Part 1 can be found here.and a PDF of the whole talk is available here (137Kb PDF file).

Transcribed from video to be found at http://www.themonthly.com.au/key-thinkers-sheila-jeffreys-kate-millett-p2-1563

Contributing to the Key Thinkers seminar series at the University of Melbourne, radical feminist scholar Sheila Jeffreys talks about the influence of Kate Millett on the course of feminist thinking, most particularly through her book Sexual Politics (1970). Jeffreys gives a summary of the key ideas of Millett's work and goes on to propose the greater-than-ever need to apply these ideas to society today.

WARNING: This presentation contains language that may offend some viewers.

University of Melbourne, March 2009

The religion of phallus worship that Lawrence promotes is important in the work of Sigmund Freud too, and Millett goes into some detail on the work of Sigmund Freud which we’ll look at later.

Millett looks next at the work of Henry Miller, who was also very fond of the c word and the f word. In the book Sexus, he was obviously doing what’s called by his publishers ‘breaking down the sexual barriers’. And these sexual barriers are broken down through the explicit description of the sexual degradation of a woman. In this novel, in the bits that Millett quotes at the beginning of the novel, the hero grabbed his hostess as she brought him towels for his bath. “It happened so quickly that she didn’t have time to rebel or even pretend to rebel”, in other words this is sexual assault, that’s another word for it. “He swiftly had her in the tub, stockings and all”. And this is the way that Ida’s behaviour is described – “She was just like a bitch in heat, biting me all over, panting, gasping, wriggling like a worm on the hook”. As a finale, he made her stand up, bend over then “I let her have it from the rear”. The script is quite straightforwardly pornographic – he wrote loads of these books – the woman is not really human, and she’s manipulated for the man’s excitement. Miller writes “She had a small juicy cunt which fitted me like a glove”, and, for a finale, the hero sadistically assaults her. “I bit,” he says “I bit the nape of her neck, the lobes of her ears, the sensitive spot on her shoulder, and as I pulled away I left the mark of my teeth on her beautiful white arse – not a word spoken”, and this is because she’s not really a fully human person who’s in any kind of relationship of equality with him.

Millett dissects the text very expertly, and she shows the cruelty that it contained, behaviour which I think would elsewhere be called sexual assault. The woman is treated as a servant, she is grabbed, she is forced into sexual use, but she is immediately avid for the abuse, and that is of course the timeless motif of pornography: the women are assaulted, but they love it, or they love it very quickly after the first minute. So in this period there was not much public pornography around, but these books served as [pornography] for the left intelligentsia of that period, this was their pornography, this is what they were reading and expecting the women who were having relationships with them to also read at that time, if they were sexually free and sexual liberals.

Now Millett explains that the action is directed at a male reader, and it’s intended to cause him excitement from the exercise of masculine power. He gains, she says, a nearly supernatural sense of power. And she says that this description is a case of sexual politics at the fundamental level of copulation. And as Millett points out, Miller’s attitudes towards women, his hatred and contempt, are revealed very clearly in the way that women are described in the novels. Women are usually presented as non-human animals (in the novels) that are disgusting. He’s horrified by women who show a sexual response in particular and if they show a sexual response they are described as disgusting non-human animals. He says “the dirty bitches, they like it” and Millett says clinical, fastidious, horrified and amused to record how one responded squealing like a pig, another like a crazed animal, one gibbered, another crouched on all fours like a she-animal, quivering and whinnying whilst another specimen was so deep in heat she was like a bright, voracious animal, an elephant walking the ball. Miller explains elsewhere that he used sexual intercourse in order to relieve tensions, and this is his language, his words – “during intercourse, they” – that is tensions – “passed out of me as though I were emptying refuse in a sewer”. [laughs wryly] These were the sexual revolutionaries, the heroes of their time.

These days for that sort of language you might be able to tell this in discussion, but I suspect that you would have to go to what’s actually called pornography now rather than high literature, but I’m not sure about that – there may be supposedly high literature that still has those sorts of sentiments in it, and I just  - I don’t actually read any literature by men at the present moment and haven’t for many years, so I wouldn’t know. But please do tell me! I mean, once you’ve had enough of this stuff you think “ah I can’t be bothered”, you know, why would I carry on with this?

Millett explains that “Miller gave voice to certain sentiments that masculine culture had long experienced but carefully suppressed”, and these were “the yearning to effect a complete depersonalization of woman into cunt”. Now this level of misogyny is evident in the work of the other sex novelists that she analyses here. She has a quote at the beginning of the book from Norman Mailer’s An American Dream – apparently Norman Mailer is somebody who moved from being a darling of the left to a darling of the right, so he made a journey, but at this time he was a darling of the left. An American Dream is about a college professor who has just murdered his wife and he’s sexually abusing his German maid at the time of this quote. He decides to bugger the maid against her will, because he finds the smell of her anus particularly fascinating. And she’s described in this piece as a kind of sewer rat, and these are his words here:

a thin high constipated smell (a smell which spoke of rocks and grease and the sewer-damp of wet stones in poor European alleys) came needling its way out of her. She was hungry, like a lean rat she was hungry, and it could have spoiled my pleasure except that there was something intoxicating in the sheer narrow pitch of the smell, so strong, so stubborn, so private, it was a smell which could be mellowed only by the gift of furs and gems. (Mailer quoted in SP p.11)

