Word: mailer
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...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...
...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...
...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...
...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...