The Prisoner of Sexism Jail and Roses

IF FREEDOM is the American dream, prison is too often the American reality. Most kids in this country spend the best years of their lives in schools with bars across the windows. Then they graduate, and get locked into nine-to-five jobs or military service or marriages that frequently end in jail-breaks. Even when they look for heroes and heroines, they tend to choose people who speak from behind bars. The young turn to David Harris, Angela Davis, or Cleaver; the middle-aged look to Johnny Cash, and the old, bereft of heroes, sit out the last years of their lives in the jails of homes for the aged.

Two of the loudest voices in this country are convinced that the prison which confines us goes beyond the military or the job rat-race. Both voices seem to agree that the prison should be called sex, but after that they diverge radically. One voice (really, many voices), the voice of the Women's Liberation Movement, has been making itself heard for over a year now. But until recently, the voice of the ideological opposition has only rumbled intermittently on talk shows and in Playboy interviews. Finally, Harper's magazine has allowed Norman Mailer to speak his piece on life inside the prison.

Mailer is at least honest about the corner of the jail in which he sits. He admits his biases quite plainly. "His sympathies," he tells us, "remained with his own sex." If this avowal seems selfish, remember that the first Principle of the New York Radical Women, a liberationist group started about a year and a half ago, is similarly one-sided. They declared in their initial affidavit, "We take the woman's side in everything."

Loyalty to one's own sex being, of course, not only natural, but even laudable, it's certainly not to be criticized either in Mailer or in the New York Radical Women. But as loyalty degenerates into chauvinism, it begins to intrude on compassion for the opposite sex. Thus, when Mailer's point of view evolves out of sexual loyalty, out of his concern for the fragility and vulnerability of his own sex, it is usually tenable. But when it seems based on male-chauvinism, or even worse, on Mailer-chauvinism, when sexual self-interest is used to evade recognition of comparable needs in women, his point of view becomes a lot shakier.

Apart from the priorities of his sexual sympathy, Mailer's other avowed bias is his reverence for the question of women and sex and the fear it inspires in him. "No thought was so painful as the idea that sex had meaning," he tells us. "For give meaning to sex and one was the prisoner of sex." For Mailer, "giving meaning to sex" entails emphasizing the differences between the sexes-their desires and their roles. It also means exploring (and sometimes exploiting) the perplexities of sexuality-Since these two concerns build the walls of Mailer's prison, they must be surveyed without delay in order for us to decide whether or not the walls can be scaled.

FOR A WRITER with an imagination as many faceted as the Hope Diamond, Norman Mailer is a disappointment when he starts thinking about the role of the sexes. Not only a disappointment, but a damn fool. His lack of ingenuity in realizing the possibilities for the energetic woman in this society or the next is only overshadowed by his stubbornness in clinging to female role-models that would seem Victorian to his Mother, God bless her and probably fascist to his ex-wives, God bless them, all four of them.

Try as he might, and indeed there are moments when Mailer certainly does try, he can't seem to rid himself of the preconception that the Archetypal American Woman is The Dutiful Little Homemaker. He begins the piece in Harber's, in fact, by recreating a scenario intended to prove just how sympathetic he is to the plight of the Sink-Chained American Woman.

The scenario stars Norman himself as Dutiful Little Homemaker and features our bold hero trudging off to the Maine woods for six weeks, five of his six children in tow, so that the soul of eagerness, he can "get some idea of what it might be like to raise a family." But he does find himself a little help, it seems; a few bit players are added to the cast: "a good Maine woman" who does the cleaning and laundry, and his sister who comes up for two weeks, and finally, as by now you may yourself have gathered, his "dearest old love," his rainy day woman.

Then, having convinced himself that this bed of roses simulates the daily drudgery of the American homemaker, he admits gaily, "Yes, he could be a housewife for six weeks, even for six years if it came to it!" Now picture our hero taking a greasy, soapy hand out of the dishwater to pat himself on the back.

But his next admission takes him out of the dishpan and into the fire. For though he can make himself believe that in a pinch he could become a housewife, honesty forces him to add, "But he did not question what he would have to give up forever."

So, after all, Mailer does realize the tremendous discrepancy between the scope of a man's activity and the scope of a woman's in our society. But he attributes this discrepancy to the preeminence of the woman's desire to function as wife and mother over any other life-style she'd ever want.

In an interview several years ago, Mailer made a casual remark which he repeats several times throughout the essay. It would not be accepted casually today. "The prime responsibility of a woman," Norman Mailer said years ago and is still repeating, "probably is to be on earth long enough to find the best mate for herself, and conceive children who will improve the species."

If only "probably" carried at least some of the weight of the argument! If only "probably" carried the weight of the women who don't want to get married, or don't care to have children, or would rather loose their creative spirits on a symphony or a novel, or indeed, run away to Israel and join the Army. But given Mailer's novels, his journalism, his marriages and his latest essay, "probably" not

For Mailer's rigidity about the roles of the sexes is sorrowfully consistent. In his elaborate and egocentric scheme of things, men are always the aggressors, the activists, the world-beaters. And though he concedes (whimpering in a spasm of pain and pleasure, to be sure) that some women are strong, even tyrannical, still, he's convinced, most women are the subordinates, the stay-at-homes, the steady salt of the earth.

