Trashing Patriarchy

...in fact, reviewers are used to it to the point of torpor...

...and that if these children turn on their television, they will encounter the same attitudes and ideals and sanctions shared to a large degree by the school, the camp, the club, the newspapers, the films, and other people...

...Even bearing in mind the alienation and disaffection which we know to exist, the way this kind of social sanction is reinforced is quite unknown to us...

...393 pp...

...One might have expected to find master strategists who command larger constituencies, or who act on a more prominent stage, who have been engaged in some way other than being chosen as representative spokesmen in the ideological polemics surrounding the sexual question...

...Relevant here as well are the stories of the countless experimental colleges of the past and probably of the present too...

...and before patriarchy, there may have been matriarchy...

...Dear Reader, I do not recommend this book...

...Even if changes in social relationships can be accomplished only after a change in consciousness, there still must be specific matters for the consciousness to be conscious about, and Miss Millett hasn't much to suggest...

...like a doctor uncovering disease, or a moralist sin, she attempts her therapy with a dispassionate stance...

...The doughy prose and the harsh, sour accusations tend to obscure anything very genuine in the experiences most women have...

...Freud and the Freudians are searched and sacked as if they were enemy towns...

...Psychoanalysis is a major part of that culture, and Miss Millett could have confronted one of the important questions of the day, but the ideological demon pursues her in another direction, and so she ignores an interesting opportunity...

...Beyond Genet: that is to be the direction...

...All societies have given thought to the care and training of the young...

...nor is there any question that some moral or spiritual aptitude would normally be expected of anyone acting as a guide or mentor, and that that aptitude is a gift rarely found...

...Our schools do not reinforce our deepest social ideals, our mass media undermine our schools, our people do not support the idea of the nation, and an irreducible commercial vocabulary makes everything expendable...

...Why not, for example, a deliberate government policy of compensatory training and education for women, to make up for the defeating sequence of poor identity formation in childhood and consequent diminution of opportunity in youth and young womanhood...

...Given her great concern with arbitrary social roles assigned by patriarchy, it is not surprising that her attention is captured by homosexual relations...

...The ostensibly liberating culture has in it possibilities for unforeseen rigidity and restrictiveness, which are the more damaging because they are unexpected and hidden...

...Is that all...

...What weight for their ideology concerning women does this confrontation imply...

...so be succeeded by a counterrevolution that all but destroyed the previous advances and still dominates the present...

...There has already been too much accusation, too much proof, too much history, too much revenge...

...I wonder why not, considering the ready achievement of power such a policy might ensure, and the natural class interest which would support it...

...that is a kind of tokenism...

...Statements so contrary to fact must mean something...

...Equal pay for equal work is an irreproachable goal, but if a women has never gotten into a position where she does equal TRASHING PATRIARCHY work, the slogan isn't much good to her...

...She finds the analogy with racism to be most revelant to her argument, ignoring the involved power network in which racial groups operate...

...THE APPEARANCE OF Sexual Politics * constitutes an event in publishing rather than in intellectual history...

...A tax advantage to take care of household help or supervision of children would do more in this connection than passage of the Equal Rights Amendment, which, as a woman labor leader observed, flatters lady lawyers while it penalizes the working women who need the "unequal" protective legislation...

...TRASHING PATRIARCHY A A T LEAST A THIRD of Miss Millett's book, and clearly her favorite part, is the confrontation with "the counterrevolutionary sexual politicians themselves...

...Miss Millett's examination of psychoanalytic theory is not distinguished either for probity or accuracy or for breadth of understanding, and is so obviously polemical that it is not worthy of serious discussion...

...And, are the options to be increased or diminished...

...Other books are being issued, in hard-cover and paperback, even a children's book about feminism...

...And that at the very moment when training and the acquisition of higher skills are offered as a solution to women's age-old exploitation, the society's needs may be very different...

...Dear Reader, relax—it's only D.H...

...She is not at all concerned with more functional aspects of politics, the organization of power for certain purposes, even irrational ones...

...Nothing would be more becoming to feminism than its silence...

...I suspect that she would be unable to analyze, in political terms, what happened to the Equal Rights Amendment in Congress this year...

...what she takes as the meaning of politics is the way the psychology of power is expressed in ideology...

