Kate Millett Quotes

To love is simply to allow another to be, live, grow, expand, become. An appreciation that demands and expects nothing in return.

Patriarchy, reformed or unreformed, is patriarchy still: its worst abuses purged or foresworn, it might actually be more stable and secure than before.

I don't believe in monogamy, possessing people, the rightness or inevitability of jealousy.

It is interesting that many women do not recognize themselves as discriminated against; no better proof could be found of the totality of their conditioning.

Whatever the “real” differences between the sexes may be, we are not likely to know them until the sexes are treated differently, that is alike.

Hell, I don't want to grow old at all. I never want to die.

If knowledge is power, power is also knowledge, and a large factor in their subordinate position is the fairly systematic ignorance patriarchy imposes upon women.

And what is boredom? Perhaps the inability to find meaning, to complete a perception, to arrive at an understanding: partly grasped, but forever just out of reach. It is not lack of interest, but interest frustrated, cut off, imperfectly held. So says the Chronicle today. But for me it is the fear of emptiness.

Let's always be having an affair. Wherever we meet, however many times a year - let it always be an affair.

Governments who manipulate population growth have two choices: making maternity pleasant, or making it inescapable.

There are only moments. Live in this one. The happiness of these days.

Listening to the sound of the water, her sound, her lovely body glistening through the room a moment from now. There are only moments. Live in this one. The happiness of these days.

Because of our social circumstances, male and female are really two cultures and their life experiences are utterly different—and this is crucial. Implicit

Under patriarchy the female did not herself develop the symbols by which she is described. As

The term “politics” shall refer to power-structured relationships, arrangements whereby one group of persons is controlled by another. By

For it is precisely because certain groups have no representation in a number of recognized political structures that their position tends to be so stable, their oppression so continuous.

Coitus can scarcely be said to take place in a vacuum; although of itself it appears a biological and physical activity, it is set so deeply within the larger context of human affairs that it serves as a charged microcosm of the variety of attitudes and values to which culture subscribes. Among other things, it may serve as a model of sexual politics on an individual or personal plane.

But madness? That small remnant of altered consciousness, pure or in response to circumstances. Circumstances of life, even those of the body itself and its chemistry. How cruel and stupid to punish this as we do with ostracism and fear, to have forged a network of fear, strong as the locks and bars of a back ward. This is the jail we could all end up in. And we know it. And watch our step. For a lifetime. We behave. A fantastic and entire system of social control, by the threat of example as effective over the general population as detention centers in dictatorships, the image of the madhouse floats through every mind for the course of its lifetime.

In sex one wants or does not want. And the grief, the sorrow of life is that one cannot make or coerce or persuade the wanting, cannot command it, cannot request it by mail order or finagle it through bureaucratic channels.

The derogation of feminine status in lesser males is a consistent patriarchal trait. Like

However muted its present appearance may be, sexual dominion obtains nevertheless as perhaps the most pervasive ideology of our culture and provides its most fundamental concept of power.

Their chattel status continues in their loss of name, their obligation to adopt the husband’s domicile, and the general legal assumption that marriage involves an exchange of the female’s domestic service and (sexual) consortium in return for financial support.31

Sexual politics obtains consent through the “socialization” of both sexes to basic patriarchal polities with regard to temperament, role, and status. As

In democracies,5 for example, females have often held no office or do so (as now) in such minuscule numbers as to be below even token representation. Aristocracy,

There are moments in friendship, Fred had said, when the thing spreads beyond the ordinary margins, when something is said that carries you beyond the little guidemarks of restraint or indifference, like watercolours merging on a page, a moment when you survey a relationship from som transcendent point and see its beauty, the beauty of persons, of friendship itself.

Your only mistake then was in trusting the people who brought you here." I will hear this remark for the rest of my life: it will echo along the walls of my mind until all sound stops for me.