Thus it's not at all surprising that one of Mailer's sharpest criticisms of Kate Millett is that "she has a mind like a flatiron, which is to say a totally masculine mind." He reacts against Millett and her feminist tome, Sexual Politics, on an immediate, instinctual level, the way he might balk if a woman sauntered into an all-male sauna in which he was sweating and luxuriating. He seems to feel instinctively that Millett simply doesn't belong where she roams, that she's misguided and out of her ken. His bafflement over another liberationist, a female pamphleteer he mentions early in the article, doesn't subside quickly. "Women everywhere," he sighs, "were certainly learning how to write on many a male subject."

But in all fairness, Mailer transcends his sexist prejudices and does quite a job on Sister Kate, a beautiful and sensitive one perhaps, but nevertheless, a job. He hammers away at the "flatiron" of her mind, calls her to task for slight flaws and gross insensitives in her argument.

He opens his attack by uncovering Millett's sexual gaff in her treatment of the motivation for the central murder in Mailer's own, An American Dream. Millett maintains that the novel's hero Rojack kills his wife to punish her for committing sodomous adultery. But Mailer insists (and who after all, should know better than he?) that the crime was not in fact, sodomy, but analingus. Academic perhaps, but indicative to Mailer of a mind that hedges the niceties of distinction, a mind that abandons evidence in the pursuit of thesis.

He criticizes Millett for sins of omissions as well. He notices that in a chapter she calls "The Sexual Revolution, First Phase: 1830-1930," she actually neglects to discuss anything that happens between 1900 and 1930. Thus, she quietly skirts the first world war and the twenties-a decade, notes Mailer, "conceivably as interesting in the emancipation of women as any other ten years since the decline of Rome."

BUT WHAT Mailer finally considers Millett's fatal flaw is the way she butchers the literary material and the writers she criticizes. D. H. Lawrence, Henry Miller, and Jean Genet all fall under her carving knife. (So does Mailer, for that matter, but in the Harper's essay, he seems to be too, er, modest to reflect on Millett's criticism of his own work, except in passing.) He is, however, swift to show us how and where the good woman wrecks havoc.

Charging that Millett disrupts the chronology of Lawrence's work to prove that he is a "counterrevolutionary sexual politician," Mailer restores the chronology, plus several passages Millett has lacerated with ellipses and paraphrase. Then, he brings to the analysis such delicacy and compassion for Lawrence that the section often moves along with the surge of a hymn, and may perhaps be among the finest pieces of Lawrence criticism to date.

But Mailer's panegyric goes just a little too far. In the fever of retaliation against Millett, Mailer exclaims, "It is not only that no other man [besides Lawrence] writes so well about women, but indeed is there a woman who can?" Now mind you, Norman Mailer once admitted quite frankly that he had never read Virginia Woolf. Not only that, he would presumably prefer Jayne to Katherine Mansfield ("I doubt if there will be a really exciting woman writer," he once said, "until the first whore becomes a call girl and tells her tale"), and he has probably never even heard of Kate Chopin. Considering his utter lack of knowledge about women writers, his declaration about Lawrence is more than arrogant; it is nonsense.

Mailer on Millett on Miller, as on Lawrence, is astonishing in the sureness of his under-standing, astonishingly good, that is, until the final twist of his logic. Mailer accuses Millett of missing the quintessential point in Miller, "that lust when it fails is a machine." Then, at his cockiest and most ecstatically ribald, Mailer treats us to his own passage on lust, on lust and love and Priapus the ram, a passage no less provocative, in its way, than the tirades of Falstaff or Rabelais or all the thighs in the canvases of Rubens.

But in the heat of his own enjoyment of Miller's literary fields ("the fields of flesh and cunt"), Mailer loses some of his perspective and self-knowledge. He seems certain he can distinguish himself from Miller, certain that he and his age are looking for "an accommodation of the sexes," whereas Miller "calls out for an antagonism." In the heat of his own argument, Mailer seems to have forgotten the battles between the sexes whose corpses litter the fields of his own novels. Suddenly, the novelist who sees himself as a "general who sends his troops across fields of paper," the writer who creates for posterity a character he can call "hunter-fighter-fucker" (in Why Are We In Vietnam? ), suddenly our ever belligerent hero has become a prince of peace, an advocate of accommodation.

And so, among the accolades that Kate Millett really does deserve (a point or two for being among the first to synthesize a theory of patriarchy and polities, a few more points for braving the trek across new grounds of literary criticism), not the least of her triumphs is meeting Mailer head on and sending him into a couple of tailspins.

