Word: mailer
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Critical Misdemeanor. Mailer's major foe is Kate Millett, whose book Sexual Politics devotes some 25 pages to mauling him, and helped prompt the Harper's riposte. Kate loses many a battle with Mailer in the article before she winds up winning the war. "By any major literary perspective." says a scornful Mailer, "the land of Millett is a barren and mediocre terrain, its flora reminiscent of a Ph.D. tract, its roads a narrow argument, and its horizon low." Kate is "nothing if not a pug-nosed wit," and "the yaws of her distortion were nicely hidden...
...Mailer's main indictment of Millett is that she misunderstands and deliberately misrepresents her four main male targets: Henry Miller, D.H. Lawrence, Jean Genèt and himself. He accuses her of judging Miller by contemporary standards, and not as a "wandering troubador of the Twenties," when "one followed the line of one's sexual impulse without a backward look at what was moral, responsible or remotely desirable for society." Millett's "critical misdemeanor" with Lawrence is treating him out of sequence "to conceal the pilgrimage, hide the life, cover over that emotional odyssey which took...
...Mailer accuses Millett of technologizing sex. He feels that such schemes as semen banks and extra-uterine receptacles to liberate women from child-bearing are "a way of guaranteeing that the end-game of the absurd is coitus-free conception monitored by the state...
...Mailer recalls his own earlier statement that "the prime responsibility of a woman probably is to be on earth long enough to find the best mate for herself and conceive children who will improve the species," an attitude scorned by Millett in Sexual Politics. "Women," Mailer now concedes, "must have their rights to a life which would allow them to look for a mate. And there would be no free search until they were liberated. So let woman be what she would, and what she could. Give her freedom and let her burn it, or blow it, or build...
...womb must remain, for Mailer sees something almost atheistic in bypassing natural biology for greenhouse-style cultivation of human life. "Who," he asks, "was there to know that God was not the greatest lover of them...