The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution

By Shulamith Firestone

Book Overview

"The Dialectic of Sex is one of the world-changing manifestos of our time; reading it, one feels the extraordinary excitement of imagining human society anew." --Vivian Gornick

The landmark manifesto by Shulamith Firestone, now with an introduction by Andrea Long Chu.

A revelation upon its first publication in 1970--when Shulamith Firestone was just twenty-five years old--The Dialectic of Sex was the first book of the women's liberation movement to combine feminist critique and full-scale radical politics. The problem of gender oppression, Firestone argues, organizes our society. It can only be eliminated by restructuring the entire world.

And so the book ranges with fearless, almost reckless ambition across feminist history, romantic love, the exploitation of children, ecology, art, cybernetics, and the liberating possibilities of artificial reproduction. Blazingly ahead of its time, The Dialectic synthesizes Marx, Engels, and Freud with feminist consciousness to insist upon complete reproductive autonomy, the fluidity of sex and gender, and an end to the violence embedded in the so-called private sphere.

Firestone wanted not just freedom from oppression but freedom for something: a new way of organizing human life, desire, and connection. With curiosity, wit, and a dizzying intellectual force, The Dialectic of Sex asks readers to stretch their imaginations, to see that the other side of suffering is not only relief but the possibility of something different.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 125045915X
• ISBN13: 9781250459152
• Release Date: February 2027
• Publisher: Picador USA
• Length: 240 Pages
• Weight: 1.00 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 5.4" x 8.3"

Customer Reviews

Recommended.

I really should've read this book again so I could write a compotent review but I'd rather read a new book instead. Anyway, you should buy this book if you grew up in the 1990's and think that nothing can shock you and that you've been there, done that, heard everything, etc. I listen to Notorious B.I.G. and Eminem and I can honestly say Firestone is the "illest". Bizarre from D12 jokes about stuff that Firestone takes seriously. This is not in any way a liberal book. Firestone wants to free children, translation: make them grow up faster then they already are. Firestone is not a democrat, not with a big "d" or a little "d". She advocates a Dictatorship of the Proletariat as a transtitional phase to Communistic Anarchy. Not only did she not get put in jail, her book is in my college library. The lady just doesn't give a f... I'd love to hear what a Republican would have to say about this if he or she could even believe what they were reading. Seriously folks, as an experiment, go to a Southern Baptist church where the preacher screams about the devil all the time. I betcha my paycheck that the "devil" and Firestone have a whole ishload in common. I digress. "Down with childhood." Classic.

An amazingly DARING book!

This book is a must read for anyone daring enough to check their social programing at the door and think for themselves! Firestone pins her readers eyes open and makes them take a hard and scrutinizing look at the nuclear family structure. Her book is more daring now than ever as we enter an age in which the "post-nuclear" family emerges and technological advances such as "in vitro fertilisation" become a common reality rather than the stuff of science fiction. Even though this book was written in the 1970's it was far ahead of its time because of the insights and solutions it offered into the abolishment of a patriarchal caste system which still exists today. Her ideas on childhood as a social construct will have you shaken up! Down with childhood indeed, Shulamith Firestone's book will definitely get the wheels turning up there!!!

Brilliant Absurdist Dystopia--must read for all MEN

I suppose a work like this is valuable mostly for its reinterpretation of standard strains of Western (masculine) thought. Ms. Firestone makes astute observations that illustrate the failures of Marxism and the Psychoanalytical movement at understanding what women want. Men will never get it and any system devised by men will never get it. Quite honestly, most men don't want to get it. The mystery is the thrill. This is why marriage is such a drag. It takes away the thrill of it all and replaces it with slow, creeping death. It also creates stability. Something that Ms. Firestone's proposed solutions do not offer. Children need stable environments to reach their potential. How a commune would provide this, I don't know. I agree with Ms. Firestone that childhood should be abolished. Mostly because I do not see how children benefit from our paternizing treatment of them. Children ought to be treated as adults and given the same rights. However, I do not agree that they should experience "as much genital sex (with adults) as they are capable of", as Ms. Firestone suggests near the end of her book. What would stop adults from taking advantage of the child's smaller physicality in these instances? What kind of paradise allows the wholesale sexual abuse of its children? Or, perhaps, sexual perversion (along with art, music, poetry and religion) would also be eradicated? I recognize that I will never be pregnant. I know it hurts worse than anything I could ever imagine. But, it isn't barbaric. It makes sense that Ms. Firestone was 25 when this came out. Most women I have known around that age were decisively against ever having a baby. Somehow, though, 5 years on, they found themselves wanting a baby. Conditioning? Undue pressures from family members and the media? Or is it simply that women are biologically constructed to desire the experience of childbirth. Maybe that's Firestone's whole point. We need to figure out a way to rewire women so they don't ever reach the point where babies make them swoon. Sure. I would like to get a glimpse at what a futuristic polymorphous world would look like, I would like to imagine a world without sexual repression or war. But I recognize the instincts that create them. Because I also know that they are the same instincts that create great tragic art. For all its evils, Western civilization has allowed us to explore our inevitable mortal death. Firestone's contention that there will be no death is preposterous. Without the threat of death, life is not worth living. The struggle against death has created us. It has created all that we are.

A powerful argument for radical feminist revolution.

Shulamith Firestone's 1970 text calling for a radical re-thinking of the basis of modern social structures remains a powerful analysis of the state of patriarchy and the feminist movements of the Twentieth Centry. Firestone's central claim is that only in abolishing the sexual differences rooted in biology and reproduction can women, and by extension all humans, free themselves of the sex caste system which privileges men over women and children. In her book, she takes on important thinkers such as Freud and Marx, exposing their oversights and/or oppositions to a true revolution of sex. She ultimately looks to technology (cybernation) as the means by which humans can finally take control of reproductive necessity and correct the accident of Nature that insists on sexual difference and differential power dynamics.