If the prison-as the writer tells us-is really sex, and its walls-from his viewpoint-are really built of the differences between the sexes and the complexities of sexuality, then Kate Millett actually challenges him with two fiats clenched. One, as we have just seen, defies his static notions of sex roles, his rigid mindset for masculinity and femininity. But Millett's other fist is more threatening to Mailer by far. For with her other fist, he thinks she wants to knock out all the mysteries of the womb, knock them out, scatter them into the stratosphere, and in the meantime, replace them with technology.

If a single belief may be said to terrorize Mailer more than any other, it is his weary conviction that the spirit of the twentieth century is to convert man to a machine. It is a fear allied to other tensions that preoccupyhim, a fear allied to his terror of Fascism, of totalitarianism in any form or degree of thoroughness.

This fear intrudes on much of Mailer's most serious work, filling it with a bloodcurdling immediacy-the mechanization of command in wartime, the mechanical sterility of men in politics, and of course, most recently, the near congruence of men and machines in space exploration.

But suddenly, Mailer wants to announce that the heavy artillery has hit the bedroom, that sex is no longer spared from the wires of automation, that, in fact, Women's Liberation has an "inbuilt tendency to technologize women." Even more specifically, that Sister Kate, "Good lab assistant Kate" is a stellar technologist, and Ti-Grace Atkinson is "the Chief Engineer of the Armies of Liberation."

So, at least for awhile, Mailer is run-in' scared. And as he runs, as he chases about "the fields of flesh and cunt," he picks up every nut and bolt he finds and throws it at us as a warning. Beware the metal fingers of the hand of technology, he insists. Then be conjures up ferocious pictures of abortions and extra-uterine gestation and operations that would give men vaginas. Beware he antiseptic, rubber-coated hand, he wails.

Finally, his rage fastens on a myth, lately more in the public eye than most others since Oedipus-the myth of the vaginal orgasm. A complicated myth-Mailer admits to that right off-as difficult to prove as to explode, but one which is surely a match for all the writer's resources, imagination, and wit.

And what he finally decides is as simple as it is complex: Norman Mailer does not want to believe that the vaginal orgasm is a myth, so he just doesn't believe it. His reasons range from the lofty and approach the ridiculous. Above all, he wants to cling to the mystery of sex, to the "enigma of orgasm," as he puts it, to "the orgasm as the mirror of one's existence." As a result, he will not give credence to laboratory evidence presented by Kate Millett (collected from Drs. Masters and Johnson and Dr. Mary Jane Sherfey) that an artificial phallus could induce, in an hour's time, twenty to fifty orgasms in some guinea-pig of a woman lying on an operating table. For "what value," he wants to know, "would be attached to the mirror of the sexual moment when orgasms could be measured by periodicity and count?"

Then, there is his own admission about the myth, his own reasons for desiring to deny it. "What of his own poor experience?" he mumbles. "All lies?" he asks and at last confesses that "he felt a hate for the legions of the vaginally frigid."

The barely concealed anger of that admission prompts suspicion. For something remains in Mailer's voice even when his reverence for the orgasmic mystery seems to have subsided, even when his fear and protestations at the technological onslaught seem to have quieted down. Somewhere in the farthest reaches of his herculean psyche, somewhere fluttering between his mind and body, his body and soul, is a small voice, a nervous, restless, jealous voice, crying out that "men look to destroy every quality in a woman which will give her the powers of a male, for she is in their eyes already armed with the power that she brought them forth."

A brief digression before the argument concludes. A piece of biographical data (which may or may not be at all to the point) found in an appendix to Sisterhood Is Powerful, an anthology of writings from the Women's Liberation Movement:

Valerie Solanis should be known primarily as an artist, not as someone who shot Andy Warhol.... She is still being persecuted by police and "mental health" authorities for her "attempted murder" of Warhol, and has been in and out of prisons ever since. Interestingly enough, Norman Mailer was charged with the same crime when he almost fatally stabbed his wife. He was never imprisoned; all charges were dropped; his reputation was enhanced; he subsequently ran for Mayor of New York. Enough said-Ed. [Robin Morgan]

Evidently, in Mailer and in the Women's Liberationists, we are faced by people who are in the same prison but who do not agree on the future. For Mailer, after all, the prison is an existential state, a dilemma of birth, sometimes painful, sometimes sweet as Blake's "loss of liberty." But for the Women's Liberation Movement, the prison can only be temporary. Recognizing it as such is the first step to finding freedom; self-assertion and sympathy for one's own sex are the next steps.

SOMETIMES behind the bars, we look at the four walls and reconsider. For if, after all, we are sure that the prison is really sex, if its walls are really built of the most profound and puzzling differences between the sexes and of the mysteries of sexuality, then who knows but Mailer may be right, after all, and maybe we'd be happiest being brave in the prison, making love and babies in it, and carrying on. For if the prison really is sex-nothing more or less vital-then outside the prison, the land may be lonely, and the species may die out.

But if the prison is not sex, after all, but sexism, if the bricks of its walls are sexual hostility and narrow-mindedness and chauvinism, then more than a few of us want more than parole.