The Anti-Mary Exposed Read online

  Kate Millett, High Priestess

  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.”8 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.

  “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).”9

  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 but had preexisted her fame since childhood. “She was the most disturbed, megalomaniacal, evil and dishonest person I have ever known,” Mallory said. “She 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.”10

  “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 was published, Kate was ambushed at an evening church meeting by a cabal of lesbians at a church, who thought they were being 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 was what 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.”11 Kate’s relationship and the years of heartache and regret it brought to both spouses was hardly an isolated case; the movement destroyed relationship after relationship with the promise of free love and liberation, where bodies were used for amusement, and vows and promises were quickly tossed aside.

  Mallory, who spent a period devoted to her sister Kate and her radical ideas before returning to the Catholic faith of their childhood, 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 clearly involved in the occult, with a Marxist twist.

  “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.”12 This “litany” was chronicled in the introduction, but it’s worth repeating:

  “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.13

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

  The last straw for Mallory, when she knew she had to get away from Kate and her cronies, was when Kate aggressively tried to get Mallory to go to bed with her.

  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.’”14

  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 slut and be proud of it.’”15 Millett and her crew of eleven young women lived by this very philosophy; they started calling themselves “sluts” and engaged in orgies and every other sort of thing that captured the imagination.

  The most harrowing story in Mallory’s memory is of a dinner party on Halloween night at Kate’s loft apartment. Upon entering, there was a long, low table with twelve placements topped by a plate, a bowl of water, and sharp knife resting on it. In front of each place setting were twelve completely naked women, sitting cross legged on cushions. The naked woman at the head of the table was wrapped by a live ten-foot boa constrictor. Dumbstruck and appalled, Mallory and her friend watched in horror. They were invited to join in the ritual, but they told Kate they were just there to observe, which seemed to suit Kate since they were only willing to take off their shoes. “As they took their eyes off us to resume their ritual,” Mallory explains, “we tiptoed to our shoes and crept out running down those flights like bats out of hell. My feet barely touched the steps until we burst out onto the Bowery, shaking and huffing in shock and terror.”16

  Mallory marvels at how it happened, how this anti-apostolic crowd succeeded so wildly in their ragtag efforts from start to finish. “How could 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—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?”17 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.

  “I came to see all this lesbianism, witchcraft, atheistic politics as a psychotic dimension,” Mallory said. �
��It is just plain crazy to convince women that not only is it good to murder your own child in your womb, but it’s imperative that you buck up and have the courage to do it. Their argument for doing it was that men are killers so we must be like them. We’ll never see equality with men if we can’t prove ourselves capable of killing,” she added. “There was a deadly concoction of their own twisted ideology along with the inflated fears of the population explosion. These women were convinced they had to do it for the sake of their own future but also to save our planet.”18

  Mallory says that Kate’s friends were always covering for her, getting her out of mental institutions and other tight spots. Even after her death, they still covered up her radical mental health issues while insisting on her genius, seen here in this short eulogizing quote Gloria Steinem emailed to the New York Times after Kate’s death:

  Kate was brilliant, deep, and uncompromising. She wrote about the politics of male dominance, of owning women’s bodies as the means of reproduction, and made readers see this as basic to hierarchies of race and class. She was not just talking about unequal pay, but about woman-hatred in the highest places and among the most admired intellectuals. As Andrea Dworkin said, “The world was asleep, but Kate Millett woke it up.”19

  It was quite a rude awakening.

  Free Love and the Lavender Menace

  Men, as part of the patriarchy, were also the direct targets for radical feminists. They argued that men were the ones who had created the world wars, so men must be stopped—using any means possible, including sex-selective abortions to thin out their numbers. Fewer men meant less harm would afflict the planet. Men were the enemy. Therefore, monogamous heterosexual relationships were frowned upon while promiscuity of any stripe was lauded. With their elevated sense of the sisterhood, their own brokenness, and experience as Lost Girls, the highest ideal of feminism became lesbianism. A young Gloria Steinem wondered aloud when she, too, would finally be attracted to another woman. At some point, she and many other feminists like her made the transition from male lovers to lesbians. It was viewed as a rite of passage to wear the feminist badge. And instead of women jumping out of cakes for stag-parties, they engaged in their own forms of adult “entertainment,” too sordid to mention here.

  As an octogenarian, Steinem boasted that she had become gender neutral, as much female as she is male, or perhaps no gender at all. “In itself, homosexuality is as limiting as heterosexuality: the ideal should be to be capable of loving a woman or a man; either, a human being, without feeling fear, restraint, or obligation,” wrote Simone de Beauvoir, apparently in a way that was compelling among these self-proclaimed misfits. “A gender-equal society would be one where the word ‘gender’ does not exist: where everyone can be themselves,” said Steinem.

  Kate Millett, oscillating between bisexuality and lesbianism at different stages of her life, weighed in on the important role homosexuality could play for the revolution. “A sexual revolution begins with the emancipation of women, who are the chief victims of patriarchy, and also with the ending of homosexual oppression.” She didn’t limit herself to adults, but thought intergenerational sex was important. She was sympathetic to abolishing the age of consent laws so that children could also express their sexuality, or have it expressed upon them. Millett added that “one of children’s essential rights is to express themselves sexually, probably primarily with each other but with adults as well,” and that “the sexual freedom of children is an important part of a sexual revolution. … If you don’t change the social condition of children you still have an inescapable inequality.”20

  Cosmopolitan: Playboy for Playgirls

  Helen Gurley Brown, Kate Millett’s polar opposite personality-wise, has undoubtedly surpassed Kate’s influence as founder of Cosmopolitan magazine. Gurley Brown, author of Sex and the Single Girl, was fascinated by the success of Playboy and decided to make her own version of it; she got pointers from Hugh Hefner and followed the Playboy model as closely as she could, right down to using the same writing agents and layout model. It quickly became the hottest women’s magazine in the nation.21 Revenues for the magazine went from $601,000 in 1964 to $47.7 million in 1985 (much of which came from advertising for the now $4 billion birth control industry). While others were struggling to get advertisers, Cosmo had no problem getting backers. Other magazines quickly followed the Cosmo model, to the point where there was very little difference between Self, Glamour, and Cosmo content.

