This piece was drawn from the afterword to a new edition of “Sexual Politics,” by Kate Millett, which is out in February from Columbia University Press.
In the fall of 2014 Time magazine published a list of words that, it proposed, should be banned—a click-bait compilation of terms and phrases that had become so buzzy and catchy that they had proliferated into cringe-inducing overuse. Among them were “bae,” a term of endearment; “disrupt,” a Silicon Valley cliché; “literally,” when used to mean “figuratively”; and “feminist.” About this last the magazine asked, “When did it become a thing that every celebrity had to state their position on whether this word applies to them, like some politician declaring a party? Let’s stick to the issues and quit throwing this label around like ticker tape at a Susan B. Anthony parade.”
The magazine assumed a familiarity with a pop-cultural context in which the label of feminist had recently become a singular badge of honor. Taylor Swift, the best-selling country singer, had announced her realization that she had been “taking a feminist stance” without even realizing she was doing so, while Lena Dunham, the creator of the innovative television show “Girls,” had increasingly used her public platform not to make self-deprecating comments about herself but to advocate for Planned Parenthood. The apogee of pop-cultural incorporation of the term was surely the moment when Beyoncé, the singer, in a performance at the MTV Video Music Awards, appeared framed before a screen emblazoned with the word “feminist.” The nadir, perhaps, was when Karl Lagerfeld, the fashion designer, contrived a show in Paris in which models dressed in Chanel’s latest ready-to-wear collection paraded down a catwalk carrying protest signs bearing slogans such as “History Is Her Story” and “Women’s Rights Are More Than Alright!”
_Time’_s banned-word list had what was presumably its intended effect: it generated a lot of attention, in the form of profitable page views. But the magazine had not, perhaps, anticipated the offense that it would give by declaring the word “feminist” to be unspeakable. On Twitter and Facebook, readers called it mean-spirited and regressive; in op-ed columns, feminist writers critiqued the list. “I keep trying to imagine a universe in which too many public figures declaring themselves feminists would be a bad thing,” Roxane Gay, the novelist and the author of an essay collection entitled “Bad Feminist,” wrote, before concluding, “Of all the words that should be spoken more, ‘feminist’ should be at the top of the list.” Within a few days of publication, Time had issued an apology, saying that “feminist” should not have been included. “While we meant to invite debate about some ways the word was used this year, that nuance was lost, and we regret that its inclusion has become a distraction from the important debate over equality and justice.”
Forty-four years earlier, Time magazine had made a different kind of statement about feminism, devoting a cover story to Kate Millett and “Sexual Politics,_”__ as a means of addressing the burgeoning movement at large.__ _Millett was described as “the Mao Tse-tung of Women’s Liberation,” hailed as the theorist whose analysis served both as cultural diagnosis and polemical manifesto. These were times in which, as the magazine characterized it, “the din is in earnest, echoing from the streets where pickets gather, the bars where women once were barred, and even connubial beds, where ideology can intrude at the unconscious drop of a male chauvinist epithet.” Much of _Time’_s tone was lightly mocking of the movement—and now seems drenched in the unconscious sexism it sought to define—which makes its treatment of Millett’s work strike a present-day reader as surprisingly respectful. “There is no questioning the impact of her argument,” the magazine notes, while giving an accessible summary of “the patriarchy,” as more densely characterized by Millett in her book: “Women are helpless . . . because men control the basic mechanisms of society.”
It is useful to look at the characterization of feminism—and of “Sexual Politics”—in the popular media, because it is there that the unconscious biases and presuppositions of a culture can be found, fossilized. Whatever Time magazine’s reporters of forty-five years ago tell us about Kate Millett, the choice to refer to her by her first name tells us a whole lot more, as does the choice to quote Millett’s mother not expressing her support for her daughter but criticizing her appearance. (“Kate’s missing the boat if she appears on the Mike Douglas Show without her hair washed.”)
To read _Time’_s Millett profile now is to remark on how much has remained unchanged, at least legislatively: many of the feminist demands of 1970—income parity for men and women, the free availability of abortion, state-supported child care—remain only partially fulfilled, if that. What has changed is a cultural tone; it seems unlikely that, these days, a serious news organization would, as Time did, make light of a college professor who acknowledged that the attractiveness or otherwise of a woman’s legs would factor into his decision about whether or not to offer her a job.
Similarly, the characterization of radical feminists as having the “eschatological aim . . . to topple the patriarchal system in which men by birthright control all of society’s levers of power—in government, industry, education, science, the arts” seems peculiarly time-bound. If much of the work that radical feminists sought to see accomplished remains undone, that fundamental premise—that men have a preordained right to rule—now strikes a reader as considerably less world-ending than it apparently did in 1970. In some ways, it seems that we got the cultural change that feminism promised, without the concomitant political transformation. In other ways, though, it seems that the kind of women’s empowerment we celebrate—that of Beyoncé, or of Sheryl Sandberg, the C.O.O. of Facebook and author of “Lean In,” a best-selling work of Silicon Valley feminism—has arrived within a social structure still biased against less exceptional women.
