Word: flaccidity
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...fact, most of the male characters come off poorly in The Thorn Birds. A fairly typical sentence runs: "She eyed his flaccid penis, snorting with laughter." The ambitious men are silly and the steady ones are inconsequential. Meggie's eight brothers either die or disappear into the woodwork. Women seem to live forever, while every hundred pages or so another man is burned alive or disemboweled by a wild boar or drowned or unsexed by gunshot wounds. None of this carnage is required by the plot. The males are punished because their punishment is what romantic fiction requires...
...real problem of All That Glitters, however, is not the show's concept. Nor is it the complaints of feminists or chauvinists. It is the execution: compared with many of Lear's other productions, the show is embarrassingly amateurish. The jokes are flaccid and the writing flat. The acting is mediocre and the direction aimless. Lear has tried to mount a revolution, but he has succeeded only in enthroning the yawn. Gerald Clarke
...changing, slowly; and it would be only natural if it took some time before the socialization of little girls of the middle class changes in response. Trilling's final note of despair--"If one of our outstanding women's colleges can do not better than to encourage such flaccid sentimental idealism...What chance, I wonder, have we for a female social force equal to the stupendous task of claiming a full citizenship for the second sex?"--seems overly pessimistic. On its own, Radcliffe can do very little to determine the kind of education its students seek; it could force women...
Lancelot's plan is clearly crazed. Percy's questioning is something else. Simply by asking whether flaccid tolerance is not as brutalizing as rigid in tolerance, he raises the kind of issue that good fiction can most thoroughly show in the round. Despite its occasional reediness of tone and a bitterness that seems more peevish than profound, Lancelot makes an entertaining run at high seriousness. It is easy to read and hard to forget. Paul Gray
...structure necessary to unite their disparate elements. The tunes lack definition and resolution; once the novelty wears off, they become tedious. Bowie's surrealism overwhelms you. You can sense important messages but only the dreamer can unscramble them. The few solos by traditional instruments, the guitar and sax, are flaccid and indefinite...