Prostitution, perversion, and pornography are intertwined with independence and radical politics in the history of outstanding women. Radclyffe Hall, Colette, Anaïs Nin, Kate Millett, Erica Jong--all of these women used the money they made from writing about sexuality to make it possible for them to live as rebels, dykes, feminists, artists, or whatever deviant and defiant identities they assumed.

As I was finishing the copyediting of Bastard, I found myself thinking about all I had read when Kate Millett published Flying: her stated conviction that telling the truth was what feminist writers were supposed to do. That telling the truth—your side of it anyway, knowing that there were truths other than your own—was a moral act, a courageous act, an act of rebellion that would encourage other such acts.

Writing is so much more problematic than drawing, full of moral pitfalls, ambiguity, public responsibility. If you record a day of your life, does the decision to do so change the shape of the day? One of Doris Lessing's days in The Golden Notebook is fifty-four pages long. It's complete; the rest are summaries - the "impression" of a day foisted artfully upon the reader by providing a few details. Fiction is made this way - as lineal perspective gives the illusion of three dimensions in drawing. But does the selection of a day - that you begin by knowing you must remember and observe - really affect it? Do you change the balance, distort the truth? The period itself, its choice and selection, does that not in itself constitute a kind of misconstruction, and the rest follow subconsciously?

Yeterince erkeksi ya da kadınsı olmamak, doğal yapıya aykırı düşmek gibi gösteriliyor. Ve hepimiz kadın ya da erkek olarark doğduğumuz için, cinsel kişiliğimizi yitirirsek yok olacağımız gibi bir düşünceye uyarlanmak isteniyoruz.

...the old pillars of an old decadent structure, are also built on the sexual fallacy. (Or as one is tempted to pun, phallacy.)

She is no one, because she lacks any trait that might render her visible: beauty, money, conformity.

Whatever the “real” differences between the sexes may be, we are not likely to know them until the sexes are treated differently, that is alike. And

Perhaps patriarchy’s greatest psychological weapon is simply its universality and longevity. A

Lady," we always call each other, partly a joke, partly in earnest, using still the old word, in its full flavor a kind of exorcism against "saleslady," "old lady," "ladylike." Relishing the anachronism, even the formality a type of aphrodisiac, a contrast to our delight in the horny, the vulgar, the vernacular which we cultivate just as ardently.

Come here." I stop like a thief in a pantomime. And then dive into the warmth next to her. "Snuggling" - surely the most pleasant thing in the world. Scrunching further and further into the mattress as we struggle closer and closer warmer and warmer nearer and nearer, our bodies like a letter fitting into an envelope, my legs over her legs, our hips sliding against each other, her arm tighter and tighter around my shoulders, my face nestled more and more firmly into her collarbone. It is bliss. The simplest and most primitive bliss. A childlike, sexual, friendly, animal bliss.

As patriarchy enforces a temperamental imbalance of personality traits between the sexes, its educational institutions, segregated or co-educational, accept a cultural programing toward the generally operative division between “masculine” and “feminine” subject matter, assigning the humanities and certain social sciences (at least in their lower or marginal branches) to the female—and science and technology, the professions, business and engineering to the male. Of

What I want is outrageous: all the possible pleasures of freedom. I want to go beyond the old system of possession, the notion of person as a thing owned. Like so many of us now, I'm experimenting with life, trying to get it right, to do it better, aware how often we're merely rationalizing — but still trying to create a new kind of social existence.

although of itself it appears a biological and physical activity, it is set so deeply within the larger context of human affairs that it serves as a charged microcosm of the variety of attitudes and values to which culture subscribes. Among

It is necessary to realize that the most sacrosanct article of sexual politics in the period, the Victorian doctrine of chivalrous protection and its familiar protestations of respect, rests upon the tacit assumption, a cleverly expeditious bit of humbug, that all women were "ladies"—namely members of that fraction of the upper classes and bourgeoisie which treated women to expressions of elaborate concern, while permitting them no legal or personal freedom. The psycho-political tacit here is a pretense that the indolence and luxury of the upper-class woman’s role in what Veblen called “vicarious consumption” was the happy lot of all women. The efficacy of this maneuver depends on dividing women by class and persuading the privileged that they live in an indulgence they scarcely deserve... To succeed, both the sexual revolution and the Woman's Movement which led it would have to unmask chivalry and expose its courtesies as subtle manipulation.

