Sexual Politics is the debut book by American writer and activist Kate Millett, based on her PhD dissertation at Columbia University.

In contrast, she applauds the writer Jean Genet for writing queer sex scenes that critically examine these myths.

Genet's work points to the "sick delirium of power and violence" that must be analyzed if society is to achieve sexual liberation.

She discusses the impact of societal expectations on women's self-perception and relationships and examines how, due to the socialization of children, gender roles are often ingrained from an early age.

[citation needed] The psychoanalyst Juliet Mitchell argues that Millett, like many other feminists, misreads Freud and misunderstands the implications of psychoanalytic theory for feminism.

[17] The author Richard Webster writes that Millett's "analysis of the reactionary character of psychoanalysis" was inspired by the philosopher Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex (1949).

She accused it of spawning what she sees as the excesses of women's studies departments, especially for attacks on the alleged pervasive sexism of the male authors of the Western canon.

[19] The historian Arthur Marwick described Sexual Politics as, alongside Shulamith Firestone's The Dialectic of Sex (1970), one of the two key texts of radical feminism.

[20] Doubleday's trade division, although it declined to reprint it when it went out of print briefly, said Sexual Politics was one of the ten most important books that it had published in its hundred years of existence and included it in its anniversary anthology.

"[22] The article was written by Marcia Seligson and praised the book as "a piece of passionate thinking on a life-and-death aspect of our public and private lives."