Until this year, however, with the publication of a remarkable book called Sexual Politics , the movement had no coherent theory to buttress its intuitive passions, no ideologue to provide chapter and verse for its assault on patriarchy. In a way, the book has made Millett the Mao Tse-tung of Women's Liberation. That is the sort of description she and her sisters despise, for the movement rejects the notion of leaders and heroines as creations of the media-and mimicry of the ways that men use to organize their world. Despite the fact that it is essentially a polemic suspended awkwardly in academic traction, Sexual Politics so far has sold more than 15,000 copies and is in its fourth printing. Patriarchy is thus limned as the institutional foe.
Women are helpless, in other words, because men control the basic mechanisms of society.