Word: mailers
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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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...
...fairness, Mailer transcends his sexist prejudices and does quite a job on Sister Kate, a beautiful and sensitive one perhaps, but nevertheless, a job. He hammers away at the "flatiron" of her mind, calls her to task for slight flaws and gross insensitives in her argument...
...opens his attack by uncovering Millett's sexual gaff in her treatment of the motivation for the central murder in Mailer's own, An American Dream. Millett maintains that the novel's hero Rojack kills his wife to punish her for committing sodomous adultery. But Mailer insists (and who after all, should know better than he?) that the crime was not in fact, sodomy, but analingus. Academic perhaps, but indicative to Mailer of a mind that hedges the niceties of distinction, a mind that abandons evidence in the pursuit of thesis...
...criticizes Millett for sins of omissions as well. He notices that in a chapter she calls "The Sexual Revolution, First Phase: 1830-1930," she actually neglects to discuss anything that happens between 1900 and 1930. Thus, she quietly skirts the first world war and the twenties-a decade, notes Mailer, "conceivably as interesting in the emancipation of women as any other ten years since the decline of Rome...
...WHAT Mailer finally considers Millett's fatal flaw is the way she butchers the literary material and the writers she criticizes. D. H. Lawrence, Henry Miller, and Jean Genet all fall under her carving knife. (So does Mailer, for that matter, but in the Harper's essay, he seems to be too, er, modest to reflect on Millett's criticism of his own work, except in passing.) He is, however, swift to show us how and where the good woman wrecks havoc...