Fifty years ago this week the hottest ticket in New York was to see one male chauvinist author take on four feminists: Norman Mailer versus Germaine Greer, Jill Johnston, Diana Trilling and Jacqueline Ceballos. The Town Hall debate, immortalised in D.A Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus’s 1979 film Town Bloody Hall, was conceived after Mailer published his essay on the women’s liberation movement for Harper’s magazine.
Entitled “The Prisoner of Sex”, and later published as a small book, Mailer’s essay is largely a rebuttal to Kate Millett’s book Sexual Politics, which, alongside D.H. Lawrence and Henry Miller, denounced Mailer’s work as misogynistic. When “The Prisoner of Sex” was first published, the editor of Harper’s magazine took out an ad in The New York Times announcing: “The Favourite Target of Women’s Lib Chooses His Weapon. Harper’s Magazine”. Adding: “Pick up a Copy. Before Your Newsstand is Picketed”.
The Prisoner of Sex is an odd book. Mailer refers to himself throughout in the third person. It contains literary analysis of the smutty bits in Miller and Lawrence, long and technical digressions on female anatomy, and meditations on the metaphysical nature of sex. For Mailer, the main problem with the women’s liberation movement is it evades the fundamental fact of biological difference: “Women, like men, were human beings” he writes, “but they were a step, or a stage, or a move or a leap nearer the creation of existence”.
Women, because of their reproductive capacities, were men’s “only connection to the future”. Without women, men would be alienated from nature: they would just bundle along, without any point or significance to their lives. This is why Mailer, who was a serial womaniser, was opposed to contraception and masturbation: they interfered with the organic, procreative essence of sexual relations. J Michael Lennon, Mailer’s authorised biographer, writes that, “from one perspective, his sixty years of writing can be seen as an untrammelled examination of all things sexual”. Alfred Kazin once described him as “the Rabbi of screwing, the Talmudist of fucking, the writer who has managed to be so solemn about sex as to make it grim”.
Joan Didion endorsed the book, writing that Mailer’s view “strikes me as exactly right”. Joyce Carol Oates was also sympathetic: Mailer, she writes, “is shameless in his passion for women, and one is led to believe anything he says because he says it so well”. Anatole Broyard, critic for The New York Times, called it Mailer’s best book. But it was also often panned — and badly. Brigid Brophy, in a review for The New York Times, contends that the “prose proceeds from malapropism” to “the rhapsodic plateau of the inside of a Christmas card”. The book was nominated for a National Book Award and earned Mailer $200,000 in royalties; but the only way I could buy it this year was to wait four weeks for my second-hand copy to arrive.
At the time of the debate, in 1971, Mailer was at the peak of productivity. Between 1965 and 1975, he wrote 16 books, directed three films, produced a play, and ran for Mayor of New York City. Mailer had been a key figure in American literary culture since his debut novel, The Naked and the Dead, was published in 1948. It spent 19 weeks in first place on the New York Times bestseller list and 40 translation rights were sold. Mailer was 25.
A year later, he briefly moved to Hollywood and hobnobbed with Charlie Chaplin, Marlon Brando and Humphrey Bogart. In the 1950s, when his follow up novel, Barbary Shore, was not as well-received as his first, he became the Philosopher of Hip. Fuelled by marijuana, booze, coffee and sleeping pills, he became a countercultural essayist who celebrated the intense immediacy of life. The fact that he stabbed and nearly killed his second wife Adele Morales in 1960 didn’t really hamper his fame. In his career, he gave over seven hundred interviews.
Millett was invited to take part in the Town Hall debate but she declined. Gloria Steinem, who was friendly with Mailer, also said no. But six months before the debate, an Australian academic at Warwick University published a book entitled The Female Eunuch. It became a bestseller and made the author a celebrity. For many people, the Town Hall debate was simply Germaine Greer versus Norman Mailer — the icon of Women’s Lib against the quintessential Male Chauvinist Pig.
In any case, the first speaker of the debate was Jacqueline Ceballos, the leader of the New York chapter of the National Organization for Women. In her speech, Ceballos argues that the root of everything — the peace movement, the civil rights movement — is “women’s liberation”. She mentioned that at work women are underpaid and overworked. And that we should encourage women to sue employers who discriminate against them.
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