So he’s trying to construct an idea of her – also in the book it says that because she was German and this was post-war it was quite reasonable to treat her in this way because she represented Nazism, so that was OK. Now anal penetration is an important method, as I say, in all of these novels of teaching lessons to women and establishing men’s power in these novels, as it is in the pornography industry today. If you have any interest in pornography today – hopefully not – but if you go onto pornography websites you will see that a very large proportion of it is about anal sex, often double anal, often anal rape by large groups of men and so on, so anal penetration is absolutely central to pornography today and what I want to say here today is that this is not new. If we understand what was going on in these novels by these left intelligentsia in the 60s, we can see all of those values now in the pornography of today.

Kate Millett then goes on – she has in the centre of the book a section which she calls ‘notes towards a theory of patriarchy’ where she sets up what she sees as the cultural and political context which allows these novels to be written in the way that they are. She describes this central section of Sexual Politics as a ‘sketch, which might be described as “notes towards a theory of patriarchy”, will attempt to prove that sex is a status category with political implications” (SP, p.24). In the first part of the sketch, she describes the great challenges to patriarchy that were created by the women’s movement of the 19th century up to 1930, and she looks at the work of John Stuart Mill and John Ruskin, Marx and Engels and Oscar Wilde and so on. In the second section from 1930 she looks at what she describes as the reaction of counter revolution against the advances that had been made in women’s status, and here she looks at the reactionary models of womanhood of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, she looks at what she calls the reaction in ideology that came from male intellectuals and academics as they sought to justify women’s inferior status and attack feminism. And of course her first, and major target is Sigmund Freud.  She goes on also of course to criticise post-Freudians as she calls them, such as the popularizer of Freud Marie Bonaparte, the evolutionary psychologist Lionel Tyger – Lionel Tyger is one of my favourite evolutionary psychologists and his book was called Men in Groups and he talks about men’s behaviour coming from animals and so on, so lovely that he’s called Lionel Tyger and his name’s actually one of these more manly animals so that’s lucky for him [laughter] – you know, if he was Lionel Spider it might’ve been harder to have the academic reputation that he had. And functionalist sociologists such as Talcott Parsons she has a go at as well. Now she says such people created what she calls the ‘vast grey stockades of the sexual reaction’. She identified Freudianism as one of the most important forces in the creation of the permissive cultural context in which the woman-hating of the cultural agents could be displayed and understood as progressive.

I’ll just say something here about what Millett has to say about Freud. I think her analysis of Freud is probably the best in feminist literature, it’s the strongest and clearest. But she is in a long tradition of feminist theorists who have pointed out the importance of Freud’s work in creating an anti-woman ideology. The first was Viola Klein, who is not much known today. She wrote two PhD theses, one in literature in Prague before she had to leave before the second world war – she had to leave in 1938, and her parents perished. When she got to London she did another thesis and this became the book that was published in 1946 called The Feminine Character, and in there she looks at Freud, she looks at Havelock Ellis the sexologist, and she does wonderful analyses of their anti-woman ideologies. Klein was excluded from the masculine academy and she only achieved an academic job at the University of Reading in sociology in 1964, nine years before her death at the age of 65. So she’s yet another one of these women who did write very remarkable work but was not recognised for it. Of course then Simone de Beauvoir also took on Freud’s work with considerable authority in The Second Sex in 1949 – she does a good job. In 1970, the same year as Millett’s work was published, Freud’s ideology on women was analysed by a British feminist, Eva Figes, in her book Patriarchal Attitudes.

Now what was astonishing was in 1974 Freud was rehabilitated by a famous socialist feminist of that time called Juliet Mitchell. It was a huge shock to feminists that she did this – nobody could understand what was going on because of the whole history of feminism had been saying Freud was crucial to the fight against women, crucial, fundamental, and then she goes and writes this book in which she tries to rehabilitate him and says he’s very useful really for feminism, the book’s Psychoanalysis and Feminism. And actually what was happening was that Freud, when he was talking about penis envy and so on, it was all just symbolic really, he didn’t actually mean it, he didn’t mean the words as they appear on the paper, and that’s often said about male scholars when women are trying to rehabilitate them and say something nice about them – “don’t be so crude as to imagine that they meant the actual words on the page – they meant something much different and now I can use them and quote them and actually get a position in the academy because I’m quoting men and that’s OK cos I’ve made them OK”. [laughter] And that’s very important because if you quote people like Kate Millett and Viola Klein you are not going to get anywhere. Usually.

I should just say that Freud is now a psychoanalytic ... feminism is supposed to be an aspect of postmodern feminism or whatever – it’s still going on, all this rehabilitation, it’s still out there. If we want to talk about Freud later I’m very happy to in more detail, but Millett offers no excuses for the anti-woman [ideology] of Freud. She doesn’t try to say he really meant something else. She takes Freud at his word. And she classifies him as one of a number of new prophets that arrived on the scene between 1930 and 1960 in reaction against the upheavals of the first wave of feminism before and after the first world war. And these prophets, she says, worked to clothe the old doctrine of the separate spheres – that is, for men and women – in the fashionable language of science. Freud argued that women should fulfil their biological destiny and not go out to work, of course, and he said that the urge to move into the professions and the public world stemmed from penis envy and if you wanted to go into the professions you had a masculinity complex and so on and so on.

