No Gun Ever Killed Anyone | FrontPage Magazine
By Mallory Millett On June 3, 2014
Editor’s note: Feminist writer and activist Kate Millet, the subject of the following article, is best known for her 1970 book, “Sexual Politics.”
Reprinted from TruthRevolt.org.
In the 1970′s I was alarmed to hear that my big sister, Kate Millett, who had serious mental health issues which had agonized my family and her friends for many years, was organizing a group called The Mental Patients’ Project in order to claim that the psychiatric community and society were “oppressing” people and “stigmatizing them with labels such as psychotic, bi-polar, schizophrenic, borderline personalities,” etc and unconstitutionally imprisoning them in hospitals thereby violating their civil rights. We, as a family, had struggled for years with Kate’s issues, many times attempting to hospitalize her so she could obtain the serious help she so obviously needed. She was a brutal sadist, a violent bully at whose hands everyone about her suffered. Throughout my childhood I was menaced and immeasurably traumatized, as I’m sure was Elliot Rodger’s younger sibling whom he, in fact, intended to murder.
At one point, in 1973, I found myself alone with her in an apartment in Berkeley, California where she did not allow me to sleep for five days as she raged at the world and menaced me physically. I had come to Berkeley at her entreaty to appear in the UCB Auditorium as she screened a film we’d produced together in the summer of 1970 (another horror story too long to recount here) and which was, in part, a biography of my life along with two other women. This movie (Three Lives) was the very first ever produced with not one iota of male presence. Even the people who delivered food to the set had to be female and Kate was touting it as the first all-woman film production in history.
Having had my youth overshadowed by Kate’s irrationality I warily traveled West and the moment I spotted her in the airport knew I “was in for it”. As she barreled across the airport’s expanse it was clear that she was in the throes of her illness and my heart throbbed with the desire to turn and run.
During the speech after the screening she fell apart onstage before a packed assembly of fawning admirers. It was a standing room only audience. In fact, they had to schedule a second screening at the last minute, as the response had been huge. As I sat next to her lectern during her incoherent ravings I witnessed the pained looks of confusion as they swept across those faces like a small gale whipping up across the top of a sea; at first tiny ripples gliding across the surface. They were polite until the realization took shape that she was making no sense whatsoever. People began glancing at each other, whispering a little then turning to one another with more energy, politeness gone, as some began to get up and leave. Soon many were slipping out and that was followed by a mad dash for the exits. She was babbling and shouting incoherently whilst I nodded and pretended every word made perfect sense. I could not bear to betray her in public. I sat there feeling my heart melting through my chest and draining into my belly with an indescribable sick empathy. Her humiliation was unbearable as the gale whipped up to a force ten and with one last enormous surge we were left in an empty room. The second screening was cancelled.
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Reprinted from TruthRevolt.org.
In the 1970′s I was alarmed to hear that my big sister, Kate Millett, who had serious mental health issues which had agonized my family and her friends for many years, was organizing a group called The Mental Patients’ Project in order to claim that the psychiatric community and society were “oppressing” people and “stigmatizing them with labels such as psychotic, bi-polar, schizophrenic, borderline personalities,” etc and unconstitutionally imprisoning them in hospitals thereby violating their civil rights. We, as a family, had struggled for years with Kate’s issues, many times attempting to hospitalize her so she could obtain the serious help she so obviously needed. She was a brutal sadist, a violent bully at whose hands everyone about her suffered. Throughout my childhood I was menaced and immeasurably traumatized, as I’m sure was Elliot Rodger’s younger sibling whom he, in fact, intended to murder.
At one point, in 1973, I found myself alone with her in an apartment in Berkeley, California where she did not allow me to sleep for five days as she raged at the world and menaced me physically. I had come to Berkeley at her entreaty to appear in the UCB Auditorium as she screened a film we’d produced together in the summer of 1970 (another horror story too long to recount here) and which was, in part, a biography of my life along with two other women. This movie (Three Lives) was the very first ever produced with not one iota of male presence. Even the people who delivered food to the set had to be female and Kate was touting it as the first all-woman film production in history.
Having had my youth overshadowed by Kate’s irrationality I warily traveled West and the moment I spotted her in the airport knew I “was in for it”. As she barreled across the airport’s expanse it was clear that she was in the throes of her illness and my heart throbbed with the desire to turn and run.
During the speech after the screening she fell apart onstage before a packed assembly of fawning admirers. It was a standing room only audience. In fact, they had to schedule a second screening at the last minute, as the response had been huge. As I sat next to her lectern during her incoherent ravings I witnessed the pained looks of confusion as they swept across those faces like a small gale whipping up across the top of a sea; at first tiny ripples gliding across the surface. They were polite until the realization took shape that she was making no sense whatsoever. People began glancing at each other, whispering a little then turning to one another with more energy, politeness gone, as some began to get up and leave. Soon many were slipping out and that was followed by a mad dash for the exits. She was babbling and shouting incoherently whilst I nodded and pretended every word made perfect sense. I could not bear to betray her in public. I sat there feeling my heart melting through my chest and draining into my belly with an indescribable sick empathy. Her humiliation was unbearable as the gale whipped up to a force ten and with one last enormous surge we were left in an empty room. The second screening was cancelled.
-go to links-
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