America's Number-One Male Chauvinist Pig Retains the Title
Coyne, Patricia
THE ALTERNATIVE America's Number One Male Chauvinist Pig Retains the Title Patricia Coyne Norman Mailer keeps up with the times. War to him was an enriching experience in the early 'fifties,...
...Incidentally, not one of his fantasies are mentioned in the Women's Liberation eight-point program...
...Mailer says that yes, she does too feel woe...
...Well, it's mean...
...And the most interesting thing about "Prisoner of Sex" is that Mailer does not seem to have any idea at all what Millett and the women in back of her are saying...
...a flame into being...
...The word for which Willie Morris lost his job and over which I would not jeopardize Mr...
...But Millett's point in Sexual Politics is that modern literature has not been kind to women, and even with the distortions she makes some telling points...
...Every point was made with a minimum of words, a mean style, no question of that...
...He even has the audacity to suggest that Millett feels "woe" each month when that thing of art and beauty that she has been creating all month "goes down the drain...
...Mailer can excuse the sexual degradation of women in Henry Miller ("Sometimes he'd stand her on her hands and push her around the room that way, like a wheelbarrow...
...The work reads like an English doctoral thesis...
...Let's all go home and make some babies...
...But they still look upon heterosexuality as society's diabolical scheme to induce them into becoming girlfriends, wives and mothers...
...Presumably he expects the women of the Liberation Movement to reply, "Oh Awe...
...Yet, Mailer goes on for pages and pages, composing a lively drama about women working all their lives to create the perfect egg, fertilizing it in a glorious blaze of light and then all the little sperms fighting and struggling to get there first...
...The main weakness, and one that is vital to her statement, is the assumption that the works of D. H. Lawrence, Henry Miller or Norman Mailer either reflect or influence society in general...
...But very recently his complacency has been disturbed...
...Free-swinging-obscenity-user...
...There his credulity ends...
...a mild example) because in later years Miller has returned "as a prophet and the tablets are in his hands...
...War to him was an enriching experience in the early 'fifties, physically and psychologically damaging in the early 'seventies...
...This may also be why Millett never mentions Hemingway...
...Awe from the likes of Mailer is an emotion that Millett will be happy to forego and especially if it all stems from her power to be one step closer to eternity...
...It is just that they have not bumped into Mr...
...He can admit, for instance, that Lawrence's view of women is "not far from sinister" because Lawrence's wife "fails to worship his most proud and delicate (sexual apparatus...
...Lawrence: "And if you're in Scotland and I'm in the Midlands, and I can't put my arms around you, and wrap my legs round you, yet I've got something of you...
...Even the flowers are f...ed into being between the sun and the earth...
...Tickle Kate Millett...
...But this is a phenomenon which Mailer cannot conceive...
...So let woman be what she would, and what she could be," he says...
...His prose becomes increasingly ponderous and opaque as his ideas grow simpler and narrower...
...Prisoner of Sex," when it focuses, focuses on Sexual Politics and in Sexual Politics...
...A sawed-off shotgun is her tool...
...Sawed-off shotguns can be perfectly legitimate tools as long as they are not leveled at Norman Mailer...
...Now where in Lawrence's works does Mailer think Millett can find the foundation to build monuments or bridges...
...We f...
...Hip-politician...
...Could all those women all those years have been-oh my God-faking...
...Sexual Politics Revisted A large section of Sexual Politics discusses the view of women held by such literary figures as D. H. Lawrence, Henry Miller and Mailer...
...So there it is...
...Now, if Millett is willing to listen to Norman Mailer at all, it is certainly not going to be on the matter of her ovum...
...To have women attacking him is impossible...
...They are calling him a reactionary-him...
...Millett, as Mailer indignantly points out, is guilty of ignoring a qualifier here and there, even of occasional distortion...
...An embarrassingly bad piece of prose...
...But Mailer must keep up with the times: "There was an idea at the core of Women's Liberation which was fundamentally radical and so could not be ignored unless he were willing to cease thinking of himself as a revolutionary...
...Not a single, solitary one...
...Millett is not going to be Henry Miller's wheelbarrow, she certainly isn't going to be his little wife...
...My soul softly flaps in the little pentecost flame with you like the peace of our f...ing...
...I personally have never met anyone who acted or thought anything like anyone in any of their works...
...As a doctoral thesis it's perfectly all right...
...A doctoral thesis must necessarily find a theme, inflate it, twist it, and finally present it as a universal statement thereby justifying the thesis' existence...
...One writes a doctoral thesis to get a Doctor's degree, not to shape the thinking of society...
...Surely, the way women get their kicks is one of the least pressing concerns of our times, bearing little, if any, relationship to job opportunities, wage scales, or division of labor...
...He has, of course, marched...
...Give her freedom to burn and let her burn it or blow, or build it to triumph or collapse...
...Mailer has dabbled in witchcraft and race relations...
...it was man's sense of awe before women...which made men his dread of her position one step closer to eternity Mailerese for being able to have babies] (for in that step were her powers) which make men detest women, revile them, humiliate them, defecate symbolically upon them, do everything to reduce them so one might dare to enter them and take pleasure of them...
...He lists a string of sexual grotesqueries that women could, for all he cares, take part in...
...Which might have been explained as a literary device, except that the same lack of knowledge appears in his nonfiction...
...To have men attack him has always been discomforting...
...Kate-baby nods, goes out...
...Again this is fair play in a doctoral thesis where the fact that you can find any backing for your point at all is good enough...
...Mailer won't allow that a whole group of women out there are abhorring the idea of being bedded and having babies...
...A dark cloud has appeared on Norman Mailer's sexual horizon...
