And Man said, “Let the female exist for men’s sexual pleasure.” Let her be accessible and available to the male at all times. When not actively engaged in his service, let her offer herself up for his visual delectation, her grooming habits and attire in conformity with the standards set by pornography. Let pornography itself be inescapable, in order that the female never forget the rigors of her role. Let every harm and humiliation that can be done to her be named “sex” and if she does not consent to each offense, let her be cast out, defamed, or disciplined by violence. Let no insult to the phallus go unpunished. Let the state supply its male citizenry with a reserve corps of permanently accessible females through the institution of prostitution, in which a sub-class of women and girls shall be enslaved; through the snare of female financial insolvency let their servility be ensured. Let statesmen avail themselves of captive females as currency, to grease the sealing of deals and steel the brotherly bonds between men’s conglomerates and their nations. Because men’s sexual tastes are so diverse, their amusements so exquisitely and richly varied, let the dazzling polyphony of their fetishes be preserved by state sanction, the male resolve to get off by any means necessary enshrined in law and policy. And when females are raped and murdered by their male relatives, by their husbands and boyfriends, or by strangers in the park, let it be known: that there was no stopping it, that her misfortune was inevitable, for men cannot be expected to control themselves in the fever of lust. In unison let the men shrug and say, as they gaze down upon her ravaged corpse: I’d tap that. 

Man saw all that he had made – a phallocentric universe dedicated to his pleasure, the whole of human society renovated into one great big sex-dungeon-cum-masturbatorium – and it was good. Sheila Jeffreys saw it, and called it “penile imperialism.” And it was vile. 

Long our most unflinching historian of men’s sexual grotesquery, Jeffreys draws from her forty years of probing and mapping the dark groin of male dominion to present a big-picture view of the current catastrophe in her latest book, Penile Imperialism: The Male Sex Right and Female Subordination, released in September through Spinifex Press. Male domination, she contends, operates as a regime of sexualized terrorism, in which women and girls are held in thrall and tormented by men mercilessly imposing their coital imperatives upon them. The founding principle of this regime is what Jeffreys calls the male sex right: the assertion that men are, by birthright, entitled to access and use the bodies of women – or children or even animals, as individual men’s tastes may dictate – in pursuance of sexual gratification. Since female bodies exist to be used by men, there are no “wrong” ways to use them. Whatever a man desires to do to a woman, sexually, is right because it is his right, as a man, to do it to her. All fraternal branches of male-dominated society uphold the male sex right. It is affirmed by men’s laws and celebrated by their media; men’s medical and psychotherapeutic industries are its enthusiastic cheerleaders. Whatever damage men do to women while exercising their sex right fails to register. His right to get off is supreme. Her rights, her privacy, her freedom, her ability to participate in society, even her survival, are irrelevant. 

Jeffreys devotes the first half of Penile Imperialism to a survey of the manifold different expressions of the male sex right and how these combine to systematically dispossess women of the bodily self-determination and dignity without which freedom is impossible. She exposes how the male sex right is at the bottom of everything from incessant coercion in heterosexual relationships to teen magazines promoting anal sex to young girls, the pathologization of women’s disinterest in intercourse, state endorsement of the sex industry, and the provision of “sexual surrogates” to disabled males presumed helpless otherwise to get laid. These seemingly disparate phenomena converge to form a unified force in the coordinated subordination of women. 

Her chapter on sexual harassment is a particularly instructive case study in how men’s insistence on their proprietorship of women’s bodies serves to enforce the social control of women, individually and as a class. Men’s hassling of women who have the gall to appear in public whilst female is ubiquitous, and recent advances in technology have yielded a cornucopia of new methods by which men can make women’s lives miserable. Standbys like namecalling and groping remain popular, but now women are plagued too by technologized trespasses, such as spy-cams transforming public restrooms into porn studios and dick pics spontaneously plonked onto their phones through the Cloud. And although there may be somewhat fewer serial killers running rampage these days, women continue to be raped and murdered for the fatal error of stepping outside unaccompanied. We have no less reason to fear for our lives. 

One problem typically absent from #MeToo reckonings with sexual harassment, which Jeffreys does not shy away from addressing, is the affront of endemic pornography. Porn has infiltrated the manmade environment as standard decor, such that video displays of women sexily choking themselves can be erected in shopping malls and accepted as ho-hum, regular ol’ advertising. Jeffreys writes that the omnipresence of sex-slave imagery is detrimental to females’ “experience of citizenship…our feelings about ourselves, our bodies, our worth and our safety.” 