...Enough damage has been done by contention to provide a reason for avoiding the further exacerbation of sexual conflict which attends the feminist argument...

...Feminist obsession with the problem of equality precludes thinking along these lines, and unfortunately stands in the way of their making any valuable contribution to the improvement so earnestly desired...

...Other media have cooperated in the assessment to make this into a full-fledged publishing event—the author photographed in the Women's Lib demonstration, eluding reporters like a celebrity, lecturing everywhere, even trying to explain the evils of patriarchy to Martha Deane...

...But what will be the ideas and ideals of these educators and training staff, and what authority, what sanction, will they enjoy...

...But remedial programs of some sort, like the urban university programs for poorly prepared college students, emergency retraining programs, funds to compensate or supply tuition, family allowances with a different emphasis, a public education law comparable to the provisions enacted for returning servicemen —is there not an important task here, an appeal made to all who profess concern with women's lot...

...more definite...

...Miss Millett is very pleased with herself for identifying the sexual relation as political, but then is unable to develop the idea because by politics she means only the power relations of oppressor and oppressed, or master and slave, that is, the politics of control...

...This hint is worse than absurd, and flirting with it is irresponsible...

...Most of the time these requirements are not met, and so the household is not maintained, or the children, like parcels, are merely delivered to sitters, or systematically brutalized by television and untrained custodians, or the woman's work or training receives minimal personal investment, or contact with the husband fades...

...But there is little in our country that tends toward the creation of social bonds, only toward their dissolution, even in our liberal culture, so SONYA RUDIKOFF we cannot be sure that any reform, however desirable, that any revolutionary change, however necessary or rational, will be encouraged to flourish and grow, once its progenitors have disappeared from the scene, once another generation's personal destiny and its needs take precedence over what has gone before...

...It is not enough to attack law school admissions, or traditional sex and identity training, or to demand new consciousness...

...Whoever wishes to transform society must do more, must develop new social forms or use the existing forms to transmit in a changed way...

...By close examination of texts, by unremitting, exhaustive, dogged pursuit, she uncovers the sexual polemics in the nineteenth century's self-conceptions...

...In this country, as we know, psychoanalysis has been embraced with more enthusiasm and credence than anywhere else...

...And if their ideas shift with each group that graduates from the teachers' colleges, can the society trust its teachers to inculcate its ideals...

...its tone and level of discourse and evidence represent a departure from generally accepted academic practice that perhaps explains the uniformly favorable reviews...

...W W HAT, THEN, DOES SHE PROPOSE...

...Relations of individual women and men, of women with one another, and of larger social groupings are to be seen against this background of power politics in the most fundamental sense...

...The plot thickens: who will the villains turn out to be...

...a similar effect, power, and notoriety would be surprising, or inconceivable, in the same circles abroad...

...It is a delicate question, but those who are fearless and uncompromising in their confrontation with other delicate subjects need not shrink from this one...

...Then, too, most of the world's, and the West's, female population is unaffected by the views of these spokesmen, probably even unaware of their very existence...

...The communal living groups which have sprung up in recent years dimly register the absence of such a continuous social environment, but they are too selfconsciously unconnected with anything else in the society to be very durable themselves...

...We have alienated our older people, so they cannot be integrated into any system of coherent training, either for sanctioning what exists or reinforcing anything new, and they are not given the authority to supervise...

...A policy of deliberately using the power of sex to achieve other ends—like peace!—would be ideologically unacceptable because it has to acknowledge "sexism," even if only as political reality...

...Lawrence, Henry Miller, and Norman Mailer...

...The book has been reviewed almost entirely by men, although the one female reviewer I've read agreed that the author was "frank," "brilliant," "loving," and so on...

...For example, a very fearless attitude is required to insure that proposals to remedy the position of women are not decreed as unalterable law, that alternatives to them are seen as valuable also...

...that the children are obedient and responsible to a degree unimaginable in this country, that they have been accustomed to strict teachers whose authority is not undermined by parents, but rather supported...

...The point is not often made, perhaps because the true nature of things is always hard to convey: les bonnes sentiments faisent la mauvaise poesie...

