Episode 14: Prisoner of Sex – Norman Mailer vs. Kate Millett and Women

It's like, no, no, no, I'm not evil.

You merely think that because you don't understand how smart I am.

I'm Adrienne Dobb.

And I'm Moira Donegan.

And whether we like it or not, we're in bid with the right.

So today, Adrienne, I wanted to take you on a little detour, a little fun, little romp in mid-20th century gender politics.

Because when we recorded our episode on the sort of taxonomy of conservative masculinity that we've been working with about perverts, preachers, and creeps, we talked as our example of the pervert about Norman Mailer, this like titan of 20th century American literature and his very particular gender politics.

And that got me thinking about this strange little episode in 1970 called The Prisoner of Sex.

So, Adrian, what do you know about The Prisoner of Sex?

So, I have it here.

I have read it.

And on the occasion of that same episode that you mentioned, I discovered that I recall jack shit about it.

I have no recollection of this book.

It's got my annotations in it.

I've underlined a whole bunch of stuff, but that's it.

Like, I treat me as a babe in the woods.

i mean i i am familiar with uh you know i i don't know norman mailer but i'm familiar with his work as they say the writing and the stabbing and you know the all of it and this book i know he got a lot of criticism he was made the topic of a book by a very famous feminist critic and he uh in characteristic mailer fashion took it super well hence this book that's what i know yeah so The Prisoner of Sex was a cover story in Harper's magazine that came out in 1971.

It was, I believe, 40,000 words, which for people who aren't used to thinking of writing in terms of word count is quite long for a magazine story.

It was

the, it's like a short book.

It was the only story in that issue of Harper's.

I believe it was summer 1971.

And after the Harper's story, The Prisoner of Sex was published as a standalone book, which the copy that I'm working off of is about 250 pages.

This was all prompted by a chapter in Kate Millett's, the literary, feminist literary credit Kate Millett's very, very influential book from the year before, Sexual Politics, which is a critique of the sort of assumptions and practices and like sort of ideological modes under undergirding heterosexuality as applied through a couple of different lenses.

Sexual politics is a weird and interesting little book.

It was Kate Millett's dissertation, and she sort of turns to an articulation of sexual politics, then she turns to a history of sexual politics.

Her like longest and I think strongest section is a critique of Freud.

But then at the end of the book, she has four chapters addressing the sexual politics of various different influential male writers in English, right?

So she goes through a chapter on D.H.

Lawrence, a chapter on Henry Miller, a chapter on Jean Genet, and one of the last and one of the shortest chapters is on Norman Mailer.

It's about a 22-page chapter.

So a 22-page chapter on Norman Mailer in the book by a feminist literary critic led to Norman Mailer's 250-page response.

Always a measured guy, yeah.

Yeah, it was a kind of like disproportionality, right?

Now, I think it might be good to sort of place Millett and place Mailer like where they were in 1970.

Because I think part of the asymmetry of Mailer's response is also a reflection of like the asymmetry of power between him and Millett.

So sexual politics was Kate Millett's doctoral dissertation, I believe, from Columbia.

She has a PhD in literature from Columbia University, and she was sort of a grad student artist activist on the radical fringes of New York City's radical feminist scene that emerged in the late 1960s, right?

Not the sort of old school liberal feminism that emerged out of like more traditional civil rights projects, but the radical feminist tradition that emerged really out of the new left and the counterculture, right?

So she was part of a group that was advancing more fundamental critiques of institutions like marriage and motherhood, whereas people like half a generation older than her, like Betty Friedan, had really been about sort of tweaking or reforming the policy regulation of those institutions, right?

So Millet is part of this younger generation.

She's right out of school.

She's really far to the left.

And she's sort of not totally aiming for respectability, right?

Whereas Mailer, on the other hand, was considered and was, you know, told to his face quite often that he was the most important writer in English of his generation.

His biggest book was The Naked in the Dead, which was his first novel, a sort of account about World War II that is a novelistic treatment of like what violence does to the psyche and the soul.

That was considered a foundationally important book of the World War II era, and then also sort of propelled Mailer into a very influential career as what we now call a new journalist, sort of a narrative and character-driven nonfiction writer.

And that is a career that was just astronomic in its heights and that was not really interrupted very much when in 1960, Mailer stabbed and almost killed his second wife, Adele Morales, at a party full full of elite people while he was running for mayor of New York.

So you've got these like people who are of different generations.

There are different points in their careers.

And one of them has quite a bit more cachet than the other, right?

Doesn't the prisoner of sex, I mean, it's all very hazy, but doesn't it start with him not winning the Nobel Prize and being kind of pissed about it?

Actually, he's totally not mad at all, Adrian.

Yeah, no, no, no, that's right.

He, again,

in a theme that I'm sure will not reoccur at all, handles it it super well.

Yeah.

Very cool.

So the prisoner of sex is Mailer's response to Millet and really to the women's liberation movement more broadly, right?

