Millett Predicts Sexual Revolution, Accuses Left of Male Chauvinism

About 1600 people overflowed Hayden Auditorium at Boston University last night to hear Kate Millett, author of Sexual Polities, speak about the "sexual revolution,"

"A specter is haunting the United States these days, and they call it Women's Liberation," she began.

Millett went on to say that "the sexual polities of our sick society depends on male supremacy or patriarchy where all power is in the hands of the male class."

"The relationship of the sexes is a political relationship between two political entities," she said.

She described our "sexually sick culture" as based on "the inequality in economic opportunity for women" and as a "steady and demeaning cult of degrading woman to a sexual object."

Murder, Rape

In this "sexually sick culture," three fourths of murder victims are women; only one-twentieth of the murderers are women, she said. Rape is an "every day affair, a form of public lynching." Illegal abortion is equivalent to "state execution."

Women's liberation, she said, is dedicated to a "sexual revolution, a radical change in the traditional subordinate relationship between the sexes," changed but the whole consciousness of our society," the liberation of men as well as women."

"It must be difficult for a man obliged to maintain a superiority he does not possess," Millett said, "but men must heavily pay for his prerogatives by war."

She saw a definite connection between war and sexism: "Who would go to war without a sex cult?

"We can't afford the archaic definition of men as the warrior. This extremity of virility is dangerous to life itself."

She emphasized that the sexual revolution would have to be a "social and cultural revolution with an altered consciousness."

"We cannot be willing to give up morality for expedience. You can't have a revolution involved with justice if you begin by shooting someone for what's in his head-there is logically no end to it."

Millett criticized today's violent methods of revolution as "coerced by the male left which is essentially male chauvinist."

Transgressing Morals

"It is just another way to express masculinity; they won't get a new world, just more blood. You can't transgress your own moral mandate to attain a popular revolution."

She said women will be the "crucial element in the social revolution." After it is over, she hopes, maybe "we can retire sex from the arena of polities."

Millett received her Ph.D. from Columbia for her book Sexual Polities. She is presently conducting a program of women's studies at Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania.

To get rid of sexism, people must change not only economic and political institutions but also the whole consciousness of our society, achieving "the liberation of men as well as women, "she said.