Yet Millett’s hopeful conclusion contrasts strikingly with the difficulties she encountered immediately after the book’s publication, many of which are described in her stream-of-consciousness memoir Flying (1974). An anti-elitist herself, Millett lamented the “media’s diabolic need to reduce ideas to personalities,” yet nonetheless her fame provoked quite a few feminists not chosen for the spotlight to attack her. She remembers commiserating with Simone de Beauvoir after Beauvoir suffered from French leftists who “insulted her for her efforts, she was an elitist, a star.” When consulted by Time about its cover, Millett had asked for an image of many women, so she felt betrayed by the Neel portrait that sparked so much antagonism. At a meeting of “the core of the movement, the Feminists, the Radical Feminists, the Redstockings, members of consciousness-raising cells,” she joked about coming out . . . this time as a pacifist, noting about the topic under discussion—“violence in the movement”—that she was an expert on the subject of “our trashing each other.”16
Everyone laughed at her joke, because this inner circle of organizers knew Millett had been forced to come out as a lesbian right after Time described her as a bisexual living with the Japanese sculptor Fumio Yoshimura and also erotically engaged with women. Pictures were printed of her “kissing Fumio”; she was misquoted as saying, “Lesbianism was ‘not my bag.’ ” At a feminist panel on the gay and women’s liberation movements, one audience member demanded she use the L-word. “Five hundred people looking at me. Are you a Lesbian? . . . ‘Say it! Say you are a Lesbian.’ Yes I said. Yes. Because I know what she means. The line goes, inflexible as a fascist edict, that bisexuality is a cop-out. Yes I said yes I am a Lesbian. It was the last strength I had.”17
In fact, although there are many sensual descriptions of Millett engaged in joyous lesbian sex in Flying, there are also quite a few sensual descriptions of her engaged in joyous heterosexual sex. And Sexual Politics had been dedicated to her husband. Why did she lie? Before the Women’s Strike for Equality march, at the Second Congress to Unite Women, the Lavender Menace Zap had galvanized the women’s movement. A group of radicals cut off the microphones and put out the lights to protest Betty Friedan’s use of the phrase “lavender menace” to distance NOW from lesbian groups like the Daughters of Bilitis. With the lights switched on, the radicals wore Lavender Menace T-shirts as they handed out copies of “The Woman-Identified-Woman,” which begins by asserting: “A lesbian is the rage of all women condensed to the point of explosion.”18
Millett, wanting to certify herself as a radical, said “yes I am a Lesbian,” although during this period she was leading a bisexual life. The lie was also spoken by the browbeaten Millett because friends like the Village Voice columnist Jill Johnston denounced bisexuality as a cop-out: “Bisexuality is staying safe by claiming allegiance to heterosexuality.”19 As Ti-Grace Atkinson put it, “Feminism is the theory, lesbianism the practice.” Johnston herself believed that “feminism at heart is a massive complaint. Lesbianism is the solution.”20
Negotiating these rifts, Millett realizes that she has pained her mother. Flying returns frequently to Millett’s sadness at her mother’s revulsion. Fame turned Millett into “a hate object while you wept in St. Paul because the neighbors heard Time say I was queer, my life’s shame home at last.” After Millett tells her mother that she is writing an autobiographical book, her mother’s response—“You’re not going to put that awful stuff about Lesbianism in it?”—makes her feel “guilty as in childhood. I am a freak.” While her mother wails, Millett asks for acceptance of the memoir she is composing, to which her mother responds that “I’m killing her”: “I tell her Doris Lessing said mothers don’t die as easily as they claim. Now she’s just crying. So am I.”21
Yet the reference to Doris Lessing alludes to the mentoring that sustained Millett. After the publication of Sexual Politics, she had visited the author of The Golden Notebook (1962), a novel that touched “the thousands of women who read it,” and discussed the trashing Lessing received at a New York event: “Movement heavies coming to cheer Lessing as their heroine, but she infuriates them by saying she doesn’t hate men at all and finds other world conditions—peace, poverty, class—all far more pressing than the problems of women.”22
The scene that meant the most to Millett in The Golden Notebook, she explained to Lessing, is the moment the heroine “finds herself in a toilet at the outset of her period. . . . Happens every month of adult life to half the population of the globe and no one had ever mentioned it in a book.” In return, Lessing encouraged Millett to continue writing by confessing that her own mother announced her intention to die with every book she wrote, and “I went on hoping eventually I might manage to please her . . . only to produce another funeral.” When Millett lamented the fact that seven years of protesting had not stopped the Vietnam War, Lessing assured her, “But you have begun something else more remarkable if less efficacious. A great pendulum of social force, a change, a movement among millions of Americans spreading now abroad too.”23
Brooding on the fallout from publicity, armed with the wisdom of Beauvoir and Lessing, Kate Millett turned down an invitation to attend a debate with Norman Mailer that would be filmed as Town Bloody Hall.24 She devoted the rest of her life to her own art, the artist colony she established for women in upstate New York, her relationship with and eventual marriage to the Canadian journalist Sophie Keir, and a fight against the obscenity of violence—trained against children, sex workers, the sick, the aged, and the victims of Islamic fundamentalism—despite her own struggles with mental illness.