And he sort of positions himself and is given the credit as being like a representative of the intellectual establishment, warding off what he sees as an attack from this insurgent feminist left that he calls, with no apparent irony, a kind of totalitarianism and a threat to civilization.

So he does divide this into four sections, all of which are named after different aspects of himself.

So section one is a prize winner.

Section two is the acolyte.

Section three is the advocate.

And section four is the prisoner, right?

So I'm a prize winner, I'm an acolyte, I'm an advocate, I'm a prisoner.

These are all of the ways that Mailer sees himself in relation to the feminist movement, the sort of insurgent radical feminist intellectual movement that's like growing up really in the late 60s and early 70s.

And in the prize winner, yeah, the Prisoner of Sex opens with Henry Miller being told, or I'm sorry, Norman Mailer, excuse me, I'm getting them mixed up now.

It's a bad sign.

It begins with Norman Mailer being told that he's about to win the Nobel Prize.

This is, again, about 10 years after he stabs his wife.

He is in such a position where that is...

Actually, like a quite plausible possibility.

And he spends the whole day feeling all great that he's about to win the Nobel Prize.

And then the evening or the next morning, the news comes in that it actually went to Samuel Beckett.

He was robbed.

Mailer was robbed.

And sort of, you know, he's like kind of talking himself into feeling good about it because, you know, fame is so foreign and terrible and amenical to his art, et cetera, et cetera.

And then what he does was he takes five of his children to Maine for six weeks.

So this is coming at a moment where where Norman Mailer is coming off his forced divorce, which seems to be the divorce that got under his skin.

He said fourth, right?

Yes, fourth, one, two, three, four.

Yeah.

Like Henry VIII, he had six wives.

The one he stabbed was his second wife, so we're two wives in after the stabbing.

And this seems to have been the divorce that really got under his skin in a way that the other ones didn't.

Is this what marriage was like before Google?

That they're like, wait, what are you famous for?

What were your previous relationships with your wives like?

He's like, oh, don't Google that.

Oh, actually, he's talking in the same section about one of his mistresses oh who

he said linked up with him right after he gets out of bellevue after the stabbing of his wife because it had actually given him this sexual cachet and made him seem more dangerous and appealing to straight women i don't know if i trust norman mailer's account of women's heterosexuality but that's how he thought it's a trap girls it's a trap

like ladies uh if he stabbed his last girlfriend maybe maybe swipe left yeah but anyway he goes to maine right and he's without his wife.

And he is with five of his children.

He's got three teenage daughters and two sort of like school-age, like under 10-year-old sons.

And he spends a couple days, or he at first has the idea that he's going to be the only adult there, and he is going to sort of submit himself to.

caring for these children to try and better understand the life of the wife who just left him, right?

But then he thinks, no, that's ridiculous.

I'm actually going to hire a maid.

So he hires a local woman up in Maine to do a lot of the housework and caretaking.

And then that's too much.

So he delegates his older daughters to taking care of his younger sons.

And then that's still too much on him.

So he has his mistress come up for the rest of the summer and also contribute to the care of these children.

I mean, you say that so judgmentally, but the man just almost won a Nobel Prize.

I mean, like, you know, you can't take, you can't change a diaper in that sort of state.

Obviously, Benice's dignity, right?

But like at the end of this six weeks in Maine, with only the help of three teenage girls and two adult women, he decides that he understands what it is to be a woman, that it has

this domestic life that he has assigned to women in his mind is actually has quite a few joys in it, but that he would not be good at being a woman because he craved the public world.

To which you got to say, like, buddy, you are so close to getting it.

And it's in this situation in Maine in which he is living what he describes as like the life of a housewife and a mother that he is asked to write about the women's movement by the editor of Time magazine.

So it's weird because the piece was commissioned by Time and it winds up at Harper's, which is a sort of like editorial detail that he doesn't really explain.

It's like, okay, at some point, Time Magazine read what you gave them and went, I'm guessing.

we can't publish this.

But Harper's magazine decided to valiantly take it on.

To just bump their movie reviews and whatever like whatever norman needs another 10 000 words which again like i can't norman needs another 35 000 words like based on like how long a magazine writes unbelievable i mean i for those of our listeners who don't write for like pitching a 4 000 word piece is like kind of a lot like you you better have like been solicited to write that shit but like 40 000 is astonishing and to read i mean like that's what like like something like 80 pages right i I mean, in the print book, it was 250.

I don't know how much it would be.

Like, 40,000 words is like, it's like a short one.

I was hoping that was an expanded edition.

No, I actually looked it up.

It's just reprinted.

It's like, it does not seem to have been, he does not seem to have expanded or changed the manuscript significantly before it was published as a book.

Yeah, I mean, not the point here, but like, can you imagine like who finished that thing?

Like, I mean,

I've had this experience before with like Atlantic pieces, especially where like, but Harper does this too, where you're like, how fucking long is this thing, right?