  Cosmo was all about selling a lifestyle. Motherhood was out, sex was in. Gurley Brown’s motto was “Hard work and sex will set you free (as long as you don’t have children).”22 Even the throw pillow on a couch in the magazine’s lobby said approvingly, “Good Girls Go to Heaven, Bad Girls Go Everywhere.”23 As part of this lifestyle, a Cosmo Girl could be anything she wanted, except a “virgin or a mother.” She could be a lesbian, a brothel owner, or a stripper, but she could not remain a virgin or become a mother. Cosmo Girls run roughshod over their fertility (although I’m sure this was never part of their advertising slogans). “Tough as a whore” was never meant to be a compliment, and yet the feminists turned it into just that.

  Sue Ellen Browder, who started on staff and then freelanced for Cosmopolitan for over two decades, was a dutiful writer of fiction for the popular magazine. Most readers didn’t realize, however, that she was making stories up. “Many of the alleged ‘real people’ we wrote about in the magazine were entirely fictitious. … The Cosmo Girl was not a real person but a persona, a mask the single girl lonely and alone in the world could put on to turn herself into the object of a man’s sexual fantasies.”24 The typical Cosmo Girl “had a glamour job, traveled a lot, and spent her hard-earned cash on pricey commodities to support her self-entered lifestyle.”25 “Make no mistake,” Browder is quick to add, “we’re not talking here about what’s popularly called spin. This was hard-core sex-revolution propaganda masquerading as fluff.”26

  Browder eventually converted to Catholicism, but that was after the damage was done as a Cosmo writer. She makes it clear that they weren’t doing women (or men) any favors, despite appearances. “As we visibly pretended to set women sexually free from their biology (via the pill and abortion), we were invisibly catering to and even helping to create, millions of sexually troubled, insecure, confused women, who were likely to attract equally confused, insecure men.”27

  Gurley Brown’s influence didn’t end with the magazine. In 1986, the magazine mogul invited the editors from thirteen different magazines—including Good Housekeeping, Redbook, Harper’s, Elle, Savvy, Family Circle, and others—to a meeting. “Helen spoke at the meeting,” Browder explains, “and the editors agreed to run pro-abortion articles in their March 1987 issues. Among the articles that appeared in Cosmopolitan that month were: ‘Abortion: Your Right Under Attack,’ ‘Choice: Separating Myth from Fact,’ ‘My Illegal Abortion,’ and an article on why eight famous women were pro-choice.”28 These women colluded in promoting pro-choice articles to soften American women to abortion.

  Magazines, starting with Cosmo and all the others following suit, were the sales arm of Kate Millett’s “litany.” It was Gurley Brown and her minions that were selling the American public on “promiscuity, eroticism, prostitution, abortion and homosexuality,” while laughing all the way to the bank.

  Wounds that Won’t Heal

  At the end of her book, Phyllis Chesler lists the many feminists for whom she still holds great affection, even though they have passed on; women such as Kate Millett, Andrea Dworkin, Rivka Haut, and Jill Johnston. Chesler worked with many other women, scores of whom didn’t make the list because they betrayed her and the sisterhood at some point. The other striking thing about Chesler’s close cadre of sisterhood friends was how many of them had severe mental health issues. “I realized that just as I was once afraid to admit—even to myself—that mental illness plagued my high-functioning mother and members of my family, so too have I denied the extent to which many of the most charismat
ic and original of feminist thinkers were mentally ill,” she wrote. “I don’t mean neurotic, difficult, anxious, or eccentric. I mean clinically schizophrenic or manic depressive, suicidal, addicted to drugs or alcohol, or afflicted with a personality disorder.”29

  It is not clear if any of these women finally came to terms with their mothers and found the healing they needed from their deep wounds. One of the tough realities of parental wounds is that the child, who loves the parent despite deep hurt, doesn’t want to go to that place of accusing the parent of terrible things. George MacDonald, who believed that Christ could redeem even Lilith, spoke to this reality in his book Lilith: A Romance. At one point in the novel, Lona—the daughter of Lilith and Adam—and her community are forced to fight Lilith’s aggressive and murderous village. Before the battle, Lona, speaking about her mother, says, “I would give my life to have my mother! She might kill me if she liked! I should just kiss her and die!”30 It is the static nature of a child to love her mother, no matter what. In fact, it isn’t hard to imagine the aborted children offering these sentiments to the mothers that will never hold them. Read it again: “I would give my life to have my mother! She might kill me if she liked! I should just kiss her and die!”

  The Lost Girls, these girls who were never affirmed properly by their parents, who looked under every rock and in every dark place for the answers to their questions—to affirm their lives, bring them peace, and flourish as authentic women—are the ones who have shaped the large majority of our cultural dialogue. Ultimately, their search has been fruitless. “Fruitless” not because they didn’t achieve their goals—the demonic desires chanted by Kate Millett and her anti-apostles have been realized through their victorious cultural revolution—but because it has only been destructive and debasing, not constructive and elevating. They destroyed the family out of hostility. As Fr. George Rutler says, “Hostility to truth is nurtured by the love of lies,” and the lies of the matriarchy sound empowering and liberating. The matriarchy sought to make the world a more comfortable place by unleashing the sensual above the rational and tolerance over principle, but at a terrible cost to everyone.