Women's Lib: Mailer v. Millett

In Armies of the Night, his Pulitzer-prizewinning journal of the 1967 antiwar march on the Pentagon, Norman Mailer lists his self-citations: "warrior, presumptive general, ex-political candidate, embattled aging enfant terrible of the literary world, wise father of six children, radical intellectual, existential philosopher, hard-working author, champion of obscenity, husband of four battling sweet wives, amiable bar drinker, and much exaggerated street fighter, party giver, hostess insulter." Not bad, but incomplete. Add frustrated novelist, passionate movie dabbler, sexual scientist, terror of the TV talk shows, critic of the global village and, to the ladies of Women's Liberation, master male chauvinist.

Last month Mailer told a young Libbie in New York: "Wait'll you read my piece in the upcoming Harper's. It's going to burn and blow what's left of your little brain. I found out what I really thought about sex when I wrote this story, and it ain't good." Normally a rapacious reporter, Mailer, 48, needed to do little legwork; his life has been plentifully preoccupied with the subject. He holed up in a cottage at Provincetown, Mass., in the dreary off-season days of last November and December, spending a month reading, a month writing.

Enraged Amazons. "The Prisoner of Sex," out this week, features more four-letter words than Harper's has printed in all its 121-year history. Mailer's 47,000-word exercise in sexual dialectic will probably blow brains not only among Lib ladies but a sizable segment of the magazine's 359,000 circulation. Mailer moves in on Women's Lib with menacing metaphor, but ends in capitulation. Writing in the third person. Mailer finally admits that "he would agree with everything they asked but to quit the womb."

He tells how he first became aware last year that he was under attack from "a squadron of enraged Amazons, an honor guard of revolutionary vaginas." He admits to naivete in visualizing his female adversaries as "thin college ladies with eyeglasses, no-nonsense features, mouths thin as bologna slices, a babe in one arm, a hatchet in the other, gray eyes bright with balefire." When he protests to chic Radical Chick Gloria Steinem that he doesn't know what Women's Lib has against him. she tells him tartly: "You might try reading your books some day." Manhattan Congresswoman Bella Abzug adds: "We think your views on women are full of s----."

Critical Misdemeanor. Mailer's major foe is Kate Millett, whose book Sexual Politics devotes some 25 pages to mauling him, and helped prompt the Harper's riposte. Kate loses many a battle with Mailer in the article before she winds up winning the war. "By any major literary perspective." says a scornful Mailer, "the land of Millett is a barren and mediocre terrain, its flora reminiscent of a Ph.D. tract, its roads a narrow argument, and its horizon low." Kate is "nothing if not a pug-nosed wit," and "the yaws of her distortion were nicely hidden by the smudge pots of her indignation." As for Millett's views: "She saw the differences between men and women as nonessential--excesses of motion to be conditioned out . . . She was the enemy of sex which might look for beauty at the edge of dread, she would never agree that was where love might go deepest."

Mailer's main indictment of Millett is that she misunderstands and deliberately misrepresents her four main male targets: Henry Miller, D.H. Lawrence, Jean Genet and himself. He accuses her of judging Miller by contemporary standards, and not as a "wandering troubador of the Twenties," when "one followed the line of one's sexual impulse without a backward look at what was moral, responsible or remotely desirable for society." Millett's "critical misdemeanor" with Lawrence is treating him out of sequence "to conceal the pilgrimage, hide the life, cover over that emotional odyssey which took him from adoration of the woman to outright lust for her murder, then took him back to worship her beauty, even her procreative beauty."

Mailer accuses Millett of technologizing sex. He feels that such schemes as semen banks and extra-uterine receptacles to liberate women from child-bearing are "a way of guaranteeing that the end-game of the absurd is coitus-free conception monitored by the state."

In the end, Mailer recalls his own earlier statement that "the prime responsibility of a woman probably is to be on earth long enough to find the best mate for herself and conceive children who will improve the species," an attitude scorned by Millett in Sexual Politics. "Women," Mailer now concedes, "must have their rights to a life which would allow them to look for a mate. And there would be no free search until they were liberated. So let woman be what she would, and what she could. Give her freedom and let her burn it, or blow it, or build it to triumph or collapse. Let her conceive her children, and kill them in the womb if she thought they did not have it."

But the womb must remain, for Mailer sees something almost atheistic in bypassing natural biology for greenhouse-style cultivation of human life. "Who," he asks, "was there to know that God was not the greatest lover of them all?"

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