’s desires. As their ambitions are discouraged by society, girls are simultaneously tempted with the consolations of being a valuable object—masculine protection, support, and admiration are presented to girls as desirable and necessary. Daydreaming of romance, and excessive focus on appearance are not essential feminine traits, but are the result of girls being discouraged from interacting with the world and achieving mastery of it more directly, without a male intermediary.

De Beauvoir thinks we should actively discourage girls from expecting a future of male support, and require them to seek economic independence. We must do away with marriage as a career. Instead it will be a voluntary relationship between equals, capable of being dissolved by either. It will not be necessary either financially or to avoid the shame of children born out of wedlock. I think this is what marriage now resembles for many women and men in more egalitarian countries, but it also seems undeniable that women are still taught to self-objectify, and that a girl growing up today will be aware that her femaleness could still be a significant disadvantage.

“Puberty has a radically different meaning for the two sexes because it does not announce the same future to them.” (p340)


De Beauvoir writes that adolescent girls experience men looking at them (especially at their breasts) as sexual objects. They are also shamed for their periods. Though all humans experience many unpleasant bodily functions, the period is especially reviled because it is not shared by males: “the human body has many other more repugnant servitudes in men and women: they make the best of them because as they are common to all they do not represent a flaw for anyone.” (p340) (Ah, Simone, happily you lived before the internet and have therefore not had the displeasure of encountering a certain variety of man who is appalled that women are not more like sex dolls, and who is devastated that they, like him, eat burgers and shit in the woods). And though puberty is awkward and distressing for both boys and girls, it is more devastating for girls who justifiable do not want to become women in a sexist society. De Beauvoir also notes that many girls self-harm, and many experience sexual abuse by family friends.

What a grim reminder that things have not changed enough in seventy years. They have changed in some ways, though. I believe girls are now encouraged fairly equally in sport and in school. However, as de Beauvoir noted, girls who are given an education are not exempt from achieving femininity. It is not enough to be human and successful; they must become pretty and pleasing to men, as well. Furthermore, sexual harassment and objectification of adolescent girls are absolutely very common and remain a considerable source of distress for them (and for adult women). Also, given the rising accessibility, ubiquity and normalisation of violent and degrading pornography, I wonder whether adolescence announces a more frightening and unpleasant future to girls today than it did just a few decades ago?

8. MEANING AND PURPOSE IN WOMEN’S LIVES love, devotion, looks… what did I miss?


“The woman feels endowed with a sure and high value; at last she has the right to cherish herself through the love she inspires.” (p703)

De Beauvoir says women are taught that love and devotion to husband and children can justify them and give their lives meaning. But it can’t; we need projects of our own. Dedicating one’s self to another not only fails to justify a woman’s existence, it also places her in a very precarious position. Selfless devotion eventually bores and exasperates her lover or husband: “what she offers, he cares not at all to accept. Man does not need the unconditional devotion he demands, nor the idolatrous love that flatters his vanity; he only accepts them on the condition that he does not satisfy the demands these attitudes reciprocally imply.” (p724)

As I said above, I think we see more portrayals of successful working women these days, but we rarely see women who are exempt from the expectations of beauty or the heterosexual destiny of the love story. And mothers continue to share their stories (often anonymously, online) about how they feel expected to sacrifice themselves limitlessly for their families, and how they feel too guilty to get their own needs met.

“If the toilette has so much importance for many women, it is because they are under the illusion that it provides them both with the world and their own self.” (p590)

Some women try to find meaning and justification in attending to their appearance. De Beauvoir writes that they mistake beauty and dressing up as a kind of work that can express their individuality. But men aren’t expected to express their character through their clothing. Women’s clothing objectifies them: impractical and revealing, it hinders their movements and delivers their bodies to public view. While being well-dressed does confer value on a woman, it does so only because she is a valuable object, and it is bought with considerable time, effort, and money. A woman who dresses too modestly is criticised just as one who dresses too revealingly, because she refuses to be an object. Although some women claim to dress up just for themselves, they are in fact encouraged from childhood to objectify themselves and incorporate a male perspective into their own. It’s not empowering to base self-worth on one's appearance, since one remains dependent on the validation of other people. “In an indefinite series of appearances, she will never have entirely won”. (p595)

