Any number of articles have compared Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics to Mao’s Little Red Book, both before and after Mao’s death in 1976 and Milllet’s death in 2017. Both treatises explicitly aimed to raise class consciousness and create Cultural Revolution.

Marxists have largely disavowed Mao’s book and revolution.

Some 50 years after Millett’s book came out, feminists such as Catharine A. MacKinnon, Eleanor Pam, Yoko Ono, Lisa Millett Rau, Joan Casamo, Gloria Steinem, Phyllis Chesler, Linda Clarke, Kathleen Turner, Hillary Clinton, Robin Morgan, Nicole Fernandez Ferrer, Cythnia MacAdams, have described Millett’s work as foundational to their movement’s work and have promised to keep it in print forever. 

Given the importance placed on sex and race in the United States today, it may be more prescient to compare Sexual Politics to Mein Kampf.

I think it’s more appropriate to make this specific comparison because:

• Sexual Politics is considered the classic work on raising sexual class consciousness.
• Mein Kampf is considered the classic work on raising racial class consciousness.

Moral Equivalence

NOTE: This article is in no way written to compare a Minnesota Author to Adolf Hitler. Analogies are not persuasive and Hitler analogies are the dumbest, laziest, analogies on the internet.

My aim is to illuminate ideas that are new to readers by showing the similarities and differences of the books, not the authors. 

I’ve heard first-hand accounts of Kate Millett’s mental illness from her sister and accounts and other women who knew her.  Dozens of reports, books, and papers have been written about Hitler’s paranoid mania and complexes. 

Those histories are best left to clinical psychologists and historians.  

While both were artists, whose writings began movements on the cover of Time Magazine, my interest here is to compare these two books as highly effective activist propaganda.

This comparison is likely to cause some readers to immediately stop reading, which is unfortunate as these are the people I’d most like to reach. Given my personal connection to the Millett family and the emotions of the people she has influenced, I plan to keep this comparison as dignified as possible.

Nothing Controversial

Both authors were heavily influenced by Hegel, Engle, and Marx, but both criticized Marx’s focus on economic class war over culture war. 

Both Mein Kampf and Sexual Politics used a visual writing style and disgust-driven language to illuminate a class struggle between groups structured by power. Both books advocate increasing the state’s role in raising children versus the family.

Each book explicitly blames capitalism as the fundamental problem in society. Both concern themselves with the oppression of a majority group by a malevolent minority, organized in a global conspiracy. Both books were used as philosophies that drove international policy.

Both books advocate a view that Jewish men are culturally conditioned to rape German women and both strongly advocate for and promote the abortion rights of minority women. 

Reception

Both books are in print many decades after they were initially published.  Both have become international best sellers, selling millions of copies. Both are still heavily cited by people who believe in their underlying dogma.

Mein Kampf was required reading for all German couples getting married.

Sexual Politics is still required reading for many Gender Studies courses worldwide.

Neither is considered an appropriate wedding gift.