...Ever since Plato, everyone who has thought about social change realizes that the subject of the education and rearing of the young is the significant revolutionary subject, and that if social transformations are to be at all dur TRASHING PATRIARCHY able, they must be expressed in changed institutions, in new sanctions, in new kinds of reinforcement, in redistribution of authority...

...we are quite extensively informed about it...

...What any serious person wants to now is, how is the change in consciousness to be maintained from age to age...

...And the violence of the material, matched by the author's deliberate violence in using it, creates an effect that is automatically welcomed by the liberal culture around us...

...any theory qualifies as a belligerent if it suggests that female sexuality and behavior are in some important sense linked to or determined by biological, physiological sexual nature, rather than culture and learning...

...Freudian analysts are not the only lackeys of the counterrevolution: social psychologists are in league with them, and sociologists too...

...and, although there are capsule histories of the suffrage movement, primitive practices, legal inequities, statistical material on industrialism, blacks, and work TRASHING PATRIARCHY ing-class women, Miss Millett's real subject is the ideology of patriarchal society in its Victorian manifestations...

...The Manson case is most interesting in this connection, as are, too, the history of the innumerable utopian communities that have flowered and died in our country...

...What can it be...

...What is only too clear in the year 1970 is the need felt by the publishing world for precisely this book on the women's issue, a "radical," "outspoken," "fearless," "uncompromising," "forthright," "militant" book, which "confronts" the facts of women's "exploitation...

...There may be a primordial ineradicable hostility between men and women...

...too many relations embittered, too many natural impulses poisoned or frayed...

...Need I add that the subject suffers from enormous neglect by feminists, who have yet to propose anything more original than free abortion, day-care centers, and sharing of housework...

...Much of its material and general drift is not only familiar, but even tired...

...How could this focus of revolutionary thought be missed by Miss Millett...

...Oh, there is a suggestion, not quite a proposal, more like a hinted fantasy, that the patriarchal family be abolished, but the fantasy doesn't go so far as to replace it with any other arrangement...

...Anyone who has read Miss Millett's book with moderate care would have difficulty discovering political or social ideas in it...

...7.95...

...and no matter how the theory is qualified, or however supported by whatever sort of evidence...

...That would of course require that men be seen as victimized too by the mythologizing of science...

...Motherhood and child-rearing are, of course, the vocational traps engineered by patriarchal oppressors, and are not to be taken seriously nor chosen freely...

...Miss Millett was of course under no obligation to go further than ideology, but I would have thought she'd surely want to...

...When feminists cite the innumerable women doctors and lawyers of Russia, they neglect to mention that the doctor's children have a very different, more rigid, inflexible schooling, that its form presupposes an earlier training of similar rigidity and control, that after school the children may be supervised by the doctor's old mother who lives with them and acts as concierge for the whole block of flats, exercising great authority accorded her by all the parents and the entire social milieu...

...A very great deal, it seems, as, in our modern way, we endow scientific hypotheses with moral meaning...

...A new sexual morality based on the ostensibly insatiable female sexuality would have to acknowledge inequality in a new disturbing way...

...And, lacking the kind of public sanction which the communal ideas enjoy elsewhere, they are forced to become internally far more authoritarian than anything ever attempted in the liberal "straight" society...

...Only ideology rouses her passion, and she moves to personify abstract forces with Hegelian audacity: "patriarchy" acts, advances, retreats, schemes, recovers, quite as if it were a person, as do "the ruling group," "the male oppressors," and the rest...

...a reversal of the double standard...

...Surely, it is worth noting that those representative spokesmen should reveal themselves to be more programmatically violent, "sexist," "exploitative" toward women than those whom the liberal culture would not defend, even as it liberates women...

...centuries of oppression are followed by a period of reform and sexual revolution between 1830 and 1930, to ' Sexual Politics, by Kate Millett, Doubleday & Co...

...Genet is thus assigned a crucial position in the landscape, because the homosexual world is seen as a parody of patriarchal sexual relations...

...The book opens with three intentionally shocking passages, from Henry Miller, Norman Mailer, and Jean Genet, which are used to illustrate the power alignment in sexual encounter...

...Why should Miss Millet have felt the need to "confront" psychoanalysis and the social sciences...

...When homosexual preoccupations with power and status are shown to caricature the sexuality we have all been led to believe is immutable, this seems to Miss Millett a convincing argument against it...