You're like, you kind of groove in with it for like three pages, and you're like, oh, I'm sorry, there's more?

And like, imagine this happening like for 40 more pages.

It's just astonishing.

I mean, this is, I finished it for my sins.

I finished this fucking book.

I will say it's quite a quick read.

It's 250 pages, but you know, they're small.

It's like biggish type on smallish paper.

And it does go smoothly, but it has quite a few digressions and quite a bit of, you know, autobiography.

And it should also be said that Norman Mailer does in the Prisoner of Sex, something he does throughout his nonfiction work, which is right of himself in the third person.

He never says I, he says the prisoner or the acolyte or like the advocate.

What is the last one?

The prisoner, the prize winner.

Yeah.

He never says I, Norman Mailer.

He sort of deflects his experience and opinions onto a third character, a third third person, which I think I wanted to, I want to touch on that later and really get your insights, Adrian, because something that Mailer does throughout the prisoner of sex, throughout his refutation of Kate Millett, and then later in his sort of like public defense of this piece in an appearance on a panel that was documented in a movie called Town Bloody Hall in April 1971.

He always says, I don't mean it, that's my character, right?

He always triangulates.

It's the lamest fucking thing.

Right.

And Kate Millett in her critique of male art in sexual politics.

I'm going to try and pull this up because she says this really nicely.

You know, this is the kind of defense of all of these.

writers, you know, it's like, oh, this is not what I mean.

This is a character and the character is being pilloried or parodied sometimes as the justification, or just, you know, just kind of an identity line drawn in the sand.

Exactly.

The people criticizing you just don't pick up on the subtle irony and the subtle friction between your authorial persona and your real beliefs.

What are your real beliefs?

Oh, but that's for you to know and for them to find out, right?

Like it's, it's such a fucking tired game.

Right.

It positions the critique as coming from a place of like ignorance or unsophistication and then insulates the actual profession.

Exactly.

Or like thunderheaded literal mindedness.

Yeah,

it's like, no, no, no, I'm not evil.

You merely think that because you don't understand how smart I am.

So this is Kate Millett.

In fact, the most fascinating problem in dealing with his writing, she's talking about Norman Mailer, is to establish the connection between his fiction and his other prose writings.

For ideas one is convinced are being satirized in the former are sure to appear with straightforward personal endorsement in the latter.

And this is kind of a, this is something I re-watched Town Bloody Hall last night, where the whole thing is on YouTube.

It's this amazing documentary that's very hilarious that happened in the aftermath of Mailer's publication of The Prisoner of Sex.

And like, we should say the prisoner of sex is just an excoriation of the feminist movement, right?

We should probably like go through its actual argument, right?

Which is that Norman Mailer positions himself as an advocate of sexual liberation and as somebody who takes the question of women's liberation entirely seriously, right?

He says, you know, he can sound the way that like misogynists can sound like a radical feminist for the first clause of the sentence and then the second clause of the sentence is quite different.

He's like, this is actually the greatest question of civilization, right?

It's the question of division between human beings from which everything else flows.

And that's like pretty standard, like 1969 radical, like Shulamith Firestone could have said that.

And then he says, you know, or he sort of reveals himself to believe through a series of like irony, social positioning, and like disavowals that actually maintaining the hierarchy of men over women is the foundation of civilization and the division between people and the imposition of order upon which humanity is able to build.

And this is something where, like, the more I read of the prisoner of sex, the more my taxonomy of Norman Mailer in our preacher, pervert, creep sort of buckets blurred because he is a pervert.

He's very much a person who understands

sex and violence as related, understands sex as an antagonistic contention between men and women, in which men sort of prove their virility through like violence and domination against women, right?

But, and that strikes me as like a straightforward, like pervert masculinity.

Then he also becomes like quite creepy because he starts talking

about

his hatred of technology.

And by technology, it becomes clear that he meets contraception.

And his rationale.

I was wondering about that.

Yeah, yeah.

Interesting.

His rationale for the hatred of contraception is that he feels that masculine sexuality, this sort of conquering, domineering, virility exercise that he depicts sex as being, is the stuff of life.

It is the stuff of meaning-making, that it is like the source of human vitality.

Millick calls this philosophical posture on the part of Miller sexistentialism, which I thought was kind of cute.

Nice.

You know, he equates male sexual aggression and response with sort of the entire human project.

And in that metaphorical schema, contraception doesn't just like mute the capacity of the sperm to impregnate.

It sort of like mutes human potential itself.

And in this sense, he's kind of Catholic.

Or at least it sounds

like a like extension of the Catholic prohibition on contraception, but it also sounds a little bit like Dr.

Strange Lovey.

You know, he's like my precious bodily fluids.

And this is something that he seems to get from Freud, but I wonder if you might have more insight into where it comes from.

Yeah, it's a good question.

I mean, I mean, definitely in the Catholic rite of the 2010s, right?

