Up Against the Men's Room Wall

SEXUAL POLITICS by Kate Mtltett. 393 pages. Doub/eday. $7.95.

First, a short radical-awareness test. Fill the blank spaces in the following statements:

1) What do those want, anyhow?

2) There are good and bad ,

just like anyone else.

3) have often been guests in my

home.

4) I'm not prejudiced; in fact, my children were even brought up by .

If you filled in the word Negroes or blacks, you flunk. Please accept a year's supply of condescending smiles. But if you wrote "women," or even "females," you are right on, grooved, with it, Queen for a Day.

Pipe and Slippers. For if it has not already happened at your house, braless converts to the Women's Liberation Movement are poised to leap right off the panels of the TV talk shows and play hell with your pipe and slippers. Sooner or later they will probably be armed with a copy of Kate Millett's Sexual Politics. Despite placards and slogans, revolutions need theoretical touchstones, dialectics to subdue the opposition. In this regard, Sexual Politics will have its uses. Without making explicit comparisons with other contemporary movements, Millett attempts to place Women's Lib in the roiling main currents of the struggle for human rights. In effect, she translates the war of the sexes from the language of 19th century bedroom farce into the raw images of guerrilla warfare. What emerges from her pages is a vision in which men constitute a colonial power that exploits and suppresses the aspirations of women by whatever means necessary. . Although Millett modestly claims that her theory of sexual politics is "tentative and imperfect," it moves with the inexorable certainty of a long, lumbering freight train. It is full of strategically selected references to history, sociology, psychology, sexology, biology and literature. The material is written and assembled like a collection of incomplete Ph.D. treatises; the scholarship is carefully but forcefully tailored to prove her thesis.

A 36-year-old American sculptor and active New York feminist who graduated with honors from the University of Minnesota and Oxford, Millett views male supremacy as a myth that has been kept alive for thousands of years by a grandiose patriarchal conspiracy. "Primitive society," she writes, "practices its misogyny in terms of taboo and mana which evolve into explanatory myth. In historical cultures, this is transformed into ethical, then literary, and in the modern period, scientific rationalizations for the sexual politic."

The worst enemies are those who are thought to maintain their power and prerogatives with self-deluding and unctuous paternalism. Millett singles out 19th century chivalry, particularly as it is enshrined in the works of Tennyson and Ruskin. Like other feminist writers, Millett views such legends of feminine evil as Pandora's Box and the fall from Eden as basic instruments of patriarchal power. The etiquette of courtly and romantic love is also interpreted as a male method of emotionally manipulating and exploiting women, "since love is the only circumstance in which the female is (ideologically) pardoned for sexual activity."

Millett joins Simone de Beauvoir and Betty Friedan in attacking the paternal Dr. Freud. She echoes their arguments that his theories about female sexual maladjustment failed to distinguish adequately between biological and cultural causes. But she fails to grapple productively with the frighteningly complex and semantically booby-trapped matter of the ways in which culture and biology modify one another. Elsewhere, she endorses the studies by Masters and Johnson of the female orgasm in order to demolish further the badly shattered Victorian myth that women have less sexual potential than men. But Millett the scholar and Millett the revolutionary cannot be separated. On the basis of discoveries that women have a theoretically inexhaustible capacity for multiple orgasms, she considers that the male-imposed institution of marriage, whether monogamous or polygamous, interferes with the achievement of women's sexual fulfillment.

Millett also applies her theories of sexual politics to literature, with not totally surprising results. D.H. Lawrence demonstrates male chauvinism through his quasi-religious cult of phallus worship. Henry Miller's sexual power fantasies, though honest in their hostility toward women, reflect a pathetic neurosis. Norman Mailer is "a prisoner of the virility cult" and a sexual "archconservative" to whom the bed is an existential battleground for the greater glory of the patriarchy. The best expression of sexual politics, Millett argues, is the work of the French homosexual Jean Genet. "Lawrence, Miller and Mailer," she says, "identify woman as an annoying minority force to be put down and are concerned with a social order in which the female would be perfectly controlled. Genet, however, has integrated her into a vision of drastic social upheaval where her ancient subordination can produce explosive force."

It is in these literary essays that Millett's seriousness and passionate discontent are most strongly felt. The force of the blows will undoubtedly come as a surprise to most men and to a good many women. The army of those already punch-drunk from the arguments of numerous protest movements will undoubtedly shrug them off. Nice guys, who volunteer to wash the dishes and change the baby, may feel an inkling of what it must have been like for a moderate Southerner caught between protest and bigotry for the past 15 years. There will always be a few, however, who may want to invite Millett outside to settle the question of Women's Liberation in a manly manner.

sbR.Z.S.

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