...that the claim is both made and honored is a fact often noted, and usually it is linked with certain facts about the decline of religion...

...Consequently, it can expose the factitious character of the sexual polarities upon which patriarchy depends for its strength...

...methodology is impure, research is tainted, everyone is on the barricades or up against the wall...

...Here it very much supplants that store of general knowledge, feeling, custom, and understanding, which is distinctive in older societies, all the natural feelings about what is important and how life should be lived, and how men and women should be...

...Lawrence and Miller certainly are a part of the liberal culture, or what the liberal culture wanted to protect and defend, although they are canonical by now, and Mailer has become part of the culture he was trying to affront...

...M M ISS MILLETT IS MORE INTERESTED in ideology than anything else and thus refuses to react directly to the scatological material she feels obliged to quote...

...The study began as the author's doctoral dissertation at Columbia...

...Clearly, if children are taken from their mothers and brought up in creches, schools, and day-care centers, they will be trained in a manner totally different than if educated in and by the family...

...The revolution is to be a cultural one, in both method and goal— sexual consciousness must be changed in order to achieve it, and, at the same time, the goal is a changed sexual consciousness...

...Psychoanalysts especially have been charged with general life guidance and moral authority...

...The second sexual revolution is ahead of us, led by women who because of their great alienation, their oppression, and their numbers, form the largest revolutionary base in society...

...If the children are to be cared for and helped and supervised in anything more than a custodial sense, if the household is to be maintained, with someone actually in charge, if the concept of "home" is to retain any significance, if the husband has any personal reality to the woman, if the job to be done or the education pursued makes any distinctive demands of its own, and if the physical environment and the health of everyone involved can be counted on—all of this requires executive talents, as well as available funds, energy, trained personnel who can exercise authority and be responsible enough to receive the power that is delegated, and so on...

...B B EYOND A PERFUNCTORY NOD in the direction of socialism, the feminist argument has nothing to say about how the future is to be assured or invented, or about more intermediate social and economic measures to alleviate conditions until the revolution arrives...

...This also seems too delicate a subject for the feminists...

...There is no doubt that psychoanalytic insight is often used for hostile and destructive purposes...

...She is more drawn toward adumbrating the connections between sex and violence, dirt, evacuation, murder, triumph, ordinary aggression, simple and complex brutality, and the network of power in which these themes appear in the writing of the "counterrevolutionaries...

...It seems virtually impossible for feminists to grant value to occupations, activities, or customs which concern women alone, so there is clearly some sort of impoverishment of possibility, not to speak of pleasure...

...Anyone who cares for human life and its continuance should refrain from further erosion of human feeling...

...So there is nothing very revolutionary offered about sexuality itself...

...Throughout her discussion Miss Millett quotes at length from writers who describe sexual activity and feelings in an explicit vocabulary which used to be proscribed but is now commonly displayed...

...In their place is a good deal of understandable animus, a lot of vindictiveness, incessant historical recapitulation, recourse to the statistics of oppression...

...Perhaps it is too revolutionary...

...But there seems to be little beyond the defensive and reactive ide ology, which may account for feminism's failure to appeal to black women, working class women, working women too busy to spend time tracking down "sexism," or older women...

...When the feminists make Freud their target, a kind of chief modern Satan, they are registering dimly the fact that something is wrong, but they are too caught up in belligerence to see the general cultural problem...

...If they wish to perpetuate the existing society, they attempt to insure the transmission of knowledge and power...

...In fact, its publishers would be performing a great public service if they were to withdraw it from circulation and donate the expenses of advertising, production, and editorial scrutiny to a fund for the education and training of disadvantaged women...

...Nor is there any other sort of sexual policy proposed, although Miss Millett is pleased to note the Masters and Johnson sexual studies, which seem to indicate a female sexual capacity far greater than the male's...

...Put differently, it was that same natural feeling, that authority, that achieved sense of life, which was rejected by all of our ancestors in order to come here, and which is repeatedly rejected, in every generation, by those who wish to embrace the liberal and ostensibly liberating culture...

...Some poorly informed women, perhaps inspired by the black churchmen, were led to attack the American Psychological Association and to demand millions of dollars in "reparations" for women whose possibilities had been stunted by psychology...

...What is the relation between the desire and presumed need for women's self-realization, and the social needs discerned from a different point of view...