I thought we should have a little bit of description from Freud – just famous bits that you already know very well – he said that girls were shocked by their first sight of a penis when they were young. This is what he says, and you may be thinking “is that really so?”:

They notice the penis of a brother or a playmate, strikingly visible and of large proportions [LAUGHTER – SJ: it’s symbolic!] at once recognise it as the superior counterpart of their own small and inconspicuous organ. And from that time forward fall prey to envy for the penis.

Now this has always puzzled me because there must be some little girls who never even see a penis at that time, not until they are perhaps grown up and therefore how are they going to get all the complexes they’re supposed to have? But apparently they’ve got to see one, it should be at about seven years old, and – um – I don’t know what happens if they miss it. [LAUGHTER] Now, as a result of seeing it they realise they suffer from a serious lack in not having such an organ and they live their whole life in envy of it. They can only be comforted for their loss by the birth of a baby as a substitute, preferably a boy baby who would carry – and Freud says – “the longed-for penis with him”. Right, so they’re able to give birth to a penis and then they’ve got a penis thank goodness. Millett said that Freud constructed a psychology of women as passive, masochistic and narcissistic based on this lack of the penis. But she sensibly asks why the little girl should consider the penis as a superior organ at all, let alone be in awe of it. She asks why the girl does not – quote – “imagine the penis is an excrescence and take her own body as norm”. Now that seems perfectly reasonable to me – why doesn’t the little girl go “eurghhh! You’ve got bits of your insides hanging on your outsides”, right? Why doesn’t she do that? But apparently she doesn’t. She’s in awe.

As Millett points out, Freud deliberately and determinedly bypasses the more straightforward explanations of women’s psychological woes that he looks at, which are that they live under patriarchy, that they’re undermined from the moment of their birth and taught an inferior status and they’re not allowed to fulfil their potential, and all of those things which can well account for the sort of problems in the women that he was dealing with, perhaps more easily than the penis, which they may indeed never have seen, it seems to me.

I think that my favourite witticism of Freud’s, which actually she doesn’t mention – I used to teach Freud so I have sort of pages and pages of his witticisms, and the one I like best is the explanation as to why women knit. And the explanation as to why women knit is they need to knit thicker pubic hair to hide their lack. [LAUGHTER] No, seriously. But of course it’s all symbolic and therefore we don’t need to worry about it. But what interests me is that these days we’ve got men taking up knitting – there’s quite a few young men taking up knitting, and they do not have a lack ... or they may do, but probably not. So I think defeat this idea, defeat it, and roll on more male knitters, I say.

Reading Sexual Politics, it seems very clear that the woman-hating ideas Millett analyses in the books of the 60s male novelists are now the stock in trade of the burgeoning pornography industry. When Millett wrote the book, pornography was still an underground industry which the male leaders of the counter culture and the sexual revolution were struggling to de-repress. And the de-repression that they achieved – getting rid of censorship laws in the 60s was crucial to the development of the pornography industry. They created that foundation with this work in the 60s. Millett’s comment on the woman-hating sex novels of that time in the 60s is very apt, I think, to express the effect of the subsequent unleashing of the pornography industry. In relation to Henry Miller she wrote: “to provide unlimited scope for masculine aggression, although it may finally bring the situation out into the open, will hardly solve the dilemma of our sexual politics”. Now that unlimited scope for masculine aggression, I suggest, is exactly what the pornography industry is today and that’s very clear in its scale and scope and content – that’s what we now have as a massively profitable industry. When she was writing though the VCR had not been invented, Deep Throat the movie was not released until 1973 – I think you’re probably aware of what happens in that movie ... Linda Lovelace Marciano, a woman with clear bruises upon her body from the handiwork of her violent pimp husband, who always had a gun with him on the sets, swallows a penis whole on the premise that her clitoris was in her throat. Now this was seen as the movie that democratized porn, and in fact you will see today  - and I have seen in girls’ magazines for teenage girls – instructions on how to swallow the penis whole – this is magazines aimed at girls who are about 14 years old. So, you know, this pornographic revolution has been enormously infective in constructing sexual ideas and constructing how sex is supposed to happen. But back then, in the 1960s and in 1970, porn was still understood as the preserve of socially inadequate men in raincoats who frequented dirty movie theatres. There were no videos at that time. But the ideas that Kate Millett looks at in these novels are, I would suggest, the lentils and potatoes (remember I’m a vegetarian) of the hugely profitable contemporary global pornography industry, which is so normalized now that it’s creating big changes in the ways that children relate to each other, viz the craze for sexting with children sending each other in school photographs of their own genitals, to their extreme harm in years to come because the photographs of these girls’ genitals can be put on the internet at any time and they’re unlikely to get the job in the law firm they might have wanted. But at 14, none of this is understood. The values of pornography are unchanged from those Millett analyses.