I believe that beauty standards are scarcely less woman-consuming than they were in 1949. True, we no longer wear corsets, and some wonderful and blessed women have made trousers and sneakers fashionable—at least for some women in some contexts. But modern advertising, tv, social media, filters and photoshopping have made images of perfection ubiquitous and inescapable. If anything, girls and women today are likely to experience more intense anguish about their appearance than they did in 1949. Girls are dieting at younger ages than ever. Hardly any women escape feeling some shame about their bodies. The feelings are so brutal, and so internalised, that some women pay for surgeons to cut and alter their flesh in the pursuit of bodily perfection. They insert foreign bodies into their chests to “enhance” healthy and adequate breasts, and even ask doctors to cut and shape their genitals because they incorrectly believe them to be ugly and wrong (thanks again to pornography). It’s not obvious to me that disordered eating and surgery are superior to corsets and hoops. I don’t know what farthingales are, but they sound positively benign next to labioplasty and anorexia.

“When she is productive and active, she regains her transcendence; she affirms herself concretely as subject in her projects.” (p737)

De Beauvoir considers the women who are privileged enough to have good careers outside the home. She believes work is necessary for women’s liberation, though a class revolution is also needed since most workers are still exploited. Women with better professions are on the right track. But they are still required to achieve femininity, and this hinders them because it entails passivity and deference toward men, and onerous efforts at beauty. Neither is especially compatible with professional success. Meanwhile, masculinity is more compatible with men’s humanity. Men’s clothes are practical, and “need not be original; they are hardly part of his personality,” (p740) whereas woman’s clothing is expected to express something about her as an individual.

De Beauvoir doesn’t think women should have to reject femininity entirely. Men and women are sexed beings, and so femininity is part of women’s humanity. Rather, she thinks that femininity must be made less limiting, less costly, more compatible with success. But this can’t be done on the individual level, since every woman stands in some relation of either compliance or rebellion toward existing standards of femininity: “The individual is not free to shape the idea of femininity at will… neutrality is impossible… the adolescent girl often thinks she can simply scorn convention; but by doing so, she is making a statement; she is creating a new situation involving consequences she will have to assume.” (p740) De Beauvoir doesn't say exactly how the transformation of femininity will happen, but one assumes that it will occur gradually, as more women resist. I believe the women who rebel most vigorously against expectations of femininity are likely to pay a heavy social penalty, but they also open up space into which the rest of us can enter with less resistance. Thank goodness for the first women who wore trousers and went to university!


De Beauvoir says that even if a husband accepts that his wife should work and be his equal (in theory), “most of the time, it is still the woman who pays the price for harmony at home. It seems natural to the man that she run the house and oversee the care and raising of the children alone.” I think this may less true today than in previous times, but studies still show that women do most unpaid house work and care work, even if they also have paid employment. They are also more likely to give up their work to look after a child, or sacrifice their job if the couple needs to move cities for his career.

9. CONCLUSION 782 pages! We solved sexism, right?

“Enough ink has flowed over the quarrel about feminism; it is now almost over: let’s not talk about it any more.” (p3)

So we have skimmed the depths of The Second Sex. We have learned that the evidence against a fixed, innate femininity is abundant. Women are shaped by their situation, and our situation forms around our bodies, economics, law, history and culture. A complex tangle of mechanisms contribute to women’s social inferiority. We are unlike any other subordinated group, because we are not unified but dispersed amongst males, across different economic classes, within a male-dominant culture. We are complicit in reinforcing the standards of femininity, through our own efforts to achieve it and also in the way we raise our children. Femininity offers tempting compensations in the form of being admired, loved, and supported by men. But beauty, passivity and dependence on men are dead ends. Women must choose the harder path toward full freedom and participation in society. This will be achieved when we lighten the burdens of reproduction, ensure concrete economic opportunities for women, and make femininity more compatible with work, public life, and personal projects.

