The central feature of patriarchy is Men’s relentless efforts to control women’s sexuality and reproduction:

“For females to be subordinated and subjugated to males on a global scale, and for males to organize themselves and each other as they do, billions of female individuals, virtually all see life on this planet, must be reduced to more-or-less willing toleration of subordination and servitude to men.  The primary sites of this reduction are the sites of heterosexual relation and encounter – courtship and marriage-arrangement, romance, sexual liaisons, fucking, marriage, prostitution, the normative family, incest and child sexual assault.  It is on this terrain of heterosexual connection that girls and women are habituated to abuse, insult, degradation, and girls are reduced to women – to wives, to whores, to mistresses, to sex slaves, to clerical workers and textile workers, to the mothers of men’s children”

And on patriarchy being the bedrock of oppression:

“Without (hetero)sexual abuse, (hetero)sexual harassment and the (hetero)sexualization of every aspect of female bodies and behaviours, there would not be patriarchy, and whatever other forms or materializations of oppressions might exist, they would not have the shapes, boundaries and dynamics of the racism, nationalism, and so on that we are so familiar with.”

  Both selections from The Willful Virgin.