 Now let’s just have a think about the size and worth of the pornography industry in the present and the extent to which it has been mainstreamed into the day to day business of major corporations – entertainment, fashion, music industries and so on. The industry is now covered seriously in the business pages of newspapers, pornography companies such as Beate Uhse from Germany are listed on the stock exchange, the big mainstream pornography distribution companies have considerable incomes. Playboy earned, or at least it said it earned, because there may be more that they are hiding, $330,100,000 in 2006, Beate Uhse from Germany earned $271 million. Now the sexual ideology of the industry is identical to that of the revolutionary left intelligentsia of the 60s – the obsession with anal sex, with scatalogical language, with women as prostitutes, desperate to receive violent punishment from men, and I thought I’d just read you a review of one porn movie, a fairly representative porn movie from the website of Adult Video News which is the online magazine of the US porn industry and they review new movies every month and they tell you what’s in them and what is good about them – they’re for the distributors and the sellers. In this particular movie, and let’s compare it with the novels we’ve been thinking about, a woman has two or three penises at one time shoved into her mouth, her vagina and anus, and is at times subjected to two penises in her anus and it’s described in the review thus: “Cock crazed Audrey is lighting up the room to critical mass levels with her blinding nuclear strength energy taking multiple man hammers, two and three at a time in her mouth, cunt and ass for the better part of a very sweaty hour. ‘Goddam fill me up like a fucking fuck whore’ she roars to one and all” – you see you’ve got to have the cunt word in there, you’ve got to have the fuck word in there – “the depraved blast furnace heat making her heavy make up run down her pretty face all Alice Cooper like. Audrey even sets a supposed new porn record” – such records being dubious at best – “for length of time doing continuous double anal – 18 minutes, breaking Melissa Lauren’s old 17 minute mark”. Now in fact the movie will be about an hour but it will take about 12 hours to make and of course the woman is having to take painkillers, she’ll have had to have an enema beforehand, she’ll have various drugs to dissociate from what is going on and so on, because that is how pornography is made.

Millett argues in Sexual Politics that the woman-hating sex rants of the 60s were a response to the changing relationship between the sexes. And following that logic we would have to understand the extraordinary vigour of the pornography industry today as a response to the considerable advances that women have now made. It’s not simply the pornography industry today that is actually encompassing these values – there is still a powerful industry of sexology and sex therapy which is promoting these sorts of anti-woman values in sex, and they’re very very influential within Australian culture at the moment. I thought, since we are pretty much at the end, I might mention to you somebody who’s been seen as very positive by an Australian editorial, which is Bettina Arndt and her book The Sex Diaries. Bettina Arndt was Australian editor of that important propaganda tool of the sexual revolution, Forum magazine in Australia from 1973. So she’s from this time period, that’s where she got her ideas, she is now promoting these ideas in a book in 2009. Arndt tells women women are the problem apparently, she says that she got people to keep these diaries and found that men have a terribly hard time of it – they didn’t get enough sex, women kept sort of turning off the tap and not allowing them access, not allowing them to ‘paddle their canoes’ I think was one of the extraordinary images in there. And the men became very very very unhappy, and the women have to keep those men happy so she says women have to ‘just do it’ – those are her words, like the Nike slogan – ‘just do it’. They need to allow their male partners to penetrate them despite their extreme reluctance and in some cases repugnance. You should read the descriptions of the unwanted sex in that book by women, but she totally discounts – they talk about slime dripping down their legs, they talk about the pain, it’s horrendous the descriptions of how much they hate the unwanted sex – but she says they have to do it. She says for the sake of their men they need to reconfigure their minds – it’s fascinating that women talk about reconfiguring their minds which is very similar to what prostituted women have to do, making a separation between mind and body so that they’re able to suffer the violation. She tells ordinary married women that they need to reconfigure their minds and overcome the pain and discomfort of unwanted sex. If they reconfigure their minds and they’re somewhere else I guess it would be possible for it to happen. The book has been – it was published by Melbourne University Press – it’s obviously an important book [laughter] and there has been great acclaim for this book which represents these rather unfortunate values.

Now Kate believed that the feminist movement which was burgeoning when the book was published in 1970 would sweep away this kind of misogyny. In fact the opposite has taken place. The misogynists won. And a massive global industry of pornography embodying precisely the sexual ideology these men promoted is now worth billions of dollars for corporations and for organised crime. In the postscript to her book, Millett comments on the feminist movement that’s growing in the US at that time. Encouraged by its strength and vigour she comments as the very last line of her book:

It may be that we may even be able to retire sex from the harsh realities of politics, but not until we have created a world that we can bear out of the desert we inhabit.

Which I think is a very nice sentiment for right now, because we have not created that world, and I think the situation is in many ways in relation to the construction of sexuality enormously more critical than when this book was written. And I’ll leave it there for now, thank you.

I'm in the process of transcribing some audio and video material which may be useful as a reference and for those who prefer to access this stuff in written form. The first is from a talk Professor Sheila Jeffreys gave in 2009 at the University of Melbourne on Kate Millett. The talk is about an hour long and is split into two videos, therefore the transcription will be posted in two parts with links to the original video. I have done my best to record Sheila's words faithfully, but it is not always easy when working from audio material to work out where quotes from other writers start and end, so any errors in the transcription of quotes (or indeed any other kinds of errors) are entirely my fault.