Like when it comes to gay adoption, gay marriage, et cetera, like you often get this kind of argument that a very specific kind of sex is this necessary site of meaning making,

that's absolutely essential site of meaning making for human beings.

And that any change to it, right?

Like whether whether or not it results in pregnancy, right down to whether like positions, whatever, like will destroy its ability to make meaning.

The idea that like, yes, human beings like to be intimate with each other and it is a big thing we do, but we've also found a truly bewildering arrays of ways of doing that, right?

That's the thing that never occurs.

It's like, nope, it's got to be, you know, P and V and for three to five minutes and no grunting by him,

right?

And like this idea of naturalizing, and something that we hadn't associated with the pervert, indeed.

That certainly sounds like it here with Mailer.

And there might be one other strain in Mailer's appropriation of the Catholic rationale for a prohibition on contraception, which is that Miller, or Mailer, rather, God, I'm doing it again, Mailer, has a thing about Irish people.

And this is in Millett's critique.

And, you know, when in the prisoner of sex, he's like talking about like, why did Kate Millett get under my skin?

And he's like, well, you know, I've been the subject of a lot of criticism from feminists and

it always strikes me as

like more annoying than when it comes from men, partly because I think women aren't as good critics as men are and partly because they remind me of my mothers and my ex-wives.

And I was like, yeah, well, that's a feminist could have told you any of that, buddy.

Yeah.

Tough, buddy.

But in Millett, she points out something that I think is very interesting, which is that, you know, Miller, Miller's Jewish.

He's American.

He's born to a Jewish family.

And he's writing in a time when like white ethnic politics among the intellectual elite are a lot more weighted than they are now, partly just because of like the extreme paucity of people of color in these circles that Mailer and later Millet were circulating in.

But he's one of these mid-century Jewish male writers with a sense of like Jewish ethnic emasculization.

Right.

He understands his masculinity to have been infringed upon by a sort of like hereditary or culturally Jewish intellectualism.

In Town Bloody Hall, at one point, he's like yelling at all these feminists who are on the panel with him.

And he goes, I'm happy to play the clown.

If you like, I'll take out my humble Jewish dick and put it on the table for all of you to spit at.

Yikes.

Yeah.

And it's, it's, you know, Philip Roth also has this anxiety.

Yeah, yeah.

I think Roth is kind of a better writer.

Oh, much better, oh my gosh.

But in a lot of Norman Mailer's novels, particularly The Naked and the Dead, his sort of proxy characters, the men who are him and who enact his sexual politics in the world of the novel, are often not Jewish.

They're often Irishmen.

Like Sergio O'Shaughnessy is one of them.

Wow.

Doesn't get much more Irish than that last name.

Yeah, O'Shaughnessy, yeah.

Although, like, apparently, that character was adopted by an Irish family and was actually like ethnically Eastern European, which Millett points as sort of the conversion of an ethnic grievance into a sexual grievance, right?

Yeah, yeah.

He seems to be adopting for himself characteristics that he sees as being Irish, such as like, you know, in contrast to the Jewish educated, cultivated emasculinization that Mailer is sort of trying to purge himself of, he understands the Irishman as having this uneducated, uncultivated, like brutish, brutal violence.

This is all, I should say, wildly racist, and I'm not endorsing any of these ethnic stereotypes, but this is Mailer's imagination.

And he sort of wants to, or seems to aspire to what he perceives as like an authentic Irish violent masculinity.

I think it's worth pointing out that Kate Millett is one of the very few public intellectuals of this period who's coming from an Irish Catholic background.

So if there are things that like particularly got under his skin about Millett, this might be one of them.

She's a representative of this ethnic group that he sort of envies and resents in this

neurotic racist way.

I mean, just to kind of give a shout out to an episode we've yet to record, of course, sort of, you know, the idea that Jewish masculinity is somehow problematic, that like there's something about Jews not living gender right, is extremely common.

That's an extremely common trope of late 19th century anti-Semitism.

Otto Weininger, who we'll talk about on the pod at some point, is the key person for this.

But Freud was fascinated with Weininger for that exact reason.

That he's like, this seems to be something that a lot of people believe, and I should really look into this, right?

This idea that new Jewish masculinity was something that had to be proven was something that comes straight out of 19th century anti-Semitism.

I guess it testifies to the power of self-hatred for someone to adopt it again in 1969.

Well, it's also a common feature of anti-Semitic misogyny, right?

The idea that Jewish women are sort of monstrously masculine or they've got a sort of devouring maternal possessiveness that then in turn emasculates their Jewish sons.

Like this is, this is, you know, Betty Freytan, Jewish intellectual of Mailer's generation, basically recreates this whole anti-Semitic archetype in the feminine mystique.

She's like, you know, we are too overbearing as mothers because we are like psychically constrained by being housewives.

And that makes us.

obsessed with our sons and that makes our sons homosexual.

You know, it's this like whole weird causation.