And what is it that you get from women?' asking me what I never asked myself. 'I don't know. Is it energy, support, tenderness? The wonder of rapport, a life experience close enough so you know the same jokes. Did your mother always warn you to wear clean underwear, just in case you had an accident?

despite a high incidence of women in certain professions such as medicine. The status and rewards of such professions have declined as women enter them, and they are permitted to enter such areas under a rationale that society or the state (and socialist countries are also patriarchal) rather than woman is served by such activity.

Başkaldıran olmak, her zaman devrimci olmak değildir. Çoğunlukla, batağa daha fazla saplanmak demektir.

Probably one should never feel such gaiety or such despair. Better to operate on an even keep like Friedan and Gloria and the others.

The subordinated group has inadequate redress through existing political institutions, and is deterred thereby from organizing into conventional political struggle and opposition.

When you have been told that your mind is unsound, there is a kind of despair that takes over

Love has been the opium of women, like religion by the masses. While we loved, men ruled.

Stoller’s direction offer proof that gender identity (I am a girl, I am a boy) is the primary identity any human being holds—the first as well as the most permanent and far-reaching. Stoller

Comprehending at one bound the myth of Demeter and knowing that she was Demeter, that the fountain between her thighs was my own youth and I Persephone, who had come to her in spring and would come forever, for she was my youth, older than I and yet my youth, my ever-recurrent spring, and spring itself only a metaphor for the source, the waters, the hidden river, the tunnel of life between her thighs.

...we touched each other's center, perfectly, just the fingertip upon the clitoris moving more and more slowly, our eyes steady on each other and the delicate pressure fine and more fine until all motion stopped in one still point remembered always, a vision. And then I did not know her pleasure from mine, my body from hers. We fell into and became each other. Then we slipped over the edge, entered and made love.

Yeterince erkeksi ya da kadınsı olmamak, doğal yapıya aykırı düşmek gibi gösteriliyor. Ve hepimiz kadın ya da erkek olarak doğduğumuz için, cinsel kişiliğimizi yitirirsek yok olacağımız gibi bir düşünceye uyarlanmak isteniyoruz.

Ataerkik düzendeki sınıfın başlıca etkilerinden biri, bir kadını bir diğerinin karşısına koymaktır. Geçmişte fahişelerle namuslu kadınlar karşılaştırılırken, günümüzde de çalışan kadınlarla ev kadınları karşı karşıya getirilmektedir. Bu kadınlardan birincisi ötekinin sahip olduğu "güvenlik" ve saygınlığa gıpta ederken, ikincisi de kendisine saygınlık kazandıran sınırlamaların ötesinde, özgürlük, serüven, dünyayı tanımak diye adlandırdığı birinci kadının yaşantısına özlem duyar. İkili düzen standardının çeşitli elverişliliklerinden yararlanan erkek, her iki kadının da dünyasını paylaşır ve üstün toplumsal ve ekonomik gücü ile de birbirlerine yabancılaşmış bu kadınları birbirlerine rakip duruma getirir.

