Kate Millett
A sexual revolution begins with the emancipation of women, who are the chief victims of patriarchy, and also with the ending of homosexual oppression.Collection: Women
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.Collection: History
Men and women were declared equal one morning and everybody could divorce each other by postcard.Collection: Morning
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.Collection: Romantic
Many women do not recognize themselves as discriminated against; no better proof could be found of the totality of their conditioning.
What is our freedom fight about? Is it about the liberation of children or just having sex with them?
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.
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.
I'm slammed with an identity that can no longer say a word; mute with responsibility.
We're more sexually repressed than men, having been given a much more strict puritanical code of behavior than men ever have.
It would appear that love is dead. Or very likely in a bad way.
Aren't women prudes if they don't and prostitutes if they do?
This country is becoming increasingly authoritarian. It's based on capital punishment.
Because of our social circumstances, male and female are really two cultures and their life experiences are utterly different.
Isn't privacy about keeping taboos in their place?
They are more beautiful than anything in the world, kinetic sculptures, perfect form in motion.
As women, we're probably more protective of children. Also, we've been minors all of our history.
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.
I saw hell. The hospital had divided and conquered pretty successfully.
I was supposed to be women's lib, and now I'd exceeded it and gone over into international politics.
In those days, when you got boxed, that was it. A lot of old people were there because somebody wanted the farm. It was about property. People are treated like property.
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.
Mother had committed me for life. This is where I felt betrayed the most.
My sister said, You're making it hard for all us housewives in Nebraska.
Psychiatry causes so much death.
They weren't crazy. They were tired of being locked up. Even I could see that.
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.
What is the future of the woman's movement? How in the hell do I know? I don't run it.
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.
You won't do any more housework? Then you go to the bin.
The involuntary character of psychiatric treatment is at odds with the spirit and ethics of medicine itself.
We are women. We are a subject people who have inherited an alien culture.
We are naive and moralistic women. We are human beings who find politics a blight upon the human condition. And do not know how one copes with it except through politics.
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.
The image of the woman as we know it is an image created by men and fashioned to suit their needs.Collection: Men
The complete destruction of traditional marriage and the nuclear family is the 'revolutionary or utopian' goal of feminism.Collection: Goal
When one group rules another, the relationship between the two is political. When such an arrangement is carried out over a long period of time it develops an ideology (feudalism, racism, etc.). All historical civilizations are patriarchies: their ideology is male supremacy.Collection: Civilization
During depression the world disappears. Language itself. One has nothing to say. Nothing. No small talk, no anecdotes. Nothing can be risked on the board of talk. Because the inner voice is so urgent in its own discourse: How shall I live? How shall I manage the future? Why should I go on?Collection: Depression
Perhaps patriarchy's greatest psychological weapon is simply its universality and longevity. ... Patriarchy has a still more tenacious or powerful hold through its successful habit of passing itself off as nature.Collection: Powerful
Homosexuality was invented by a straight world dealing with its own bisexuality.Collection: Bisexual
To love is simply to allow another to be, live, grow, expand, become. An appreciation that demands and expects nothing in return.Collection: Appreciation
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 powerCollection: Power
The lesbian is the archtypical feminist, because she's not into men - she's the independent woman par excellence.Collection: Sex
The enormous social change involved in a sexual revolution is basically a matter of altered consciousness, the exposure and elimination of social and psychological realities underlying political and cultural structures. We are speaking, then, of a cultural revolution, which, while it must necessarily involve the political and economic reorganization traditionally implied by the term revolution, must go far beyond this as well.Collection: Women
You have to be a little patient if you're an artist. People don't always get you the first time.Collection: Artist
Let us stop being afraid. Of our own thoughts, our own minds. Of madness, our own or others'. Stop being afraid of the mind itself, its astonishing functions and fandangos, its complications and simplifications, the wonderful operation of its machinery--more wonderful because it is not machinery at all or predictable.Collection: Mind
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.Collection: Sex
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.Collection: Sex
No one should be adored, it's fundamentally immoral.Collection: Should
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.Collection: Crazy