Daily Inspiration Quote by Kate Millett

Muted is the tell: Millett is naming how patriarchy survives by looking ordinary. “Sexual dominion” isn’t framed as a loud doctrine with banners and sermons; it’s the low hum under everything, the arrangement that keeps registering as “just the way things are.” That’s the move that makes the line sting. If power were only what governments do, you could vote it out or litigate it away. Millett insists that the deepest training in hierarchy happens earlier and closer to home: in sex roles, in intimacy, in the taken-for-granted entitlement to women’s bodies, labor, and deference.

The phrase “most pervasive ideology” is deliberately expansive, almost daringly totalizing, because second-wave feminism was pushing against a culture that treated gender as nature and politics as something that happened elsewhere. By calling it “ideology,” she drags it into the realm of design, enforcement, and payoff. Someone benefits; someone learns to comply. “Present appearance” nods to a moment when legal and social reforms were making domination less legible - more polite, more individualized, more deniable - even as the underlying structure remained intact.

Her sharpest subtext is methodological: follow power to its root metaphor. If a society’s baseline lesson is that one sex can rule another, every other dominance begins to feel plausible, even moral. Millett isn’t only describing sexism; she’s arguing that sexuality is where a culture rehearses authority itself, until domination passes for romance, and coercion can masquerade as common sense.