In 1970, the academically successful but mentally unstable Kate Millett found herself on the cover of Time magazine with the title “The Politics of Sex: Kate Millett and Women’s Lib,” featuring her book Sexual Politics. Considered groundbreaking, Millett quickly became the intellectual force behind radical feminism. Time called her the “high priestess” of the movement and her book, its bible.

The New York Times also called her book “the Bible of Women’s Liberation” and “a remarkable document because it analyzes the need and nature of sexual liberation while itself displaying the virtues of intellectual and emotional openness and lovingness.” Time also called her “the Karl Marx of the Women’s Movement” because her book laid out a course in Marxism 101 for women. “Her thesis: The family is a den of slavery with the man as the Bourgeoisie and the woman and children as the Proletariat.”

A few months after Millett appeared on Time’s cover, the magazine ran a second article about her, this time less laudatory. The article, entitled “Women’s Lib: A Second Look,” attacked Millett for her bisexuality. The fame and the shame, many people say, destroyed her. Her personality wasn’t strong enough for the glowing limelight, followed by the dark scrutiny.

Dark and Demented

“Kate had a s***load of charm and, in the beginning, a commanding presence,” Phyllis Chesler recalls. “But she also had periods in which she didn’t sleep, raged at others, attempted suicide, and exploited her groupies — all the while feeling victimized by them (which she was). She couldn’t be counted on to remain lucid at a press conference. She also fell in love, and tried to have her way, quite aggressively, with woman after woman (including me).”

Millett died in 2017. But her sister, Mallory Millett, has started speaking up about the irreparable damage Kate did to Western culture through the popularization of her dark and demented work. Mallory attests to the fact that Kate’s mania wasn’t brought on by the Time articles. It had preexisted her fame since childhood. “She was the most disturbed, megalomaniacal, evil and dishonest person I have ever known,” Mallory said. “Kate tried to kill me so many times that it’s now an enormous blur of traumatizing horrors. She was a sadist, a torturer, a deeply-engrained bully who took immense pleasure in hurting others.”

“What the Time article did do,” Mallory says, “is it destroyed her marriage. Despite being seduced by a female professor in college, Kate had given up her lesbian lifestyle when she married Fumio Yoshimura, and for seventeen years, they had a happy marriage.”

After the Time article appeared Kate got ambushed at an evening church meeting by a cabal of lesbians, who felt left out of the movement’s limelight. “To defend herself against their charges, Kate confessed that she had once been a lesbian, unaware that two Time reporters were among the throng. This prompted the second Time article, but it also led Kate back to promiscuity as a lesbian and the ruin of her life with Fumio. It was something that she would regret for the rest of her life.”’

Relationships Destroyed

Kate’s relationship and the years of heartache and regret it brought to both spouses proved hardly an isolated case. The movement destroyed relationship after relationship with the promise of free love and liberation. Bodies were used for amusement and vows and promises were quickly tossed aside.

Mallory spent a period devoted to her sister Kate and her radical ideas before returning to the Catholic faith of their childhood. She eventually left Kate’s inner circle when things just got too weird. But she spent enough time with women in the movement to see its underbelly. Mallory has dark stories that make it clear these women were involved in the occult, with a Marxist twist.

A Litany of Evil

“It was 1969 and she took me to a meeting at her friend, Lila Karp’s place, in Greenwich Village,” Mallory explains. “At a consciousness raising (an idea imported from Mao’s China), twelve women gathered at a large table. They opened with a type of Litany from the Catholic Church. But this time it was Marxism, the church of the Left.”

“Why are we here today?” the chairwoman asked. “To make revolution,” they answered.

“What kind of revolution?” she replied. “The Cultural Revolution,” they chanted.

“And how do we make Cultural Revolution?” she demanded.

“By destroying the American family!” they answered.

“How do we destroy the family?” she came back.

“By destroying the American Patriarch,” they cried exuberantly.

“And how do we destroy the American Patriarch?” she probed.

“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, abortion and homosexuality!” they resounded.

Pregnancy Is “Barbaric.”

Such antics might seem insignificant except for the fact that these women achieved all of their goals. The rhetoric used to convince women to engage in these things seems ridiculous now, but somehow it was compelling then.

But the craziness didn’t stop with Kate. “Shulamith Firestone called pregnancy ‘barbaric,’ preferred artificial reproduction and imagined a utopia in which children, like Eros, would roam freely throughout the world.” Mallory adds, “Greer, with a PhD from Cambridge, encouraged women to taste their own menstrual blood and discouraged them from partnering monogamously. ‘Women,’ Greer claimed, ‘have very little idea of how much men hate them.’”

These ideas extended beyond their little troop of women through the women’s studies programs they helped establish across the country. In those women’s studies classes, a young impressionable girl, Mallory explains, “will be told, ‘Be an outlaw, be a damned outlaw Every law was concocted by dead white men. Be a sl*t and be proud of it.’”

Millett and her crew of eleven young women lived by this very philosophy. They started calling themselves “sl*ts” and engaged in orgies and every other sort of thing that captured the imagination.

Marxism and the Occult

Mallory marvels at how it happened, how this anti-apostolic crowd succeeded so wildly in their ragtag efforts from start to finish. “These twelve American women who were the most respectable types imaginable. Clean and privileged graduates of esteemed institutions: Columbia, Radcliffe, Smith, Wellesley, Vassar. The uncle of one was secretary of war under Franklin Roosevelt. How could they plot such a thing?” she asks.

“Most had advanced degrees and appeared cogent, bright, reasonable, and good. How did these girls rationally believe they could succeed with such vicious grandiosity? And why?” Clearly, there had to be more to their motivation and Kate’s mania. Their adherence to Marxism, and their engagement in the occult, made it a perfect storm of destruction. It was an anti-Marian bomb that is still exploding throughout Western culture.

 

This post is an excerpt from Carrie Gress’ new book, The Anti-Mary Exposed: Rescuing the Culture from Toxic Femininity.