The Sexual Contract: Summary & Key Insights

The heart of my critique lies in confronting the foundational thinkers of modern political thought—Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau—and revealing how their vision of social order rests upon a silent agreement among men. Each of these theorists proclaims a revolution against patriarchal authority in its classical form, yet each reconstructs a version of it within the modern state. The paradox is that their 'freedom' depends upon the subjection of women.

In Hobbes’s world, all individuals in the state of nature are equally free, but his individual is clearly male. The social contract that forms the commonwealth not only protects men from one another but also guarantees their mastery over women. Women appear as subjects in the family, not as contracting partners. Similarly, Locke’s account of individual rights and property—so often celebrated as the basis of liberal democracy—rests on a familial foundation in which the husband’s power over wife and children remains legitimate. For Locke, private property and paternal authority are twins; civil freedom presupposes both.

Rousseau, perhaps the most revealing of all, makes explicit what Hobbes and Locke only imply. His *Social Contract* begins by declaring that man is born free and yet everywhere he is in chains. But in *Émile*, Rousseau tells us that woman’s nature is to please, to serve, and to obey. Sophie, the ideal woman, is fashioned for the sake of man’s moral development. Here patriarchy is no longer biological tyranny but moral necessity.

Across these canonical texts, women are not the co-authors of freedom but its medium. Each theorist redefines patriarchy from a father’s despotic right into a sexual right exercised by all men over all women. The public sphere arises as the domain of contract and consent, while the private sphere—the domain of marriage and domesticity—remains governed by dependence and duty. It is this structural duality that I expose as the sexual contract: the continuous, though hidden, foundation of civil society.

To understand what I mean by the sexual contract, we must return to the ‘original contract’ itself—the mythical act that brings society into being. Traditional political theory tells us that this contract transforms natural inequality into civil equality, replacing the arbitrary power of the father with consensual political order. Yet this narrative itself conceals another, prior contract: the sexual contract, by which men collectively establish their right over women.

The supposed freedom of the civil state depends upon women’s exclusion from it. Before men could agree to rule one another as equals, they had to reaffirm their shared dominion over those deemed unfitted for contract. As I argue, the patriarchal right of men over women does not vanish with the social contract; it is generalized. No longer the right of one father over his household, it becomes the right of men as a sex over women as a sex.

Marriage, motherhood, and the family were the institutional forms through which this right was encoded. The transformation of patriarchy into fraternity—of paternal to fraternal authority—was the key moment in the emergence of modern political order. What appears as a contract among equals is in truth a fraternal pact, a brotherhood formed through the exclusion and subordination of women.