'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.