Ataerkil düzendeki sınıfın başlıca etkilerinden biri, bir kadını bir diğerinin karşısına koymaktır. Geçmişte fahişelerle namuslu kadınlar karşılaştırılırken, günümüzde de çalışan kadınlarla ev kadınları karşı karşıya getirilmektedir. Bu kadınlardan birincisi ötekinin sahip olduğu "güvenlik" ve saygınlığa gıpta ederken, ikincisi de kendisine saygınlık kazandıran sınırlamaların ötesinde, özgürlük, serüven, dünyayı tanımak diye adlandırdığı birinci kadının yaşantısına özlem duyar. İkili düzen standardının çeşitli elverişliliklerinden yararlanan erkek, her iki kadının da dünyasını paylaşır ve üstün toplumsal ve ekonomik gücü ile de birbirlerine yabancılaşmış bu kadınları birbirlerine rakip duruma getirir.

[Prostitution] is ultimately an experience we all share. But diluted. I think many of us, maybe all of us, are really selling and not knowing we're doing it. The question lies than in who among us could stand, or will have to stand on Broadway tonight.

The arbitrary character of patriarchal ascriptions of temperament and role has little effect upon their power over us. Nor do the mutually exclusive, contradictory, and polar qualities of the categories “masculine” and “feminine” imposed upon human personality give rise to sufficiently serious question among us. Under their aegis each personality becomes little more, and often less than half, of its human potential. Politically, the fact that each group exhibits a circumscribed but complementary personality and range of activity is of secondary importance to the fact that each represents a status or power division. In the matter of conformity patriarchy is a governing ideology without peer; it is probably that no other system has ever exercised such a complete control over its subjects.

Yet one can think of a love thats free based on respect, affection, understanding, tenderness. How great to live that way. And to love many people and love them well. To have the job of that, of what love is without possessiveness, exclusiveness, jealously, property, economic dependence, ego conflicts. How full of flowers, music, highs, conversation, fantastic love making... all of it could be. And I think its worth it. But never let it prevent you from the knowledge and expectation of how hard its going to be, how scary - until we can live that way. And its now only the hedonist but the pragmatist that urges we practice for living the revolution, since surely there wont be once unless weve made some progress at living the new way. And it must be new: revolutions got to be a better way to live, lovingly even. Not hate: we have such a sickening amount of that already.

Between 1970 and 1971, the feminist movement made significant strides. In 1970, the Equal Rights Amendment was forced out of the House Judiciary Committee, where it had been stuck since 1948; the following year, it passed in the House of Representatives. In response to a sit-in led by Susan Brownmiller, Ladies' Home Journal published a feminist supplement on issues of concern to women. Time featured Sexual Politics author Kate Millett on its cover, and Ms., a feminist monthly, debuted as an insert in New York magazine. Even twelve members of a group with which Barbie had much in common—Transworld Airlines stewardesses—rose up, filing a multimillion-dollar sex discrimination suit against the airline. Surprisingly, Barbie didn't ignore these events as she had the Vietnam War; she responded. Her 1970 "Living" incarnation had jointed ankles, permitting her feet to flatten out. If one views the doll as a stylized fertility icon, Barbie's arched feet are a source of strength; but if one views her as a literal representation of a modern woman—an equally valid interpretation— her arched feet are a hindrance. Historically, men have hobbled women to prevent them from running away. Women of Old China had their feet bound in childhood; Arab women wore sandals on stilts; Palestinian women were secured at the ankles with chains to which bells were attached; Japanese women were wound up in heavy kimonos; and Western women were hampered by long, restrictive skirts and precarious heels. Given this precedent, Barbie's flattened feet were revolutionary. Mattel did not, however, promote them that way. Her feet were just one more "poseable" element of her "poseable" body. It was almost poignant. Barbie was at last able to march with her sisters; but her sisters misunderstood her and pushed her away.

Başkaldırıdan devrime geçiş, geçmiş özleminden kurtulup yeni alternatifler yaratmayı gerektirir.

No one should be adored, it’s fundamentally immoral.

