One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest Essay

Reversing the roles
Author Ken Kesey builds the perfect feministic antagonist as well as the perfect male protagonist to combat her ways during a time where women had begun their fight for gender equality and social acceptance. In the book One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, by Ken Kesey,
Kesey uses the power struggle between Nurse Ratched and Randle McMurphy to capture the
1960’s american feminist movement by reversing the gender roles using sexual connotations and innuendos, as well as the men's’ own social ideals of how men and woman should interact.
Kesey gives the reader subtext and life-like situations to capture what men think of when they hear the word “ feminist”.
One could argue that the 1960’s were a truly eventful decade. From the

This is the first sign of the reversal, the majority of the population is male, yet they do nothing to gain their independence. This symbolizes how Kesey views what would happen if things were different and women ruled the world. This gives the men of the (then) modern society who read the book insight as to how women felt oppressed on a daily basis, by comparing themselves to the rebel McMurphy in one way or another.
In One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, we see several sexual references, proving Kesey's view on just how much men need their women, and how little the men realize how much control women have over them. Nurse Ratched is smart in the sense that she knows the men of her time are sexually driven, and uses this to her advantage of “breaking” them. By discrediting the mens individuality and Sexuallity she uses their insecurities and doubts of their manhood to get them to completely succumb to her will. “...something strange about the way they all knuckle under to that smiling flour-faced old mother there with the too-red lipstick and the too-big boobs”
(McMurphy 49). McMurphy obviously notices that the men are under her complete control.