I just heard, via Lori Marso, the news that Kate Millett has died.

I remember the very first time I read Sexual Politics. I’m embarrassed to say it was well into my teaching at Brooklyn College. It was for a course on counterrevolution, some time around 2005 or so, and we were doing a lengthy section on the right-wing backlash against the feminist movement.

I was looking for a text that would state the strongest revolutionary argument for feminism, not just substantively but rhetorically. I wanted to give students a sense of the ferocity of the attack—intellectual, political, cultural—that feminism posed in its original incarnation. After reading around a bit, it was obvious that there was only one candidate: Sexual Politics.

In this, Millett reminded me of what I love most about Catharine MacKinnon’s earlier work. Not always the arguments themselves, but the tenacity, the refusal to be cowed by one’s critics or to give them an inch, the categorical unwillingness to give any quarter, to give anyone a sense of calm or comfort or peace, the unbowed buoyancy that makes her and her arguments always rise far above the tide.

These are, for me (I recognize this is a question of taste), the mark of a true writer. Kate Millett was such a writer.