Mailer had to make do on April 30, 1971, with braying and snorting at Jacqueline Caballos, the president of the New York chapter of NOW; Germaine Greer, the author of The Female Eunuch (1970), who said that Sylvia Plath, trying to be a poet as well as a housewife, “was such a perfectionist and ultimately such a fool”; Jill Johnston, who stated that “all women are lesbians except those who don’t know it”; and the literary critic Diana Trilling, who judiciously asserted that Mailer had failed to imagine “the full humanity of women” and yet she “would gladly take even Mailer’s poeticized biology in preference to the no biology at all of my spirited sisters.”25
In The Prisoner of Sex (1971), Mailer’s rants against contraception, masturbation, clitoral orgasm, and homosexuality repeatedly excoriate Kate Millett while defending Henry Miller, D. H. Lawrence, and most especially Mailer himself. Irving Howe, who also attacked Millett, argued that Sexual Politics was a “vulgarized form” of The Second Sex that sounds as if it were “written by a female impersonator.”26 But in his own fashion Gore Vidal came to Millett’s defense, in a review of Eva Figes’s Patriarchal Attitudes (1970). Mailer’s tirades, Vidal declared, “read like three days of menstrual flow.” In fact, he argued that “the Miller-Mailer-Manson man (M3 for short)” is on the defensive about “girls” like Figes and Millett who threaten M3’s “tribal past.”27
At the free-for-all in the town hall meeting, the boos of the audience failed to inhibit Mailer’s braggadocio. Audience members Betty Friedan, Elizabeth Hardwick, Susan Sontag, and Cynthia Ozick rose to defend the feminists on the panel and to question his cocky performance. When Sontag got the mike, she wanted to pose “a very quiet question to Norman” and then queried his use of the word “lady,” which she found patronizing. “I don’t like being called a lady writer,” she said quietly. Ozick prefaced her question by explaining that she had a fantasy of putting it to Mailer ever since she read his Advertisements for Myself, where he stated that “a good novelist can do without everything but the remnant of his balls”: “For years and years,” Ozick mused, “I have been wondering, Mr. Mailer, when you dip your balls in ink, what color is it?”28
By the end of the seventies, Kate Millett had come to see the situation of the “second sex” as almost inevitably deadly. In her 1979 book The Basement, she agonized about “a human sacrifice”: 16-year-old Sylvia Likens, whose torture and murder she had been bro
oding on since 1965, when the crime took place.29 A lively teenager, Sylvia had been left, along with a crippled younger sister, in the Indianapolis home of the ultimate sadistic babysitter, one Gertrude Baniszewski, by her father, a traveling circus roustabout. Baniszewski had seven children of her own, most of whom were pressed into service torturing Sylvia, who was ultimately bound, gagged, and left to die in the family basement, with more than 150 wounds on her naked body. Though she screamed, neighbors didn’t respond. In the end, malnourished and deprived of water, she chewed through her own lips.
