Women's Lib: Mailer v. Millett

In Armies of the Night, his Pulitzer-prizewinning journal of the 1967 antiwar march on the Pentagon, Norman Mailer lists his self-citations: "warrior, presumptive general, ex-political candidate, embattled aging enfant terrible of the literary world, wise father of six children, radical intellectual, existential philosopher, hard-working author, champion of obscenity, husband of four battling sweet wives, amiable bar drinker, and much exaggerated street fighter, party giver, hostess insulter." Not bad, but incomplete. Add frustrated novelist, passionate movie dabbler, sexual scientist, terror of the TV talk shows, critic of the global village and, to the ladies of Women's Liberation, master male chauvinist.

Last month Mailer told a young Libbie in New York: "Wait'll you read my piece in the upcoming Harper's. It's going to burn and blow what's left of your little brain. I found out what I really thought about sex when I wrote this story, and it ain't good." Normally a rapacious reporter, Mailer, 48, needed to do little legwork; his life has been plentifully preoccupied with the subject. He holed up in a cottage at Provincetown, Mass., in the dreary off-season days of last November and December, spending a month reading, a month writing.

Enraged Amazons. "The Prisoner of Sex," out this week, features more four-letter words than Harper's has printed in all its 121-year history. Mailer's 47,000-word exercise in sexual dialectic will probably blow brains not only among Lib ladies but a sizable segment of the magazine's 359,000 circulation. Mailer moves in on Women's Lib with menacing metaphor, but ends in capitulation. Writing in the third person. Mailer finally admits that "he would agree with everything they asked but to quit the womb."

He tells how he first became aware last year that he was under attack from "a squadron of enraged Amazons, an honor guard of revolutionary vaginas." He admits to naiveté in visualizing his female adversaries as "thin college ladies with eyeglasses, no-nonsense features, mouths thin as bologna slices, a babe in one arm, a hatchet in the other, gray eyes bright with balefire." When he protests to chic Radical Chick Gloria Steinem that he doesn't know what Women's Lib has against him. she tells him tartly: "You might try reading your books some day." Manhattan Congresswoman Bella Abzug adds: "We think your views on women are full of s——."