Word: mailers
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...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...
...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...
...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...
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...
...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...