Reviewing Millett’s painful meditation in the New York Times, Joyce Carol Oates coolly commented that
Miss Millett’s identification with the murdered girl is extraordinary, and one can only respect, if not fully comprehend, the depth of its power: “I was Sylvia Likens. She was me.” Elsewhere, as part of a long, reasoned, admirably sustained meditation on the historical fate of women in general (which includes a discussion of clitoridectomy and other genital mutilations still practiced today), [Millett] comes to the conclusion: “To be feminine, then, is to die.”30
One wonders, Is this what the arguments of Sexual Politics had to come to? To be female is to die? Despite the measured tones of Joyce Carol Oates’s review, in 1970 she had published the brilliant story “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” about a young girl who implicitly accepts the decree that to be feminine is to die.
SUSAN SONTAG AS FEMINIST PHILOSOPHER
Ten years before Millett produced The Basement, Susan Sontag included “The Pornographic Imagination,” in Styles of Radical Will, one of her books. Here, meditating on “Pauline Réage’s” sadomasochistic The Story of O—in which a chained and naked young woman whose name is merely O, a null or a hole, willingly acquiesces to a variety of tortures—Sontag appeared to celebrate exactly the female sexual degradation that horrified Millett. Rather than a hapless victim, she argues, “O is an adept . . . grateful to be initiated into a mystery [that] is the loss of self.”31 Moreover, though she seems passive, she is active; her entrance into mystery is also an entrance into mastery:
O learns, she suffers, she changes. . . . The plot’s movement is not horizontal, but a kind of ascent through degradation. . . . O’s quest is neatly summed up in the expressive letter which serves her for a name. “O” suggests a cartoon of her sex, not her individual sex but simply woman; it also stands for a nothing. But what Story of O unfolds is a spiritual paradox, that of the full void and of the vacuity that is also a plenum.32
Sontag’s language verges on the mystical. But most feminists would have none of it—especially Susan Griffin, who declared that although Sontag “defends The Story of O not only as art but as an extension of consciousness,” consciousness in this novel “extends ultimately only into its own annihilation.”33And of course, unlike The Basement, “Réage’s” story is not grounded in reality but is embedded in a fever dream of eroticism: it first took shape when the real “Réage”—a young French intellectual named Anne Desclos—wrote a series of sexual letters to titillate the imagination of her lover Jean Paulhan. It is hard to believe that Sontag would have been so enthusiastic about The Story of O if she thought the work had its origin in living flesh rather than fantastic imagery.
In fact, a crucial sentence in Sontag’s meditation on the book hints at a turn her thinking would take in the early seventies: “ ‘O’ suggests a cartoon of her sex, not her individual sex but simply woman; it also stands for a nothing.” As if Sontag were haunted by this notion, in feminist essays published in 1972, 1973, and 1975 she sought to dismantle the notion of woman as null, submissive, and irrational.
The first of these pieces, “The Double Standard of Aging,” focuses on the terrible truth that aging female bodies are considered “obscene,” whereas older men are viewed as powerful, even virile. Old women are witches, older men are tribal leaders. The “rules of this society are cruel to women. Brought up to be never fully adult, women are deemed obsolete earlier than men.” Moreover, Sontag goes on to observe, femininity is performative: to “be a woman is to be an actress. Being feminine is a kind of theater, with its appropriate costumes, décor, lighting, and stylized gestures.” Thus, “from early childhood on, girls are trained to care in a pathologically exaggerated way about their appearance.”34 Trained, in other words, to be the null O, who is merely a decorated body.
