Daily Inspiration Quote by Kate Millett

Millett’s line doesn’t beg for sympathy; it issues an indictment. The sting is in the comparative: “more” sexually repressed than men. She’s not arguing that men are free, only that the system’s cruelty is unevenly distributed and carefully justified as “morality.” By naming a “strict puritanical code,” she pulls the veil off what often gets framed as personal modesty or individual choice and recasts it as enforcement: a behavioral regime with consequences, rewards, and punishments.

The subtext is power, not prudishness. Sexual repression here isn’t just about sex; it’s about managing women’s mobility, credibility, and risk. A society that polices women’s desire also polices their public presence: who gets believed, who gets protected, who gets shamed into silence. Millett’s phrasing implies a double standard so entrenched it becomes invisible, naturalized through religion, etiquette, family expectations, and later, “respectability” culture. Men “ever have” signals historical continuity: the rules weren’t accidentally harsher; they were designed that way.

Context matters: Millett emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when second-wave feminism was mapping how intimate life reflects political architecture. Her broader project was to treat sex as a site of governance, where consent, pleasure, and identity are shaped by institutions as much as by romance. The rhetorical move is blunt on purpose. It refuses the comforting myth that sexual norms are neutral, and it dares the listener to notice how freedom gets rationed along gendered lines.