I first learned of “Sexual Politics” in the mid-eighties, midway between its publication and today. I was in my mid-teens, a nascent feminist and a subscriber to Spare Rib_,_ the British magazine that was the rough equivalent of Ms. magazine, which had been launched in 1971. Spare Rib wasn’t available on the newsstand anywhere in the provincial town where I lived, and so it came by mail order. It was a communication from another world.
It was by reading Spare Rib that I became aware of American feminism’s recent history; the Wages for Housework campaign; the works of Shulamith Firestone, whose book “The Dialectic of Sex” was published in 1970, and Susan Brownmiller, whose book about rape, “Against Our Will,” appeared in 1975. It was Spare Rib that fortified my effort, in our school’s debating society, to persuade a small audience of my peers that “All Men Oppress All Women All the Time.” I lost the debate then, though a similar case was—persuasively, movingly—made more recently, on Twitter, when the hashtag #YesAllWomen was adopted to give expression to the pervasiveness of female fear and male obliviousness, or worse.
It wasn’t until I was at college in the late eighties that I actually read “Sexual Politics,” pressed into my hands by a fellow student of English literature who, like me, was trying to assimilate the alien language and sensibilities of Victorian literature. By that time, feminist literary theory had developed into a relatively well-trafficked critical genre; it was no longer unusual for critics to examine literary texts through the prism of feminist theory. But I wasn’t yet aware of that. Having been taught in high school to read literary texts according to principles derived from the New Criticism—close reading, dissection of metaphor and symbol—it was shocking and exhilarating to discover Millett’s audacious coupling of an explicit political critique with a technically skilled literary dissection. Her book exploded the tidy conceit in which I had been schooled: that literary criticism and social politics were things apart from one another.
Re-reading “Sexual Politics” today, I am struck anew by two things. One is that, while Millett was publicly cast in the polarizing role of polemicist, there is often in her tone the cool, controlled archness of the literary essayist, a role she might easily have inhabited had the times not called upon her to do otherwise. The book is suffused with a strain of very dark, angry humor, an aspect of Millett’s writing that seems to have been barely noticed—or was perhaps invisible—upon publication. Take, for example, the way she dispatches Freud’s injunction that appropriate sexual development calls for an evolution from clitoral to vaginal orgasm. She calls this “a difficult passage in which Freud foresaw that many women might go astray. Even among the successful the project has consumed so much of their productive youth that their minds stagnate.” If “Sexual Politics” has endured, it is not just because so much of the political work it recommends remains undone, but also because it is an astringent pleasure to be in the company of Millett on the page.
The other, remarkable fact that re-reading “Sexual Politics” now brings to light is this: that at the time it was written, literature was agreed to be something worth fighting over. Whatever arguments there are still to be made about the status of women within contemporary society, it seems beyond imagining that a book which made its case via literary analyses of John Stuart Mill and John Ruskin—or even D. H. Lawrence and Jean Genet—would be championed as “Sexual Politics” was. It is similarly unimaginable that a book offering a feminist critique of leading contemporary novelists would gain the kind of cultural traction achieved by “Sexual Politics,” with its analyses of Norman Mailer and Henry Miller.
It is hard to feel very nostalgic for the world of forty-five years ago that Millett describes, with women’s rights curtailed by law, and reflexively compromised by custom. And yet for those among us who care about literature—those of us who came to Millett in part because of literature—there is something poignant in the attention she pays to literary authors, both contemporary and historical. A similar sense of dissonance can be experienced by watching “Town Bloody Hall,” the documentary film about a 1971 debate about women’s liberation in which Germaine Greer, while referring to Mailer, speaks of “the being I think most privileged in masculine elitist society, namely the masculine artist, the pinnacle of the masculine elite.” It has been a long time since even the male novelist has been regarded as occupying the pinnacle of any elite. The battleground over which Millett and her peers fought included what would now be regarded as impossibly abstruse high culture: we concern ourselves with Beyoncé instead of Jean Genet.
What remains most striking about the politics of “Sexual Politics” is the largeness of the vision for the future it outlines: not of a society reformed by incremental legislative change, but radically transformed. Millett’s concern is for freedom, a right she insists upon extending even to her cultural nemeses. Of Henry Miller’s misogynistic descriptions of female sexuality, she writes that “the release of such uninhibited emotion, however poisonous, is beyond question advantageous”—a position it is considerably harder to imagine being defended on college campuses in the age of the trigger warning.
To read “Sexual Politics” today—while enjoying many of the advances that have been made on women’s behalf since its writing—is to become aware of the descent of a certain poverty of imagination in the forty-five years that have passed since the radical moment of its inspiration. We may have arrived at a world in which it can be jokingly suggested that the word “feminism” be banned—however badly such a joke may have misfired. But we are as far away as ever from a world in which the word “feminism” has dwindled into obsolescence, a world in which no one—a celebrity or otherwise—need declare herself or himself a feminist, because social change has rendered the word meaningless. Whether we are really closer to that eventuality than Millett was, or have moved further away from it, is still an open question.