Millett was the author of Sexual Politics, her dissertation at the communist hotbed Columbia University. It became a cultural juggernaut when published in 1970. There, she decried the “patriarchy” of the monogamous nuclear family. The book landed Kate on the cover of Time magazine on August 31, 1970, which dubbed her the “high priestess” and “Mao Tse-tung of the Women’s Movement.” Her angry book served as the bible, the feminist-Marxist manifesto, of women’s lib.645 The New York Times referred to Sexual Politics as “the Bible of Women’s Liberation.”646

Kate Millett: Marxist, feminist, advocate for gay rights, for new sexuality, for new spousal relationships, and on and on. She channeled her revolutionary energies into a campaign to take down marriage and family, the backbone of American society. And she practiced what she preached. Though she was married, she practiced lesbianism, becoming bisexual. She had started that lifestyle at Columbia while writing Sexual Politics. This would, predictably, end her marriage to her husband, who found the trashing of these norms unnatural and detrimental to the health of their marriage. Of course, to many in our brave new world, this makes Kate a heroine. Today, the bio for Kate Millett at the “GLBTQ” website hails her as a “groundbreaking” “bisexual feminist literary and social critic.

About halfway through high school, I abandoned my childhood religious upbringing. Not surprisingly, given my experience with my father, I was drawn irresistibly to the feminist movement, devouring all the classic books from Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique to Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex to Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics, and many more. Later, while living in Europe, I stumbled across L’Abri, the ministry of Francis Schaeffer in Switzerland. (We had lived in Europe when I was young, and I had gone back.) At L’Abri, for the first time I discovered that there exists something called Christian apologetics, and I was stunned. I had no idea that Christianity could be supported by logic and reasons and good arguments. Eventually I found the arguments persuasive and I reconverted to Christianity. Yet that was only the beginning of a decades-long process of spiritual and psychological healing from my father’s abuse.

Las personas que tan apasionadamente desprecian a la mitad de sus compatriotas son incapaces de sentir el mínimo autorrespeto.

Girl next to me at the baggage counter said she wrote her way to liberation. How did you handle first person narrative, I asked her. And said she knew the hole of depression, had been there. But I am out now, I escaped, I told her. 'You will fall into it again,' she said. Already I was sliding.

Support Gay Liberation the whole way. But forget the practice. Nothing in it but the pain. They can say in public that I'm queer, but that doesn't mean I have to be. Tell the truth––then outwit it in private.

It started with Carol and it was almost an accident. Woke up one night because I had to tell Fumio, sitting up in bed smoking, terrified, what will he do, will he kill me, will he ever speak to me again, so I made him wake up and I told him. He laughed into his pillow. Why are you laughing? 'Well, at least you won't get pregnant," ...giggled, and went back to sleep.

Patriarchal religion and ethics tend to lump the female and sex together as if the whole burden of the onus and stigma it attaches to sex were the fault of the female alone. Thereby sex, which is known to be unclean, sinful, and debilitating, pertains to the female, and the male identity is preserved as a human, rather than a sexual one.

herrschaft, a relationship of dominance and subordinance.3

Control of these fields is very eminently a matter of political power. One

Kadınlar da konuşuyorlar hani. Bütün ezilen topluluklar gibi, kadınlar da konuşkan insanlardır, çünkü onlara başka hiçbir anlatım olanağı tanınmaz.

For 150 years, women agitated against the patriarchy but never quite figured out a way to erase it completely. Then it happened, as if the magic spell had been discovered. Women found the secret way to bring down the patriarchy once and for all in Kate Millett’s litany: destroying the family.

Sex is deep at the heart of our troubles, Genet is urging, and unless we eliminate the most pernicious of our systems of oppression, unless we go to the very center of the sexual politic and its sick delirium of power and violence, all our efforts at liberation will only land us again in the same primordial stews.

L'oppressione crea la psicologia dell'oppresso.

Kate Millett diseccionó la nueva figura del «canalla bohemio» como objeto de culto «antiburgués» y anticapitalista para los chicos de izquierdas y le redefinió como nuevo modelo de machista, un mero coleccionista de relaciones sexuales con mujeres a las que en el fondo desprecia.