PDF of both parts 1 and 2 (137Kb)

So here follows a transcription from the video available at http://www.themonthly.com.au/key-thinkers-sheila-jeffreys-kate-millett-1564

Contributing to the Key Thinkers seminar series at the University of Melbourne, radical feminist scholar Sheila Jeffreys talks about the influence of Kate Millett on the course of feminist thinking, most particularly through her book Sexual Politics (1970). Jeffreys gives a summary of the key ideas of Millett's work and goes on to propose the greater-than-ever need to apply these ideas to society today.

WARNING: This presentation contains language that may offend some viewers.

University of Melbourne, March 2009

[Applause] Thanks everybody for coming, and I think what it means is that there is more enthusiasm for Kate Millett now in 2009 than I thought there might be so that’s absolutely terrific.

I just wanted to start off by saying why I’m doing this lecture, why I chose Kate Millett, why I offered her for this lecture. Sexual Politics is really important to me because it’s the book that made me a feminist. There was already a feminist movement going on in America before 1970 when the book was first published – not much in Britain, where I was at that time – but it was reading that book that made me a feminist and if you talk to other women from that time, it made thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of women feminists at that time. So it’s a very, very important book. It’s not just a book of theory, it’s a book that created and helped to create a movement.

Now, I was a student at the height of what has been seen as, or what has been called the sexual revolution of the late 1960s. I tried hard to be liberal at that time and live up to the new values about sex that were around at that time – I did my very best. [laughter] Then I read Sexual Politics. I was teaching in a girls’ boarding school in 1971 – I wasn’t a trained teacher, I just, you could in those days, you could just go and teach. And as soon as it was published in the UK I took it into the discussion group that the headmistress asked me to set up. It was a sixth form discussion group in the lounge, with chintz armchairs and I was running a discussion group there every week, and I read Sexual Politics and I went straight in the next day and I said “girls – this is the book that we have to talk about”. So it was pretty exciting for me and pretty exciting for them – I was sort of communicating it directly.

When I re-read the book today, what  strikes me is that it has not aged or become in any way really out of date. There are some books that you read from that period like Shulamith Firestone’s The Dialectic of Sex, a lot of which is out of date, it really doesn’t fit now. But that’s not the case with Sexual Politics. The ideas seem not only fresh, but crystal clear compared with the great muddying of feminist messages that has come out of the academy in the forty years since it was published. I realised that the basis of my feminist thinking is in the book, and it’s expressed with a confidence that today would be called anti-sex, incorrect, totalizing, essentializing, ahistorical and the host of other terms that are used to traduce radical feminists today.

The reason I offered to speak about this book is not just because of its political importance, but also because I consider it quite unreasonable that Kate Millett’s work is generally excluded from the canon of significant social theorists. She’s unlikely to feature in collections or on university courses. I consulted a website on social theory which listed thirty-two thinkers, of whom only one was a woman, and that was Harriet Martineau, 19th century economist. I looked at who was included in some recent significant readers on social theory – Readings in Social Theory: the classic tradition to postmodernism contained thirty-seven pieces, only two by women, the sociologist Dorothy Smith and the theorist Michele Barrett from the UK, but there were no radical feminists at all, certainly not Kate Millett, although she’s arguably a lot more famous than the women who are included. And then there was Social Theory: a history edited by Alex Callinicos which has no women mentioned in the contents, only men. Then there was Social Theory: the multicultural and classic readings in 1998 – quite a few women – about a dozen out of the many dozens of male thinkers, but none are radical feminists. There’s no Andrea Dworkin, no Mary Daly, no Catharine MacKinnon, no Kate Millett. Despite the very very considerable importance of these thinkers and their ideas, they are quite completely excluded.

Now I realise that the key thinkers offered in this [Key Thinkers] series are rather idiosyncratic and they reflect the thinking of those who have offered them, rather than this series itself. But I think the question of how thinkers enter the canon, and make it into the ranks of social theorists or political philosophers of significance is a very important one. We need to understand how Kate Millett, as well as other radical feminist theorists, get left out. And it isn’t an accident, I think, but there are workings of power in the exclusion of these women from the ranks of social theorists.

I want to talk about the importance of the book at the time that it was published. Sexual Politics was out of print during the 1990s, which shows its lack of importance you could say during that period, although it is possible to acquire it now and indeed I think there are some copies [here]. Yet in 1970 the book provided an extraordinary shock to the system of male domination – a shock that’s been largely forgotten today. Radical feminist theorist Andrea Dworkin wrote of the book: “the world was sleeping and Kate Millett woke it up”. Betty Friedan had written about the problem that had no name ... Kate Millett named it, illustrated it, exposed it, analysed it. And Dworkin says “I cannot think of anyone who accomplished what Kate Millett did with this one book – it remains the alpha and omega of the women’s movement. Everything that feminists have done is foreshadowed, predicted or encouraged by Sexual Politics”. And I have to say, I agree with that.

Now the most significant thing that Millett did in this book was to politicize sex. The male sexual liberals of the 1960s, who she looks at in this book, and that I grew up with, proclaimed that the problem with sex was simply that sexual freedom had been repressed. There was no criticism of the way sexuality was constructed. The alternative press of the late 60s in London such as Oz, International Times, presented innumerable photos of naked women and promoted pornography as vital to sexual and somehow also  political freedom. The male novelists whose work was being rescued from censorship such as DH Lawrence, or published for the first time like Miller and Genet, were seen as warriors for sexual freedom against the fuddy-duddy forces of prudery and conservatism. Sex was not seen as political – only the repression of it. Sex itself was seen as natural, biological and wholly good.