The cumulative effect of the daily onslaught of sexualized abuses, insults, and threats women face is that we do not have the same freedom as men to live our lives and move through the world according to our will. Each individual man’s exercise of the male sex right contributes to the subordination of all women. One man after another they tell us our place and corral us there. 

In the latter half of the book, Jeffreys charts the history of the male sex right as it has been institutionalized through men’s sexual rights movements. Since the 1960s-70s “sexual revolution,” male fetishists have organized interest groups and latched onto the coat-tails of gay liberation in a calculated effort to sanitize and normalize habits formerly frowned upon as paraphilias. Jeffreys calls this effort “liberating the perversions,” its ultimate goal being to expand men’s freedom to satisfy the male sex right through the removal of those restrictions installed by public disapproval. She outlines the clever strategies men have used in lobbying for their sex rights: male sadomasochists’ quest to have their fetish repealed from the DSM as a psychiatric diagnosis; the attempt of pedophiles to re-brand themselves as “minor-attracted persons” and their pleas for sympathy and child sexual abuse dolls, to prevent them feeling “stigmatized” and raping actual children in fits of self-pity. The stealth crusade of transvestites to wrap their fetish so tightly in the banner of human rights that no one would spy their lacy pink underthings peeking out beneath. Of the sexual rights movements covered, the transvestites’ campaign has achieved the greatest success in securing state protections and convincing the general public to celebrate their predilections as “progressive.” But BDSM enthusiasts are not far behind, with “kink” now a mass-market sensation proudly defended through prohibitions against “kink shaming.” Less far along are those men who get their kicks donning diapers and forcing women to clean up after them when they shit themselves. They’re working on it, though, and Jeffreys shows that they have good cause to be encouraged by the triumphs of their brothers. 

For women, the harms of men’s sexual liberation have been severe. The reinforcement of the male sex right has empowered men to tyrannize with impunity; eroticized violence against women has been mainstreamed as chic sexual “play”; and we’ve been forced to acknowledge that, in a male-supremacist society, men’s right to arousal trumps even our most basic right to legal recognition. 

It is easy, reading Penile Imperialism, to grow despondent. It is even easier to grow disgusted, to crinkle one’s nose at the loathsome mass of male sexual cruelties Jeffreys has placed upon the dissection table and diagnose men as congenitally, terminally gross. This is not the conclusion she has in mind for us, however. Never succumbing to a fatalistic resignation to men’s hideousness, Jeffreys summons the radical feminist argument that male sexuality is socially constructed. Sexuality is not determined by biology, as men claim, but instead hammered into shape within the crucible of male dominion and unleashed into the world to perpetuate male master-class power. In the patriarchal war against women, men’s sexuality is a primary weapon. But what has been constructed can be taken apart. By denying the male sex right and thereby disrupting the sexual reproduction of male dominance, women could weaken men’s power over us; and with the dissolution of male dominion, male sexuality might be re-molded into something more tender than an instrument of oppression. Men are not doomed to be monsters entranced by their own erections. Women are not doomed to be their downtrodden playthings. The cycle can be broken. What Jeffreys calls for is the disarmament of male sexuality: this is our most urgent, most genuinely radical feminist mission. 

Sheila Jeffreys is a reliable font of sickening but essential knowledge, and with Penile Imperialism, she floods the trough. The horrors she lays out here are harrowing, and Jeffreys isn’t one to soft-pedal, but neither can she be accused of leading us through hell only to leave us in despair. Her mordant wit brings out the absurdity of male behavior at even its most abhorrent, creating room for laughter between the grimaces. And with her expert command of history and uncompromising analysis of the politics of male rule, she traces the connections women must begin making and taking seriously if we are to stop tiring ourselves out kicking at each freshly sprouted head of the hydra of our oppression and aim instead for its heart (or loins). Penile Imperialism gives us what we need to become as holistic in our revolt, and as sweeping in our vision of freedom, as men in their sex-fueled reign of terror have been. 

Aurora linnea is a radical lesbian (eco)feminist writer living at the ocean’s edge in the region of North America colonizers dubbed “Maine.” She strives to contribute to the global feminist struggle to end male dominion through poetic dissidence and uncompromising disloyalty to the necrophilic patriarchal empire presently destroying life on earth.