We should probably do an episode on momism.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And the sort of bastardization of Freud or like misuses of Freud against mothers in this misogynist mid-century project.

That's, I think, really, really interesting.

And it's definitely hanging heavily over both Mailer and Millet.

We should probably get back.

Let's get back to prison.

Let's get back to prison.

Yeah, let's get back to prison.

Let's get back to the substance of these critiques, right?

So, Millet's critique of Mailer is that he associates sex with violence.

He eroticizes violence.

Mailer actually has this great quote where he just kind of steals to Beauvoir.

He's like, nobody is born a man.

You have to make yourself a man all the time.

And the way that you do that in Mailer's schema, as I think Millett charts like quite persuasively, is you do it through sex and violence, right?

And that this is the way that manhood is demonstrated, maintained, and created.

And she views this as like, first of all, she kind of dispenses with, she articulates the sexual politics of eroticized violence.

She pulls out a lot of pieces from Mailer's war novels in particular, where, you know, explosions are compared to ejaculations, guns are penises, et cetera.

And then she sort of dispenses with his claims to ironic detachment and says, you know, look, these are not actually anti-war books.

These are books that glorify the violence of war as a demonstration of masculine virility.

As a proving ground kind of.

Right.

Which like, I think might strike us now in 2023 as like somewhat a pedestrian critique.

But at the time it was totally revolutionary.

And frankly, Miller kind of agreed with her.

He's like, yeah, my understanding of violence has changed.

I like do think it's necessary.

He says that writing the naked and dead changed him from being a pacifist to being somebody who with an appreciation of violence,

which is a crazy way to write the naked and the dead.

Yeah,

it's been a while, but that's not, you don't come away being like, oh, that was awesome.

It reminds me of when Sally Rooney

in one interview said she thinks that Conversations with Friends is a beautiful love story.

And I was like,

wow.

You are, you really were born in 1993.

I was like, that is not the impression I got from that book.

But, you you know, authorial intent.

It's crazy.

But, you know, Millet's reading.

Here's the thing: Millet and Mailer actually kind of have the same assessment of Mailer's politics, right?

It's just Millet thinks it's bad, and Mailer thinks it's good, which is this sort of classic clash we have between the radical feminists and the gender conservatives, right?

It's just like they can actually articulate the same phenomenon, they just have different sets of values and priorities around it.

But Mailer's critique in the prisoner of sex, his response is kind of not totally consistent, right?

So sometimes he claims to be a great advocate and proponent of women's liberation who truly believes that the question of, you know, the extent to which women and men can live together and freedom and equality is the greatest question of the human project, right?

So he sometimes says he takes it very, very seriously.

And then he sort of adopts this posture of like schoolboyish, like jeering dismissal, right?

He's like contemptuous.

He can't decide what he means.

He can't decide if he's joking or not.

He can't decide the tone he wants to take.

Something I thought about when we talked about the Libertine in our other episode, in some way, the Libertine does have to be in favor of some kind of liberation because he needs enthusiastic, frequent, and not very discerning partners, basically, for his libertinism, right?

Like, and I mean, we see that all throughout the 1960s, that like a lot of men appeared to mean bisexual liberation.

Basically,

the gendered values that structure our society stay the same but i get my dick wet more right like that's that you know like i feel like that's you know around the bay area right all these communes that basically turn into these like patriarchal like nightmares right like or weird cults you know they all sort of say like oh you have to get rid of your inhibitions etc and that always means like kind of consenting to things that you normally might not have consented to and even being told that it's like it's actually like traditionalist or puritan not to want to So it makes perfect sense to me that like Mailer must be on board with that part of women's lib, given that like that's what keeps Norman Mailer in business.

He's just not so cool about the part that would get women to write a book about him and about how gender politics suck.

Yeah, I think this is a really good point because it points to the novelty and the challenge.

posed by Kate Millett's contribution in 1970, right?

So feminism had since the 19th century been critiquing restraints on heterosexual expression, right?

There had been free love feminists in the early 20th and late 19th century.

There had been sort of anti-monogamy feminists.

There had been people advocating for the destigmatization and really legalization in practice of having children out of wedlock.

So advocation for increased sexual expression and access had traditionally been

a feminist project and continued to be, right, into the 1960s and 70s.

What Millett does is she enters at a moment when heterosexuality has been,

because of the sexual revolution, remember, like Millett publishes in 1970, the pill is only legalized for married couples in 1965, right?

It's only available to anybody since 1960.

So that's only 10 years legal and actually like practically accessible for a lot of people since 1965.

Won't be accessible to single women until 1972.

Oh, is that true?

I didn't even know that.

Oh my God.

Yeah, that's Eisenstadt v.

Baird.

I mean, it's different state by state.

It's like abortion, but Griswold versus Connecticut technically only legalized the pill for married couples.

Did not know that.

So this is a moment, and this is also at the moment where the sexual revolution is sort of critiquing from the non-feminist or like sort of gender-neutral counterculture moral prohibitions on sexual expression, right?