Millett delivered a scathing feminist critique of this self-serving masculine folly. She showed that the subordination of women is powerfully constructed through and in acts of penile penetration of women. And she pointed out that sex is not natural, but politically formed out of and in support of male domination. In the book she examines the way that sexual intercourse in various forms is written about by the self-proclaimed sexual revolutionary novelists of the 60s, to demonstrate the power politics that they express. And she explains what she’s going to be looking at here – she says: “coitus can scarcely be said to take place in a vacuum, although of itself it appears a biological and physical activity, it is set so deeply within the larger context of human affairs that it serves as a charged microcosm of the variety of attitudes and values to which culture subscribes. Among other things it may serve as a model of sexual politics on an individual or personal plane”. And this understanding of the political construction of sexuality inspired my work on the history and politics of sexuality.

In relation to the title of the book – Sexual Politics – she explains “many would find it hard to see the relationship between the sexes in a political light at all”. I don’t know whether that is true now, but I suspect there are still many who would fail to see that it is political. But she however defines the term politics as referring to power structured relationships, arrangements whereby one group of persons is controlled by another, and patriarchy she identifies as one of these. And she states that the situation between the sexes is one of dominance and subordination which has created a most ingenious form of interior colonization, that is inside the head. Meaning that women often cannot see that they are oppressed because they are fully acculturated to that oppression, and may even defend the interests of the men who are their masters. Sexual dominion, she argues, is perhaps the most pervasive ideology of our culture and provides its most fundamental concept of power.

I’ll say something about the background of Kate Millett and where she was coming from and what she did in her life before I go back to the book in more detail. She came from an Irish-American family – her mother was a dramatist, the family were strongly political and aligned with the left. In the 1960s she was involved in the anti-war and civil rights politics in the US – and many feminists who created second wave feminism in the US were involved in civil rights politics – that was the real crucible of the construction of feminism. In the mid 1960s she joined the newly reborn women’s movement and she joined the National Organisation for Women. So she had a few years of experience of feminism before this book came out, she was working out her ideas. She was 36 when it was published. It was her PhD, so she was writing this PhD, which was in literary theory, in her early 30s. She was an artist, and she was married at the time to a Japanese sculptor. Her life at this time is documented in her third book, which is called Flying, in 1974, where she writes about the political turmoil of that time, about coming out as a lesbian, her relationship with her husband, what the politics were meaning – it’s a very exciting book, I have to say. She was a lesbian before her marriage, she became one again during the heady feminism of those times in which lesbianism was understood as a way of uniting the personal and the political, and was seen as progressive, and feminism in action. In the late 80s she explained that her husband constituted her only loving relationship with a man. She published a memoir about a lesbian relationship she had after her marriage in 1977, Sita, in which she details her emotional suffering in that unequally balanced affair. And both Flying and Sita were compulsory reading for feminists like myself in the 1970s who were also choosing a lesbian life in consonance with our politics. I chose to be a lesbian in 1977 under the same sorts of influences that had affected Kate Millett. Now when Kate Millett came out publicly about what she called her bisexuality, immediately after the publication of Sexual Politics, it caused a huge stir in the media. Feminists of course came out marching in her support and what happened was that heterosexual feminists wore badges saying that they were lesbians on the grounds that they mustn’t let the lesbians in the movement be picked off and isolated – so it was a very strong sort of solidaristic move on the part of heterosexual feminists at that time. All feminists, it was reasoned, should be prepared to say that they are lesbians, to be assumed to be lesbians, in fact in the 70s a badge that we were all wearing said “how dare you presume I’m heterosexual” and that was also on posters in everybody’s kitchens: it was everywhere.

Her only other book apart from those three that’s specifically concerned with feminist issues was called The Prostitution Papers and that was published in 1973. I used Millett’s insights from that book about prostitution on the first page of my new book The Industrial Vagina, so important was her framing of the issue of prostitution at that time. She wrote that prostitution was paradigmatic, somehow the very core of the female’s condition, and reduced women to cunt. Feminists in the 1960s and 70s understood prostitution to be a hangover from traditional male dominant societies, and they understood that it would disappear with the advance of women’s equality. It was as Millett put it a “living fossil”, and old form of slave relations still existing in the present. Her book is a swingeing feminist critique of the harmful practice of prostitution consisting of interviews, two of which were with women in prostitution.

Now in the meantime since the publication of that book, which reflected the universal (pretty much) ideas of feminists at that time, this understanding of prostitution has been lost. Neoliberal economic forces have made the sex industry a very profitable market sector, and in some places – a few places – such as Victoria, brothel prostitution has been legalized and the violence of prostitution is now administered by consumer affairs. At this time, the extraordinary situation exists that the majority of feminists in Australia are likely to think that prostitution is legitimate work, and that it expresses women’s agency and choice. This is not true in other countries of the world – it is only really in legalized regimes where most feminists are likely to take that position, and they are affected as a result of the legalization and the normalization of prostitution in holding those beliefs.