They want Christians to believe this is about justice and equality. But it’s not. Take, for example, the Gay Liberation Manifesto of 1971. It said, “Equality is never going to be enough. What is needed is a total social revolution, a complete reordering of civilization. Including society’s most basic institution, the patriarchal society.”22 Along the same lines, there is the key leader in the second wave of feminism in America, Kate Millett. She was a homosexual woman and author who held meetings in one of which the following call and response were heralded: “Why are we here today?” “To make revolution,” the group answered. “What kind of revolution?” “The Cultural Revolution,” “And how do we make Cultural Revolution?” “By destroying the American family!” “How do we destroy the family?” “By destroying the American Patriarch,” they cried exuberantly. “And how do we destroy the American Patriarch?” the leader replied. “By taking away his power!” “How do we do that?” “By destroying monogamy!” they shouted. “How can we destroy monogamy?” “By promoting promiscuity, eroticism, prostitution, and homosexuality!”23 The goal of the sexual revolution was a complete leveling of authority. The adherents of the sexual revolution didn’t really hate men. They hated hierarchy. They hated order and objectivity. They did not hate fathers; they hated the Father. The agenda of the sexual revolutionaries is often lost on Christians. For example, a very prominent Southern Baptist pastor recently said in a message on homosexuality that to be like Jesus, “churches must be known as the friends of the LGBT community.” It is just here that our present challenge comes into high relief. Christians should certainly be friendly to LGBT people. Jesus was a friend of sinners. My family and I have had homosexual neighbors with whom we enjoyed a friendly relationship. But my concern is the claim that “churches must be known as friends to the LGBT community.” In our times, there is a world of difference between being a friend and being recognized as a friend by those who don’t know Christ. If your goal is to be known as a friend, you may end up being no real friend at all.

LONGER NONFICTION: RECOMMENDED READING Allison, Dorothy. Two or Three Things I Know for Sure. New York: Dutton, 1995. Bradbury, Ray. Dandelion Wine. Thorndike, ME: G.K. Hall, 1999. Burroughs, Augusten. Dry. New York: St. Martin's Press, 2003. Coetzee, J.M. Boyhood: Scenes From Provincial Life. New York: Viking, 1997. Eighner, Lars. Travels With Lizbeth. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1993. Hamper, Ben. Rivethead: Tales From the Assembly Line. New York: Warner Books, 1991. Knipfel, Jim. Quitting the Nairobi Trio. New York: J.P. Tarcher/Putnam, 2000. Lewis, Mindy. Life Inside: A Memoir. New York: Atria Books, 2002. Millett, Kate. The Loony-Bin Trip. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000. Rose, Phyllis. The Year of Reading Proust: A Memoir in Real Time. New York: Scribner, 1997.

Imagine anything at all, for after all one is free to do it here. That is the purpose of this place; it was made for you to be mad in. And when you give in and have a real fine bout, they have won. And then they have their evidence as well. But the temptation in the long hours is hard to resist, and it comes over you like the drowsiness of the powders. . . . The moments of clarity are the worst. You burn in humiliation remembering yesterday's folderol, your own foolish thoughts. Not the boredom of here, the passive futility of reality, but the flights of fancy, which would convict you, are the evidence that you merit your fate and are here for a purpose. The crime of the imaginary. The lure of madness as illness. And you crumble day by day and admit your guilt. Induced madness. Refuse a pill and you will be tied down and given a hypodermic by force. Enforced irrationality. With all the force of the state behind it, pharmaceutical corporations, and an entrenched bureaucratic psychiatry. Unassailable social beliefs, general throughout the culture. And all the scientific prestige of medicine. Locks, bars, buildings, cops. A massive system.

Mientras nosotras amábamos ellos gobernaban el mundo.

las mujeres hemos sido protagonistas indiscutibles de la pérdida de la razón. Pero la locura ha estado siempre envuelta en la vergüenza.