So sex has become a lot more free, a lot more available.

And it's also been decoupled from a Christian moral framework.

So the critique of heterosexuality that Millett advances is new and unique in that it's not a critique of heterosexuality as filtered through Christianity.

It's not a critique of heterosexuality as filtered through state apparatuses.

It's a critique of heterosexuality on its own terms, right?

Or at least on men's terms.

And that is new.

And that is, it's not a critique so much of institutions, it's a critique of men, of individual men, of men as a class, and of the way that they deal with women in intimate relations.

And it implicates individual men.

So like in The Prisoner of Sex, Norman Mailer does something that anti-feminist men always do, which is sort of like he cops the wage gap.

He's like, women don't make as much money as men, and that's legitimately wrong.

He's like, even people, those of us skeptical of women's liberation, have to concede that the economic exploitation of women is, you know, real and must be amended, something like that.

Babysitters don't make nearly enough money.

I know, right?

Like now that I have experienced this for six whole weeks with only five women's help, I understand how terrible it is.

Yeah, but like that's, that's a common thing, right?

A lot of anti-feminist men will particularly point to money.

On the one hand, it's empirical.

It's not a sort of like qualitative or moral charge the way Kate Millett's sexual politics is.

But it's also something where you can like move the goalposts a lot.

You can always be like, well, what do you mean by the wage gap?

Or like, oh, look, I'm going to discursively remove the motherhood penalty as a legitimate objection.

Like that's something that they can poof away very quickly.

But it's also often a way to rhetorically purchase some credibility as I'm not denying that women have a subordinate place in our society that's often incongruous with their capacities.

And look at me not denying that by saying that the wage gap exists.

And that then allows me to go.

protect these other privileges.

But like crucially, the wage gap is a critique of institutions.

It's a critique of employers.

It's a critique of corporations, which are entities that somebody from the counterculture like Mailer is like very very comfortable pointing a finger at.

Whereas the sexual politics critique that Millett is advancing is one that happens, that is carried out by men in private on a person-to-person individual basis.

So there's individual culpability that he takes great offense to.

Well, it also, right?

I mean, like in some way, he has to find something to critique capitalism on because there needs to be something radical about his critique.

And then the other move I remember him making is just kind of accusing feminism of totalitarianism, right?

Basically, he's like, like, this is a left totalitarianism.

You basically say, I'm the modern one.

You liberated women are actually the traditionalists here, right?

You're authoritarian, you're new Puritans, et cetera, et cetera.

And basically, you're the ones who are not reading the signs of the time.

I'm for women making a dollar to a men's dollar.

And isn't that the thing that really matters?

Are material conditions the most important thing?

And in some respects, that's a plea back to the liberal feminism of now, right?

Although it should be said of now that they did not buy this from Mailer whatsoever.

Right.

There's this great moment in Town Bloody Hall when Betty Friedan, who's not on the panel, she's in the audience, she stands up and like curses him out.

It's great.

It's a great movie.

But that panel, and it might be a good moment to turn to it really quickly just before we wrap up.

Because it's a really interesting sort of confrontation.

between Mailer and his critics, not on the page, but in real time, right?

So it's a town hall, like, you know, at Town Hall, I used to think honestly that town hall in New York City was New York City Hall.

And then I

moved to New York bright-eyed and bushy-tailed and realized that it's actually a concert hall in Times Square.

It's like this, you know, famous theater.

It's like pretty big.

It's a Broadway theater, right?

And the National Organization for Women, I believe, like sold tickets.

Like it was like a fight night where Norman Mailer was going to confront critics of the prisoner of sex.

So Kate Millett was in the audience, but she did not come on stage.

On stage were Jacqueline Sabalos, who was the head of the very powerful New York City chapter of Now, the kind of willowy, like sex pot feminist writer, Jermaine Greer.

Oh, Jermaine Greer, nice.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It was weird to see Jermaine Greer in 1971 when she was like actually at the height of her powers on this stage because she's now descended into like paranoia and bigotry.

And it was so it was weird to see her.

back when she was, you know, in this other era of her life when she was actually quite intellectually serious.

and she's kind of the star of the the panel then there's jill johnston who's a like radical lesbian separatist from the village voice and then diana trilling who sort of plays the role as the anti-feminist woman uh and this like elder stateswoman big anti-68er yeah yeah yeah yeah i mean i that's that's a very interesting panel and for very interesting women but i would say where is valerie solanas when you really need her

I think she may have been locked up by this point.

It's April 1961, but it's actually, it's quite rowdy.

People in the crowd keep standing up to interrupt the speakers.

It is very much a two-way street between people on the stage and people in the audience.

And Mailer is like varyingly contemptuous.

He spends a lot of time attacking Greer, who is, I think, kind of the best equipped to fight.

back.

He patronizes even his ally on stage, Diana Trilling.