...Miss Millett is tireless in tracing theoretical position to polemical will, and in seeing everyone but herself as culture SONYA RUDIKOFF bound...

...Furthermore, all of Miss Millett's criticisms of Freudian theory have already been made, by Freudians themselves, even the questioning of androcentrism and phallocentrism, by Ernest Jones, Gregory Zilborg, and others —and far enough back to be in Miss Millett's bibliography had she cared to be serious...

...Perhaps, then, it is the new mixture, the use of this familiar material to frustrate, deny, and extirpate sexual interest in the reader, rather than to excite it, as pornography does...

...Like the chief offenders of the patriarchal enemy, Miss Millett has only contempt for what women generally do, and her indictment of every historical version of the patriarchal family has blinded her to one of its important functions, often considered its great cultural contribution, that of being in effect the women's trade union...

...Still, when anything at all can be said, in print, in public, in private, nothing formerly thought shocking can be expected to shock...

...But that kind of equality may be too revolutionary for the feminists...

...These are the actors in a grand historical process which uses the nineteenth century, uses Freud, uses D. H. Lawrence, Miller, Mailer, and all other events or people as its locomotive roars toward the second sexual revolution...

...In this country the problem becomes an especially difficult one because we create ourselves anew with each generation, so in a sense no social change can be durable, no commonly shared ideals can be assumed to remain powerful long enough to reinforce social change...

...Nazi ideology, Communist ideology, Victorian, Freudian, modernist ideology of sexual liberation, "new conservative" ideology of the fifties, the ideology implied in sociology, social psychology, in statistical method, in the study of primates —pages and pages are devoted to the ideological analysis of ideology, indeed I should say the polemical analysis of ideology, buttressed by mockery, heavily ironic paraphrase, selective quotation...

...In fact, all that we have come to associate with sexuality seems to be taken by Miss Millett to be merely learned behavior, with the hint that such learning is of very recent date, and would be easily reversible if the male oppressors were not in charge...

...the audible voices are cacophonous, social bonds are fragile, social institutions so discontinuous that no resonance can be assumed...

...No intelligent person feels he can delegate anything to the public schools, mistrust is everywhere...

...Apparently not one of them realized that the APA was not the Ford Foundation...

...Engels plays the part of Virgil during this journey through the bleak forests of patriarchal history, until he is replaced by Genet, the French writer, homosexual, and former convict...

...This may have been foolish and misplaced, but isn't there a need for something sensible...

...Although variants of it have certainly been employed with notable effect on an individual level, and for purely private ends, it has not been made a political policy by the ostensibly revolutionary class or by their self-proclaimed vanguard...

...more revolutionary...

...Indeed, after such mockery, so much indictment, such analysis and explication and probing of attitudes, of implications, of ramifications, and reverberations of sexual attitudes of whole societies, throughout all of hideous patriarchal history—to come away with nothing more than "changed consciousness" is a bit of a swindle...

...This history and its details emerge from a perspective determined by the title and its all-embracing idea: the relations of men and women are seen as political in essence, as is the relation of women as a class to the rest of society...

...Miss Millett is fascinated by the intricacies of the psychology of power...

...National ideals are chaotic and self-contradictory...

...Sexual relations are not scrutinized for possibilities of reform, motherhood and child-rearing are virtually ignored, implications of extended or communal living arrangements not followed out, and women's education or vocational lives don't receive attention...

...She does not say why she was compelled to undertake it, but she seems to believe the effort was unique and difficult...

...For, we surely need something more than this review of ideology, which repeats so many earlier efforts, such as Simone de Beauvoir's, and far less brilliantly...

...Some very fearless speculation is required...

...As for the book itself, the argument pursues the history of patriarchal society in its subjugation of women...

...Miss Millett herself speaks of the "relatively uncharted, often even hypothetical territory" of her concern, of the "ambitious, often overwhelming" task...

...Despite her boldness of attack, her deliberately liberated use of the colloquial sexual vocabulary, her self-designated "ambitious" and "anomalous" undertaking, she is not at all radical, but, like many contemporary feminists, and many contemporary "radicals," her radicalism is confined to language and posture, to ideology...

...but Miss Millett chooses not to discuss this...

