ABSTRACT
RADICAL FEMINISTS HAVE TRADITIONALLY taken the lead not only in articulating the "highly elaborate" and "deeply entrenched" nature of the sex/gender system, l but also in sketching exit routes out of it. In particular, radical feminists have proposed several ways to free women from the cage of femininity. These proposals have ranged from working toward an androgynous culture in which male and female differences are minimized to replacing male culture with female culture. Similarly, radical feminists have proposed several ways to enable women to escape from the sexual domination of men. These have ranged from transforming the institution of heterosexuality so that neither men nor women play a dominant role to rejecting heterosexuality in favor of celibacy, autoeroticism, or lesbianism. Although much of what they have had to say about sex and gender has also been said by nonradical feminists, radical feminists should be credited with detailing the ways in which men, rather than "society" or "conditions," have forced women into oppressive gender roles and sexual behavior. 0
Millett's Sexual Politics One of the first radical feminists to insist that the roots of women's
oppression are buried deep in patriarchy's sex/gender system was Kate Millett. In her Sexual Politics (1970), Millett argued that sex is political primarily because the male-female relationship is the paradigm for all power relationships: "Social caste supercedes all other forms of inegali-
tarianism: racial, political, or economic, and unless the clinging to male supremacy as a birthright is finally forgone, all systems of oppression will continue to function simply by virtue of their logical and emotional mandate in the primary human situation."2 Because male control of the public and private worlds is what constitutes patriarchy, male control must be eliminated if women are to be liberated. But this is no easy task. To eliminate male control, men and women have to eliminate gender-specifically, sexual status, role, and temperament-as it has been constructed under patriarchy.