And he claims that, you know, simply nobody understands him and that nobody is correctly reading his work.

But then he also makes a claim that he makes variously and sort of partially in the prisoner of sex, or like incompletely, but he's a little more avowed about it on the stage, which is that an acceptance of sexual inequality is in fact

an honorable confrontation with the realities of the world, right?

And this, I think, he really gets from Freud.

And Millett also traces it from Wilhelm Reich, but I think it's a misreading of Reich.

He says, like, women have this burden and privilege of creating life, even though they don't want to.

And their psychic and moral task is to reconcile themselves to this fate and to thereby submit to it and play their role in this human struggle.

And he just kind of keeps like reverting back to, it's not as specific as a biological determinism.

It's more abstract.

It's more like an existential determinism of childbearing and sort of feminine submission as, you know, not culturally imposed, but the fullest expression of the human soul for women.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And it's just kind of a brick wall.

Which is something that, as we talked about with Midector, like that is one thing that the mid-century intellectuals seem to get out of Freud with an ease that I can't get it out of Freud, right?

Like their Freud was one that was all about learning to cope with these noble but restrictive roles that you know, the species is forcing us into.

And I don't think Freud ever really, I mean, Freud has those kinds of moments, but by and large, it's a fairly selective reading of Freud's work, I would say.

And Freud thought he was telling, as far as I can tell, a story of contingencies.

Like, there's actually, this can go wrong in many which ways.

Like, yes, like we all are going to die.

We all at some point will likely want to be intimate with other people.

Like there are things that are, that are just givens.

But like, what's interesting is that we're not actually.

Like we chafe under that quite extensively and productively.

And I think that that's, that's something that like mid-century Freudianism had a real tough time with.

And we talked with Sam and Matt from Know Your Enemy about this a little bit, why that is, why sort of the professionalization and almost straitjacketing of Freudianism in the psychiatric kind of establishment really meant that, you know, yeah, you had to kind of promise people this is a form of normalization because otherwise you're not going to get anyone to cover it.

You're not going to have enough people showing up.

You're just going to have your flowy, willowy Jermaine Greer on your couch and not like people who could actually pay for therapy.

And it was a way to kind of square, let's say, the Viennese sensibilities of psychoanalysis with the very sort of use-focused American moralism, right?

Yeah, historians of psychoanalysis, like my friend and friend of the pod, Hannah Zeevan, of Parapraxis Magazine, really trace the conservative turn in American psychoanalysis to, frankly, just American immigration policies, right?

Like the analysts who were in this overwhelmingly Jewish profession, the analysts who were able to flee Germany and Austria and come to the United States were the ones who already had a conservative disposition.

They were the ones who were avowedly anti-communist.

They're the ones who were best equipped to slot into a socially conservative American intellectual milieu.

And that was further incentivized by the marketplace that they found in the U.S.

But I want to say also, like, Freud was...

a subject of more contention for the mid-century intellectuals than you might think.

One of the best parts of Town Bloody Hall is Diana Trilling and Jermaine Greer just sort of mudslinging at each other over their respective selective quotations of Freud.

And they eventually just both say, well, you know, we're going to have to agree that both of us quote Freud when it suits us and ignore him when it doesn't, which is at least quite honest, you know?

And, you know, Freud is a guy who alternated between loyalty to the superego and the id, right?

At times, he had a great loyalty to, I think, what Mailer would identify as sort of a spirit of uncultivated, authentic vitality, right?

And that's the principle behind a lot of uses of Freud for sexual liberation purposes, right?

I think Mailer has no problem seeing that, certainly not for himself.

But he does not apply that sort of spirit of vitality to women, that sort of ability to impact the world and make meaning.

This is something he reserves for one sex.

Exactly.

He has both the Freudian right and the Freudian left in the back of his mind, I think, right?

There's a very good book that might have even been out by the time this event happened.

I can't quite remember.

It was written in 19 published in the 1970s by our Stanford colleague Paul Robinson called The Freudian Left.

And that is exactly the study of these kind of people who thought that a kind of left-wing critique of the superego was really what needed to happen.

And his three examples are Wilhelm Reich, Gesar Roheim, and Habat Makuse, right, are sort of his exemplars of this.

It's called the Freudian Left.

I don't know if it's still in print, but it's quite good.

And it's clear that, like, as you say, that Norman Meiler is drawing on that.

But then he's also clearly, you know, know, drawing on the kind of more professionalized, sort of anti-revolutionary Freudian, I don't call them Freudian establishment or Freudian right or whatever you want to call them.

And it seems like, yeah, Freud is sort of feeding everyone their lines at Town Bloody Hall.

Before we go in the like five minutes we have left to record before you have to go pick up your daughter from daycare, I wanted to ask you about Mailer's uses of irony.

Miller calls it Nietzschean.

And that reminded me of your thoughts on Nietzsche's uses of irony.