But women’s thralldom to the body is even more problematic than the performativity in which girls are trained. For, notes Sontag in “A Woman’s Beauty: Put-Down or Power Source?,” “Women are taught to see their bodies in parts, and to evaluate each part separately. Breasts, feet, hips, waistline, neck, eyes, nose, complexion, hair, and so on—each in turn is submitted to an anxious, fretful, often despairing scrutiny.” Her vision here suggests that women are taught to subject themselves to an almost Picasso-esque fragmentation, by which body parts are moved around according to the ways that their beauties are prioritized. No wonder, then, that Sontag dryly comments, “To preen, for a woman, can never be just a pleasure. It is also a duty. It is her work.” Indeed, she concludes, “One could hardly ask for more important evidence of the dangers of considering persons as split between what is ‘inside’ and what is ‘outside’ than that interminable, half-comic half-tragic tale, the oppression of women.”35
In “The Third World of Women,” Sontag’s major feminist essay of this period, the oppression of women is no longer dismissed as “half-comic half-tragic.” Responding to a questionnaire from the editors of Libre, a Spanish-language, loosely Marxist journal, Sontag—who was often identified as an anti-feminist—outlined radically subversive, feminist views of what, like Millett, she defined as a patriarchal culture. Her central thesis: the “oppression of women constitutes the most fundamental type of repression in organized societies. That is, it is the most ancient form of oppression, pre-dating all oppression based on class, caste, and race. It is the most primitive form of hierarchy.”36
The substance of the piece then elaborates on the consequences of this primordial oppression, as Sontag ranges from cultural practices to the “grammar of family life” to grammar itself. “The ‘femininity’ of women and the ‘masculinity’ of men are morally defective and historically obsolete conceptions,” she argues, adding that the “liberation of women seems to me as much a historical necessity as the abolition of slavery”—indeed, “even more momentous than abolition in its psychic and historical consequences.” As for the linguistic fate of women, she points out that “grammar, the ultimate arena of sexist brainwashing, conceals the very existence of women. . . . Thus we must say ‘he’ when we mean a person who might be of either sex. ‘Man’ is the accepted way to refer to all human beings; ‘men’ is the literary way of saying people.”37
On the fundamental organization of society, she notes that the “modern ‘nuclear’ family is a psychological and moral disaster. It is a prison of sexual repression, a playing-field of inconsistent moral laxity, a museum of possessiveness, a guilt-producing factory, and a school of selfishness.” On the basis of these premises, she formulates a series of radical prescriptions for social change, significantly akin to those ideas put forward by equally radical thinkers more usually associated with the women’s movement. First, “the only sexual ethic liberating for women is one which challenges the primacy of genital heterosexuality.”38 Second, the
women’s movement must lead to a critical assault on the very nature of the state—the millennial tyranny of patriarchal rule being the low-keyed model of the peculiarly modern tyranny of the fascist state. . . . Fascism, in other words, is the natural development of the values of the patriarchal state applied to the conditions (and contradictions) of twentieth-century “mass” societies. Virginia Woolf was altogether correct when she declared in the late 1930s, in a remarkable tract called Three Guineas, that the fight to liberate women is a fight against fascism.39
Finally, in a dazzling and sometimes sardonic riff on what women should do, and how, So
ntag stipulated a series of large and small actions that women should take in the battle against oppression.
Only groups composed entirely of women will be diversified enough in their tactics, and sufficiently “extreme.” Women should lobby, demonstrate, march. They should take karate lessons. They should whistle at men in the streets, raid beauty parlors, picket toy manufacturers who produce sexist toys, convert in sizable numbers to militant lesbianism, operate their own free psychiatric and abortion clinics, provide feminist divorce counselling, establish make-up withdrawal centers, adopt their mothers’ family names as their last names, deface billboard advertising that insults women, disrupt public events by singing in honor of the docile wives of male celebrities and politicians, collect pledges to renounce alimony and giggling, bring lawsuits for defamation against the mass-circulation “women’s magazines,” conduct telephone harassment campaigns against male psychiatrists who have sexual relations with their women patients, organize beauty contests for men, put up feminist candidates for all public offices.40
“You . . . are precisely a liberated woman,” the editors of Libre remarked in the questionnaire that they addressed to Sontag, to which she rather ironically replied, “I would never describe myself as a liberated woman. Of course, things are never as simple as that. But I have always been a feminist.”41
But had she? Decades of commentary on her work defined her as either indifferent to feminism or as anti-feminist. And interestingly, the feminist essays we’ve been discussing never appeared in any of her collections. Instead, they are relegated to “Uncollected Essays,” a section at the back of the Library of America’s 2013 volume of her essays of the 1960s and 1970s, edited by her son, David Rieff.42
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