Word: sexualism
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...same time, They can accept feminine ideals--gentleness, passivity, endurance--if actual femininity is rejected. In Bernard Malamud's The Fixer, the hero partakes of the heroic aspects of femininity but is revolted by actual femininity to the point of refusing sexual intercourse. Conversely, They revile women for manifesting masculine qualities, aggression in particular. Women's books are reviewed as if they were women--criticized for being "shrill," praised for being "not shrill." Critics call Marianne Moore "the best women poet in America." Why not the best blue-eyed poet? In the Nov. 1 issue of Time Magazine...
MARY ELLMANN, a free-lance writer and critic married to the distinguished Joyce scholar Richard Ellmann, has written about the sexual analogies that permeate everyone's thinking, much to our tedium. Loosely constructed, confused, unfortunately titled, the book still manages to amuse as it meanders through various conceptions of femininity and their relationship to criticism and fiction...
...Ellmann's chief preoccupation is the way They impose sexual forms and opinions on the external world. Amidst multiple contradictions one principle stands firm: masculinity is good, femininity is bad. Beyond the usual visual analogies--curves and receptacles are womblike; steeples, shoes, and cylinders are phallic--lie physiological comparisons. They equate woman's mind with "her most definitive organ," according to Norman Mailer (one of Them), and just as the womb is conservative, nutritive, claustrophobic, feminine influence is antithetical to energy and thought. "Let's get out of here," a Harvard student said to a girl he visited...
...MOST general level, They use women and sexuality to symbolize whatever man is not, Mrs. Ellmann notes. Her idea is only partly developed, but its implications are extensive. Behind it lies Their ethic of the male writer. In art, the feminine is everything external to the artist--the incoherence and incomprehensibility of Nature. The writer must struggle against this all-encompassing enmity. Sexual capacity is equated with the capacity to write, and woman is what resists both...
...their comments on the generation gap, their values, a personal account of what they loved most. Set down by Kate, this testament is liveliest when it reflects Marya Mannes' own penchant for high-class invective. During their sex talks, the painter howl-, "Don't tell me the sexual revolution was made by those pre-nubile, fur-bearing match-sticks...