Kate Millett - Sexual Politics (1970)

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

Kate Millett
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.

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

Kate Millett
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.

Kate Millett
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.

Kate Millett
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.

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

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

Kate Millett
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.

Kate Millett
Many women do not recognize themselves as discriminated against; no better proof could be found of the totality of their conditioning.

Kate Millett
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.

Kate Millett
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.

Kate Millett
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.

Kate Millett
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.

Kate Millett
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.

Kate Millett
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.

Kate Millett