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