The Sexual Contract

Within the reading for this week I found Carole Patemans's The Sexual Contract to captivate my interests the most. I've always been interested in social contract and specifically its political ramifications but Pateman argues a novel view. I am inclined to agree with her that there has been a historical neglect of the source and influence of private sphere. Most interesting, to me, though, is Pateman's assertion that "political right originates in the sex-right" (3). Carole Pateman argues that from the very beginning the social contract was superseded and in a manner determined (in its future exercise) by the core assumptions of the contract itself. Out of the language of individualism and common rights of the social contract era Pateman identifies the mode by which patriarchal control was replaced with paternal right in contract, labor, and gender relations. Pateman identifies the rationalization and obfuscation of the male paternal right as a function of the historic idea of the individual and free contracts. By clarifying the historical birth of the idea of individual as a male dominated perspective, Pateman gives creedence to the necessity of a reformulation of contract theory. To learn that there exists a purposefully embraced disconnect in the historical formulation between ideas of the individual and the female should give any ardent believer of social contract theory reason to pause. The inherent inequality of the original sexual contract which was re-manifested in all of social contract has resulted in a warped and obscured presentation off equal individuals. Just as Pateman asserts, in this manifestation of social contract men's sexual desires are fulfilled in the capitalist market while the division of female into the private sphere denotes prostitution as a vice and crime, rather than business contract. This example does not to seek to judge on the morality of prostitution, rather, it manifestly shows the disconnect between females and their "individual" right to their bodily labor. As historians, and specifically those focused on what is termed "Western" history, Pateman's argument is necessary to grasp how and why both the public and private are politically relevant. Even more, Pateman's argument suggests that we must not bind our understandings of social and political interactions to primarily private or public in nature.