I think it's accurate but incomplete to say that Mailer is simply using irony as a kind of plausible deniability so as not to take responsibility for his misogynist views.

I think that's part of what he's doing.

But it seems like it's serving other purposes for him.

Yeah, I mean, I think that the idea that you're publicly enunciating things that you may not fully believe, right, is obviously for literary, I mean, it's

what makes Nietzsche so difficult to sort of assimilate as a a philosopher, because philosophy is really not supposed to do that.

But literature, it's its birthright to kind of be like, to just talk out of one corner of your mouth and be like, no, I mean, I wrote a person that I found reprehensible.

And it's, of course, made even more difficult for, let's say, the new journalists, right?

Which Mailer was most famous as by 1970, 71.

Because, of course, the whole point of this was like, yes, it's subjectively shot through.

It really did happen.

And the whole point is the authenticity of the author kind of vouches for the values or for the value of the observations, right?

It vouches for what makes these books compulsively readable and exciting, or this reportage, you know, useful and interesting.

Of course, there's a certain kind of irony built in in the sense that there's a self-reflexivity of what you're doing.

That's a very big part of the new journalism.

And of course, you're not fully identical with the kind of the speaking position you adopt in any article, right?

Like we always, everyone who writes for a living knows that sometimes you're like, my full argument would take too much time.

This is the bridge I can build here.

And my editor says I'm already 200 words over.

Unless we're Norman Mailer and it's Harper's, I guess.

Like all of us other than Norman Mailer will have experienced this.

So like in some way, yes, there is this kind of inherent irony.

On the other hand, I do think that this double game that people like to play and that they, I think, to some extent learn from Nietzsche by misunderstanding Nietzsche has become really this kind of, frankly, this plague on our discourse, this idea that in one moment, insist that you be taken seriously as though you were being authentic and unironic.

And then the moment you get pushed back to be like, well, you didn't understand the complex irony of this situation, right?

Of my speaking situation.

And it's like,

yeah, I feel like enjoy having that cake and eating it too.

It's a very, very tricky thing, right?

Like it's deeply corrosive, in many ways, frankly, a little bit cheap to kind of make statements of value and fact.

And then depending on what kind of pushback you get, it's a different thing.

We talked about a mailer novel, right?

Where, like, yes, if a novel character says this, you know, on some level, we can't ever say like, that's what the author is saying.

I think that's fair, right?

On the other hand, once that author is mostly known as a public intellectual, there's a presumption that at least some of what that person is saying, they mean, right?

That's why, you know, Katzard is not a, you know, not a useful, or whatever internet troll is not a useful public intellectual.

It's like a public intellectual has to say, I kind of stake my implicit reputation on this being the case, right?

And everyone from fucking David Brooks on down to like Matt Iglesias, like they'll always run to this.

And it's so easy.

And it's this rote kind of language game that we've established.

And I think it's, it's a real disservice.

That's not to say that there isn't a gap here.

That's not to say that there isn't something that, you know, the easy equations are not a good idea.

At the same time, it also does slimy critique in its most basic form, right?

You're basically saying, oh, you're both too serious and not serious enough.

You're both overly intellectual and not intellectual enough, right?

You're like, it's putting your critics in this really weird, neither fish nor foul position, which rhetorically is super seductive, and I get that.

It's just, I think, it's usually pretty unearned and not particularly interesting.

If what's keeping Mailer from making the defense, yeah, I didn't mean it that way.

It was kind of, I was taking a role, I was playing a role, but what I would say in his defense is this, right?

That's totally fine.

You can say that, right?

Like, I don't actually know that I believe that, but if I were to defend it, this would be my defense, sure.

But like, but that's not what he's doing.

He's like, oh, you dumb broads don't get what I'm doing here.

You know, go back to literature seminar, right?

Yeah, I think this is a maybe a good place to close and also a good lesson both from Norman and Mailer and to all the public intellectuals of our own time, which is if you want to be taken seriously, you have to be able to be held responsible.

And that's them's the breaks.

That's the deal.

Sowi.

Adrian, thank you for following me down this weird path into this, you know, my obsessive little detour into Norman Mailer, a guy I just can't get enough of hating.

Oh, God.

I had a lot of fun.

I got to say, I'm glad we'll be hopefully done with him for a little while.

I wouldn't mind a Philip Roth episode because I actually enjoy reading Roth.

But

I mean, mean, right?

Like, you're like, oh, I disagree with this, but like, the sentences are beautiful and I'm having a good time.

That's not my experience with Thornfield, usually.

Sorry.

He has his moments, but they're few and far between.

All right.

I guess we'll see you next time.

Yeah, well, this has been In Bed with the Right, In Bed with a Prisoner of Sex, and a bad time all around.

In Bed with the Right, we'd like to thank the Michelle R.

Clayman Institute for Gender Research for generous support.

Jennifer Portillo for setting up our studio.

Our theme music is by Katie Lyle.

Our producer is Megan Kalfis.