Sexual Politics

The first chapter opens with a passage from Henry Miller’s Sexus in which the main character, Val, recalls the seduction of his friend Bill Woodruff’s wife, Ida Verlaine. Of the seduction, Millett notes that “[i]n accord with one of the myths at the very heart of a Miller novel, the protagonist, who is always some version of the author himself, is sexually irresistible and potent to an almost mystical degree” (4-5). It is of little surprise that Ida succumbs to his advances which play out as “a series of stratagems, aggressive on the part of the hero and acquiescent on the part of what custom forces us to designate the heroine” (5).

Miller’s tone is “of one male relating an exploit to another male in the masculine vocabulary and with its point of view” (5). Similarly, the suggestion that Ida didn’t fight back is significant and “the entire scene is a description not so much of sexual intercourse, but rather of intercourse in the service of power” (5). Indeed, throughout Miller’s description, “the reader is vicariously experiencing […] a nearly supernatural sense of power—should the reader be a male” (6), with Miller’s penis transformed into “an instrument of chastisement, whereas Ida’s genitalia are but the means of her humiliation” (7).