Kate Millett Quotes

We're more sexually repressed than men, having been given a much more strict puritanical code of behavior than men ever have.

Prostitution is really the only crime in the penal law where two people are doing a thing mutually agreed upon and yet only one, the female partner, is subject to arrest.

The complete destruction of traditional marriage and the nuclear family is the 'revolutionary or utopian' goal of feminism.

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.

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.

How crazy craziness makes everyone, how irrationally afraid. The madness hidden in each of us, called to, identified, aroused like a lust. And against that the jaw sets. The more I fear my own insanity the more I must punish yours ...

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.

This country is becoming increasingly authoritarian. It's based on capital punishment.

The great mass of women throughout history have been confined to the cultural level of animal life in providing the male with sexual outlet and exercising the animal functions of reproduction and care of the young.

Monogamy and prostitution go together.

What is the natural reaction when told you have a hopeless mental illness? That diagnosis does you in; that, and the humiliation of being there. I mean, the indignity you're subjected to. My God.

Because of our social circumstances, male and female are really two cultures and their life experiences are utterly different.

The involuntary character of psychiatric treatment is at odds with the spirit and ethics of medicine itself.

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

It may be that a second wave of the sexual revolution might at last accomplish its aim of freeing half the race from its immemorial subordination
and in the process bring us all a great deal closer to humanity. It may be that we shall even be able to retire sex from the harsh realities of politics, but not until we have created a world we can bear out of the desert we inhabit.

I'm slammed with an identity that can no longer say a word; mute with responsibility.

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.

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.

It would appear that love is dead. Or very likely in a bad way.

Men and women were declared equal one morning and everybody could divorce each other by postcard.

Politics is repetition. It is not change. Change is something beyond what we call politics. Change is the essence politics is supposed to be the means to bring into being.

The image of the woman as we know it is an image created by men and fashioned to suit their needs.

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.

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

Aren't women prudes if they don't and prostitutes if they do?

Everybody believes in psychiatry; it's supposed to be for our own good. Let psychiatry prove that anybody has an illness, and I'd concede, but there is no physical proof.

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.

Hostility is expressed in a number of ways. One is laughter.

Mother had committed me for life. This is where I felt betrayed the most.

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.

Intercourse is an assertion of mastery, one that announces his own higher caste and proves it upon a victim who is expected to surrender, serve, and be satisfied.

To be a rebel is not to be a revolutionary. It is more often by a way of spinning one's wheels deeper in sand.

In many patriarchies, language, as well as cultural tradition, reserve the human condition for the male. With the Indo-European languages this is a nearly inescapable habit of mind, for despite all the customary pretense that 'man' and 'humanity' are terms which apply equally to both sexes, the fact is hardly obscured that in practice, general application favors the male far more often than the female as referent, or even sole referent, for such designations.

Perhaps nothing is so depressing an index of the inhumanity of the male-supremacist mentality as the fact that the more genial human traits are assigned to the underclass: affection, response to sympathy, kindness, cheerfulness.

This is how psychiatry has functioned-as a kind of property arm of the government, who can put you away if your husband doesn't like you.

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.

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

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?

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.

You won't do any more housework? Then you go to the bin.

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.

Psychiatry causes so much death.

They are more beautiful than anything in the world, kinetic sculptures, perfect form in motion.

It was horrifying. You wouldn't believe how people are treated there. You could see that these people had withdrawn so far that they just lived in their own minds. They did terrible things to themselves.

The concept of romantic love affords a means of emotional manipulation which the male is free to exploit, since love is the only circumstance in which the female is (ideologically) pardoned for sexual activity.

We are women. We are a subject people who have inherited an alien culture.

Ah, but depression - that is what we all hate. We the afflicted. Whereas the relatives and shrinks, the tribal ring, they rather welcome it: you are quiet and you suffer.

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.

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?

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.

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

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.

[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 rationale which accompanies that imposition of male authority euphemistically referred to as 'the battle of the sexes' bears a certain resemblance to the formulas of nations at war, where any heinousness is justified on the grounds that the enemy is either an inferior [part of the] species or really not human at all.

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

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.

With the first act of cruelty committed in the name of revolution, with the first murder, with the first purge and execution, we have lost the revolution.

Isn't privacy about keeping taboos in their place?

Homosexuality was invented by a straight world dealing with its own bisexuality.

People have a right to their own lives, and if you can't help somebody, you ought to get out of their way.

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.

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

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.

I believe there's a killer in all of us. I know there's one inside me. When you know the killer in you and you know also that you do not want to kill, you have to set yourself upon a course of learning. Not to kill that killer then, but to control it.

A sexual revolution begins with the emancipation of women, who are the chief victims of patriarchy, and also with the ending of homosexual oppression.

I was supposed to be women's lib, and now I'd exceeded it and gone over into international politics.

The whole bloody system is sick: the very notion of leadership, a balloon with a face painted upon it, elected and inflated by media's diabolic need to reduce ideas to personalities.