...Surely it must have occurred to one critic that the thought of Norman Mailer' languishing in a jail would inspire almost any police chief to shriek "Get him out of here...
...It has come to him that "his very reputation...
...And, in spite of all this, by the end of "Prisoner of Sex," Mailer seems to think that he has demonstrated himself to be a pretty revolutionary fellow at that...
...b) he was too fat...
...Mailer's primary agony in Armies of the Night seems not to have been the horror of slaughtered humanity in Vietnam, but rather: a) Mailer was afraid of jail...
...Suddenly Mailer is no longer spokesman for the American avant-garde...
...So Mailer does not think Millett has a very mean style at all...
...I suspect it's not going to happen...
...Prisoner of Sex," Mailer's defense published in Harper's has been out but a short while and already controversy rages...
...Harper's owners thought the article was obscene and Willie Morris, Harper's editor, has resigned...
...Maiier quotes D:H...
...He has taken side excursions to Alaska and the moon...
...Yet the article is unstructured, unfocused, well-nigh unreadable and centers on only the most superficial aspects of the Women's Liberation Movement anyway...
...Instead "it read with the tension of an anger profound enough to be kept under the skin...
...had not only been ambushed, but was apparently being chewed half to death by a squadron of enraged Amazons...
...Prisonerof Sex" will be made into a book soon, will probably be a best-seller...
...bury 'em deep in [defecation] Kate-baby...
...And so Mailer has come up with what I can only call, after stumbling over his lumpy prose, his "awe theory...
...Well, the answer is, not a one of them, Sir...
...She'll blush and giggle with the best of them...
...rather he is the Number One Male Chauvinist Pig...
...Nor as a modern American revolutionary, can Mailer label the shrill, hysterical prose which has emerged from the movement as simply insane...
...Mean-bad...
...The more moderate among them are perfectly willing to be girlfriends, wives and mothers as long as they can be something else too, something which, unfortunately, they have not yet been quite able to define...
...Yet Mailer asks, "Which case-hardened guerrilla of Women's Liberation might not shed a private tear at the passage...
...Mailer refers to himself now in the third person, yet he is neither ruler, editor, nor detached spirit...
...Sheer drivel...
...And the critics, a pretty trendy bunch themselves, are impressed...
...The women of the movement are attempting to set up a society in which the idea of what a woman is can be found outside her role as girlfriend, wife or mother...
...She'll start knitting little things...
...Put women back in their rightful place...
...But- not mean-good...
...Mailer's women .are either bitches, intent on destroying their betters (men) or puppets, intent on serving their betters (men...
...He once paid tribute to Marilyn Monroe, has since forgotten her...
...It was, and an editor rushed it into print before Millett made it anything else...
...Yes, in the end it's back to the kitchen sink and don't expect Norman Mailer to change any diapers...
...Now, if Mailer had any sense he would simply ignore the whole movement...
...But, unlike most doctoral theses, Sexual Politics was published, it became a social tract, and as a social tract it is severely flawed...
...Tyrrell's swindle...
...If Mailer is going to talk to the ladies, this treatment of women is something he is going to have to deal with...
...Right...
...By seeing his every twitch, belch and emotional response invested with universal significance, the critics have allowed Mailer to depart from any sense of proportion...
...The office of the President was a romantic and idealistic concept in the early 'sixties, work for a "grey old con" in the late 'sixties...
...Not only can he not imagine women as something other than girlfriends, wives and mothers (not surprising since no one else can either) he cannot conceive of their even wanting to be...
...But all that freedom Mailer is willing to lavish, is given in order for her to find a more perfect mate, "that man in a million" have "shattered the pearl of [her] love for pristine and femine will," "give an egg back to nature," and "return with a babe who came from the root of God's desire to go all the way, wherever was that way...
...And certainly some critic could have suggested that Norman Mailer consider a diet...
...And they are not only attacking him...
...And finally Mailer comes to Kate Millett...
...Yet Mailer gives the issue the same sort of respect that Tom Wicker gives the kid problem...
...Millett has attacked him personally...
...And so, to update his revolutionary credentials, he takes the very silliest (in his view revolutionary) ideas that have come out of the movement, the great debate over the variety of ways women achieve sexual satisfaction, for instance, and deals with them seriously...
...He thinks about it deeply and decides that no, they could not have been...
...Yet he insists that "if Millett had wished to get around Lawrence in the easiest way for the advance of the Liberation she would have done better to have built a monument to him, a bridge...
...Yet the rightful place that Miller might have in mind for Millett is surely not the one she has for herself, and the idea that Millett might forgive Miller as soon as she is told that Miller does have a rightful place in mind for her is sheer lunacy...
...Mailer, by stretching to the very outer limits of his imagination, might be able to understand that Millett does not want to be a wheelbarrow...
...Send her a big bouquet of roses...
...This, in the end, is what Mailer hates most about the movement-this urge to become a "gestation-free elite...
...We had no idea...
...Mailer, however, is not the most likely person to bring this false assumption to the attention of the public...
...Now this is not the sort of treatment Mailer can ignore...
...Mailer has become complacent indeed...
...Experimental film-maker...
...And so he feels called upon to lecture to the women on their reproductive systems...
...He's not the person to take on the Women's Liberation Movement at all, because not only does he feel personally threatened by them, but his writing reflects a complete lack of knowledge about womankind in general...
...but to understand that she does not want to be a wife...
...Yet critics are increasingly willing to think of his prose as art, his ideas as genius...
...Millett says she doesn't feel any woe...
...But its a delicate thing, and takes patience and long pause...
...Lawrence was spectacularly anti-militant-woman...
...It isn't the sort of debate in which either protagonist emerges awash in the admiration of his fellows...
Vol. 4 • May 1971 • No. 6