After this period in the 70s Millett’s books were not specifically feminist or lesbian – she wrote many more, she wrote a book called The Politics of Cruelty on the history of torture, she wrote a book called The Loony Bin Trip in the 1980s about her battles with what was called at the time manic depression, now more often called bipolar disorder, and in that book she explains that she was compulsorily detained in a mental hospital after ceasing to take the lithium that she was prescribed. She established an artists colony for women in New York State, which continues to run and she set up a christmas tree farm to provide herself with income and as far as I know she is still doing christmas trees.

Despite the importance and the effect of Sexual Politics, she does not consider it to be her most important book. In fact when she is interviewed she sometimes refers to it as her thesis – “that was my thesis” – and she thinks others of her books are more important that probably none of us here have heard of or not many of us. Now the reception of the book – it was immediately a popular success, it sold 80,000 copies within months which is not usually the case for works of theory. Time magazine featured it and her on the cover, and it actually says that she was the Mao Tse Tung of feminism at this time – however she doesn’t get the mileage Mao Tse Tung does, his books are probably still in print.

Male readers were often discomfited by this book – one of her thesis advisers, someone called George Stade at Columbia University remarked “reading the book is like sitting with your testicles in a nutcracker”. [LAUGHTER] I think thesis advisers should not be allowed to have such biases it has to be said. When Sexual Politics was published women’s liberation was still new. Much has changed between then and now. But in one area, which is the main area she addresses in her book, the politics of sexuality, the subordinate status of women is clearly demonstrated and powerfully maintained today. Indeed the values of the sex industry dominate, advertising in public space, the fashion industry, even for little baby girls in *porn star* t shirts, the entertainment industry, and create huge problems for the self esteem of girls and young women. The sex industry now constitutes a huge obstacle in the path of women’s emancipation which I suspect Kate Millett could not have envisaged or imagined back in the 1970s, and neither could I.

What she does in the book is that she does scholarly analyses of the masculine biases of anthropology, sociology, economics, history and so on and so on, and she shows great familiarity with those literatures, but the meaning of sexual politics she considers to be most clearly displayed in the sex novels of the 1960s. She says “I’ve operated on the premise that there’s room for criticism which takes into account the larger cultural context in which literature is conceived and produced”, and I think this is probably not a very fashionable view now, either when literary critics tend to stress that every reader  can have a different interpretation and the author is dead and you’re not supposed to look for truth about sexual power relations in literature. I think that would be viewed with suspicion these days. Now she analysed novels by DH Lawrence, Henry Miller, Norman Mailer and Jean Genet, who she described as cultural agents who  shaped attitudes and as counter revolutionary sexual politicians. She was very brave to do this – these men had hero status in the 1960s, particularly on the left: women were not supposed to be taking them apart. She included Genet – The Thief’s Journal – because she wanted to show that the sexual power dynamics in a novel by a gay man were actually very similar to those in the heterosexual novels by heterosexual writers. These novelists used a lot of language using words like fuck and cunt all the time, and one insight she gives which helps to explain why dirty language and pornography have become so acceptable to all social strata of men in the last half of the century. What she suggested was that crudeness about sex was once seen as evidence of lower class status. It was picked up by upper class men, she reckons, after the second world war because it was seen as creating masculinity – it made them more masculine if they were going around saying the f word and the c word and writing explicitly about the degradation of women – that bolstered their masculinity even though they had been middle class and once might have had to take account of chivalry or slightly different sorts of attitudes towards women – you know when men were supposed to “not in front of the women” and women went off and the men went off and smoked somewhere else and then they could say f or c or whatever it is they wanted to say on their own. But she considers that that changed in that period.

The writers she criticises introduced scatological language, then, into respectable literature. Saying the f word in the 1960s was regarded as a sign of liberation and progressiveness  as well as a trangressive act  against the conservative values that the avant garde was rescuing the new generation from at that time. The desire of left wing men to use the f word is best represented by the theatre critic Kenneth Tynan – I remember this very well – he was the author of Oh Calcutta  - in 1965 in a live TV debate on the BBC he commented, he used the word for the first time on British television, that “I doubt if there are any rational people to whom the word ‘fuck’ would be particularly diabolical, revolting or totally forbidden”. He was a darling of the left intelligentsia and a self-styled sexual revolutionary who campaigned against censorship and liked sadistic sex. His second wife, Elaine Dundy, wrote of him – “to cane a woman on her bare buttocks, to hurt and humiliate her were what gave him his greatest sexual satisfaction”. During the second marriage he engaged in an extra marital affair in order to do sadistic sex and engage prostituted women in threesomes with his wife in order to do that. This was very sexual revolutionary behaviour in that period. The f word is exciting to men, I suggest, because it’s freighted with meanings of male power and the degradation of women – it is not a descriptive word in the way that these men used it, as a word simply to describe sexual activity. The cruel excitement that men experience through saying the word, and have traditionally experienced through saying the word, is because of what it means – the f word connotes an act in which men dominate and conquer and enter women – that’s the excitement of it. The c word too as used by men is not neutral but a word that encompasses their contempt for women and women’s genitals. The use of these words in the novels Millett analyses makes it clear that they are hostile masculine ideas about sex and women and could not be easily taken up as women’s language. I have never been one of those feminists who said that we should take up the f word and the c word and they’ve been simply badly used by men and we can rescue them: I have no intention of ‘rescuing’ those terms.

