Word: millett
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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...
...reporting Militant Kate Mil left's public admission that she is "bisexual," nine Women's Lib leaders held a press conference last week in New York City to announce common cause with "the struggle of homosexuals to attain their liberation in a sexist society." The leaders, including Millett herself, Ti-Grace Atkinson of the National Organization of Women, and Writers Gloria Steinem, Sally Kempton and Susan Brownmiller, issued a prepared statement. Excerpt: "Lesbian is a label used as a psychic weapon to keep women locked into their male-defined 'feminine role.' The essence of that role...