...Nor should we think that "how to live" is for us easier or more difficult than it was for Tolstoy, or for our forebears way back in more shadowy patriarchal history...

...Nothing more specific...

...Like blacks, colonials, Untouchables, the proletariat, and other low-caste groups, women are exploited, oppressed, manipulated, and controlled for the benefit of the ruling class—in this case, the male masters...

...the feminist activities SONYA RUDIKOFF involve "rap" sessions, decorative demon strations, invasion of offices, and, in journals like Rat, and elsewhere, lurid confessional material documenting the pernicious effects of male oppression...

...What really depresses and defeats a woman with professional goals and children who still need supervision, is not oppression of the master group, or discrimination, or patriarchical counterrevolutionary strategy, but simply the difficulty of meeting many responsibilities...

...indeed, most of the rhetoric of feminism is similarly innocent of ideas...

...How much more difficult for those who start with a grave handicap, whether it is ignorance, inadequate training, confused goals, insufficient physical or financial resources...

...Miss Millett says primly, "I have operated on the premise that there is room for a criticism which takes into account the larger cultural context in which literature is conceived and produced," but such somnolent ambition would not wake the echoes of the Hudson Valley...

...And revolutionary as well...

...And none of these examples is entirely successful...

...If we compare this with the situation in the kibbutz, the Russian schoolroom, the Chinese collective, to mention only a few of the countless attempts to reeducate a society by strictly controlling the education of the young, we can see that in our own society we do not have available that enormous force of public social sanction, achieved at great cost, which forms the support for introducing and maintaining social change, and we have nothing comparable...

...Only a very clear relation to goals and a good deal of energy and cash make this workable...

...No one needs to be reminded that patriarchy didn't begin with the Victorian age but long long before, with the wheel and stone implements...

...Instead, she fulminates against Freud, throws out hints about Marie Bonaparte's sex life, compares Erikson with the baboons, calls Talcott Parsons a quaint antique, and even seems to question the integrity of such scholars as Orville Brim...

...She makes no attempt to report on social fact, nor to present the results of any social analysis or investigation, and no original research into women's consciousness was undertaken...

...In America, from the very beginning, there was a bleakness, a harshness about the emotional landscape, and at a time when new demographic and social patterns were being revealed...

...There may also be much of the truth of marriage and motherhood which has not been revealed, perhaps cannot be, possibly should not be, at least in writing...

...When equality is the goal, and the absence of equality is traced to cultural conditioning and oppression, this leads quite in the opposite direction from any useful political or social advance...

...We have nothing like it really, except perhaps in small isolated communities, or, fleetingly, in the sanctions observed in types of street life that lane Jacobs saw before its decline...

...Miss Millett's own contribution is tirelessness, heavy irony, a mocking, derisive, often brutal style of comment, a habit of tendentious paraphrase, and an addiction to ad hominem argument that is so "fearless" as almost to invite legal scrutiny...

...it offers no new research, argument, or proposals, nor is it an imaginative essay like the famous ones of Virginia Woolf and Simone de Beauvoir, nor a valuable investigation, like The Captive Wife by the late Hannah Gavron...

...The method is employed especially in the analysis of Freudian theories about female sexual temperament, and of post-Freudian ideas and psychological research...

...attitudes toward female sexuality and temperament suggest some of these ambiquities, but Miss Millett reacts blindly...

...the radical change alluded to is one of consciousness primarily, as in Charles Reich's ruminations...

...Given the feminist views of sexual life, it is surprising that none of them suggests even half-seriously the adoption of a Lysistrata policy, that is, using sexual power for political ends...

...It isn't much to go on, for longer than a demonstration or a book...

...Group marriage...

...Miss Millett's interest is largely Victorian, however...

...Other proposals that lend themselves to more realization are not entertained by Miss Millett or other feminists...

...Genet's message of revolutionary transformations of sexuality is what she chooses to end with...

...Feminist disdain has, for many women, interfered with the discovery that to take care of one's own children is not only necessary, and desirable for the children, but is as fascinating and rewarding as any research project, that managing an involved household is far more interesting than managing an office, that cooking or sewing require greater skill and provide more pleasure than planning curriculum meetings or figuring out stock options or dictating letters or writing up briefs or countless other tasks for which women are to be liberated...