The writers whose work Millett analyses were stars of the so-called sexual revolution. Andrea Dworkin says when Millett wrote Sexual Politics, Miller, Mailer and Lawrence were the sages of sexual revolution and they were the writers of subversion. Dworkin says they socialized a whole generation into believing that force and violence were valued elements of sex and anyone who found their work harmful at that time would be accused of being anti sex and prudish. Their novels represent the underlying ideology of the sexual revolution, the misogynist construction of men’s sexual freedom and delight out of women’s degradation. They saw themselves as knights jousting with the evil forces of prudery and censorship  to liberate and tell the truth about sex. Norman Mailer himself describes the battles of the publishers who were bringing out these novels and their legal representatives in the 50s and early 60s as being “like the American Civil War”. The sexual revolutionary authors won the war, he says: “a war has been won. Writers like myself in America can now write about any subject. It is sexual and we’re explicit, no matter. The American writer now has his freedom”. Charles Rembar, lawyer for the publishers, laid out the free speech argument. He said “in the free interchange of ideas the truth will emerge”. Well of course it so happens that feminists do not have the truth about pornography because their truth has not emerged. I mean these sort of statements show no understanding whatsoever of the power structures that construct what can be said and what can be heard.

Millett begins the book with a quote from Henry Miller’s Sexus. The book was published by Grove Press in New York in 1965. I was 17 years old in that year, and I was determined to become a sexual revolutionary. Henry Miller’s novels were some of the books that I tried hard to like at that time. The Grove Press website informs us Grove’s books have “broken down sexual, cultural and political barriers”. Grove produced all of the books that Millett is criticising – also William Burroughs, who mistakenly shot his wife dead while playing a William Tell game, Kerouac and others. They had fun, these chaps. Most famously Grove Press published DH Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover in its first unexpurgated commercial edition, and I’ll just say a little about that book, because Millett goes into DH Lawrence’s work in detail. Millett argues that DH Lawrence was responding to the women’s emancipation movement of the early 20th century in his writing and she sees him as putting women back in their place and that place turns out to be awed phallus worship. In the trial that allowed this book to be published, because there was a censorship trial, it was judged to have literary merit and the defence of literary merit was then used to defend many other woman-hating books in the next decade. I’ll just give you a couple of quotations from the book – I do realise that one of the problems feminists and scholars who actually want to look at books like these and to look at pornography is that it’s quite difficult, it’s like – you know – watching troops killing people and weapons of war, because, not because it’s about sex, but because the values are so woman-hating that it’s very very difficult to read them. So I hope you will not mind my reading a few extracts this evening, and will bear in mind that I am aware of the effect, and the effect is not because these descriptions are about sex but because of the values that they are freighted with, and for women particularly it’s hard to hear this stuff.

This is Lady Chatterley when she first sees the gamekeeper’s phallus in Lady Chatterley’s Lover – quite a famous quotation.

“How strange!” she said slowly. “How strange he stands there! So big! and so dark and cock-sure! Is he like that?” ... “So proud!” she murmured, uneasy. “And so lordly! Now I know why men are so overbearing! But he's lovely, really. Like another being! A bit terrifying! But lovely really! And he comes to me!”

And then the gamekeeper replies with instructions to his penis on what the penis is after, which is ‘cunt’, and there’s a lot more about cunt in the book and Lady Chatterley is seen in this quotation simply as cunt:

“Best bit o’ cunt left on earth and cunt, eh?  That’s the beauty of thee lass.”

Balls, on the other hand, are described very differently – he says balls are the roots, roots of all that’s lovely, the primeval root of all beauty. Moreover he says the root of all sanity is in the balls. [laughter] So that’s pretty clear sexual politics going on in Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Now, Lady Chatterley needed to be rehabilitated by the penis because her life was distorted by education and being a modern woman. And anal penetration is particularly efficacious in all of these novels it’s particularly efficacious for teaching women lessons. It says in the novel about the anal penetration she had needed this phallic hunting out, she had secretly wanted it, and she had believed that she would never get it.

Continue reading part 2 here

Photo: Iceland's Prime Minister, Johanna Sigurdardottir

The Women's Rights Association of Iceland reports that as of 31 December 2011 women make up more than fifty per cent of the Icelandic government for the first time:

Iceland is the sixth country where women are a majority government. Finland was the first in 2007 and since then, Norway, Spain, Cape Verde and Switzerland also ordered governments where women are in majority.

Following the reshuffle, Iceland has female ministers of Finance (Oddný G. Hardardottir), Environment (Svandís Svavarsdóttir), Industry (Catherine Júlíusdóttir) and Education, Culture and Nordic Co-operation (Catherine Jakobsdóttir). And, of course, the government is headed by Prime Minister Johanna Sigurdardottir. That's five female ministers out of nine ministerial posts.

This further bolsters the claim that Iceland is the world's most woman-friendly country. For more on this, see:

Is Iceland the best country for women? - Kira Cochrane

Iceland: the world's most feminist country - Julie Bindel