"Theory of Sexual Politics" by Kate Millett,1969

Sexual Politics is a classic feminist text written by Kate Millett, said to be "the first book of academic feminist literary criticism",and "one of the first feminist books of this decade to raise nationwide male ire".

Based on her PhD dissertation, it was published in 1970. Millet argues that "sex has a frequently neglected political aspect" and goes on to discuss the role that patriarchy plays in sexual relations, looking especially at the works of D. H. Lawrence, Henry Miller, and Norman Mailer. Millet argues that these authors view and discuss sex in a patriarchal and sexist way. In contrast, she applauds the more nuanced gender politics of homosexual writer Jean Genet. Other writers discussed at length include Sigmund Freud, George Meredith, John Ruskin, and John Stuart Mill.

"[T]here is no remedy to sexual politics in marriage."

Sexual Politics was an important theoretical touchstone for the second wave feminism of the '70s. It was also extremely controversial. Norman Mailer, whose work, especially his 1965 novel An American Dream, had been criticised by Millett, wrote the article “The Prisoner of Sex” in Harper's Magazine in response, attacking Millett's claims and defending Miller and Lawrence.[3] More recently, Camille Paglia accused Sexual Politics of spawning what she sees as the excesses of women's studies departments, especially for attacks on the sexism of male authors of the Western canon.

Doubleday's trade division, although it declined to reprint it when it went out of print briefly, said Sexual Politics was one of the 10 most important books that it had published in its 100 years of existence and included it in its anniversary anthology.
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Ideological

Hannah Arendt has observed that government is upheld by power supported either through consent or imposed through violence. Conditioning to an ideology amounts to the former. Sexual politics obtains consent through the "socialisation" of both sexes to basic patriarchal polities with regard to temperament, role, and status. As to status, a pervasive assent to the prejudice of male superiority guarantees superior status in the male, inferior in the female. The first item, temperament, involves the formation of human personality along stereotyped lines of sex category ("masculine" and "feminine"), based on the needs and values of the dominant group and dictated by what its members cherish in themselves and find convenient in subordinates: aggression, intelligence, force, and efficacy in the male; passivity, ignorance, docility, "virtue," and ineffectuality in the female. This is complemented by a second factor, sex role, which decrees a consonant and highly elaborate code of conduct, gesture and attitude for each sex. In terms of activity, sex role assigns domestic service and attendance upon infants to the female, the rest of human achievement, interest, and ambition to the male. The limited role allotted the female tends to arrest her at the level of biological experience. Therefore, nearly all that can be described as distinctly human rather than animal activity (in their own way animals also give birth and care for their young) is largely reserved for the male. Of course, status again follows from such an assignment. Were one to analyse the three categories one might designate status as the political component, role as the sociological, and temperament as the psychological - yet their interdependence is unquestionable and they form a chain. Those awarded higher status tend to adopt roles of mastery, largely because they are first encouraged to develop temperaments of dominance. That this is true of caste and class as well is self-evident.