It’s 2020. How far have we come, seventy-one years later, toward shaping a society that supports women’s freedom? Many men and women act as though equality has already been achieved, and there is little left for feminists to analyse or correct. They said the same thing in 1949. Simone de Beauvoir disagreed with them, and so do I.

“This denial is not a liberation for those concerned, but an inauthentic flight. Clearly, no woman can claim without bad faith to be situated beyond her sex.” (p4)

It seems to me that many of the old myths still hold power over us. Although a wider variety of women’s viewpoints are appearing in every form of media, many films, advertisements and other stories portray sexual and romantic relationships with men as women’s primary destiny, and show women servicing men’s emotional needs and playing support roles. Women who refuse to perform such emotional services as ego-stroking are still subject to disapproval and sometimes violence. Women who are ambitious may be subject to more intense scrutiny and impossible double standards whereby their assertiveness is interpreted as more unpleasant and unacceptable than men's, but friendliness is treated as proof they are incompetent and unprofessional.

Although modern femininity allows women to express a wider range of human interests and characteristics, the requirements of beauty are not reduced but intensified: many women feel intense pressure to have impossibly perfect bodies, faces, hair, makeup and personal style. It seems that film makers, corporations, advertisers, plastic surgeons, pornographers and social media personalities have taken up the creation of feminine myths and beauty standards where priests, philosophers, orators, writers and artists have left off.

How are women doing in material terms? In developed nations, women make up a large part of the workforce, and have more reproductive freedom than in 1949 (not everywhere). But there are few countries where childbearing does not create a significant conflict with one’s career. With the COVID lockdowns of 2020, it is disproportionately women who are dropping their jobs to take care of children as schools close. Feminised poverty, especially in old age, is a major problem even in wealthy nations, as women have lower earning potential over their lifetimes, and are likely to retire with smaller savings or superannuations than men. Women make up considerably less than half of all political representatives in most countries.

There is no country on earth where domestic violence, sexual assault and rape are not obscenely common and do not shape women’s emotional lives (whether they have already experienced assault, or merely have a rational fear of it). Nowhere are these crimes adequately investigated or prosecuted. The sex trade has expanded all over the globe, and the vast majority of women and children involved are coerced, though we are less likely to hear from them than from the tiny minority of high class escorts who do a little “sex work” voluntarily before exiting the industry at will.

So although many individual women are doing reasonably well, women as a class do not have anything like equal wealth, they do not have anything like equal power, and they are not free from physical and sexual violence. And yet, like the post-feminists in 1949 who claimed that there was no problem, we suffer cultural blindness around these issues. We don’t see them, or don’t notice how urgently wrong they are, or perhaps we give up because the problems seem intractable.


Simone de Beauvoir’s gift is the same, and as precious, as it was in 1949. By taking a magnifying class to the mechanisms of women’s subordination, she burns away the blind spot. She reveals the invisible, discovers the artifice and invention layered over our human nature, and exposes the historical contingency of facts that pose as inevitable and eternal. The job of feminist theory today is, in my view, exactly the same as it was seventy years ago. It is to find and describe the mechanisms by which sexual injustice is created and perpetuated, in order that our activism and politics can target them accurately. It is to ask “What circumstances limit women’s freedom, and can she overcome them?”

1. Beauvoir, Simone de. 2011. The Second Sex. Translated by Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier. London: Vintage.

2. Criado-Perez, Caroline. 2019. Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men. New York: Abrams Press.

3. Friedan, Betty. 2010. The Feminine Mystique. Modern Classics. London: Penguin.

4. Kimmel, Michael S. 2012. Manhood in America: A Cultural History. 3rd ed. New York: Oxford University Press.

5. Manne, Kate. 2018. Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.