Over at The Critic, Felice Basbøll has written the rare essay that picks up Mailer and the feminists without flinching in either direction: “Sex wars, what are they good for?” The hook is our own moment — the dreary, evasive stand-off between the sexes that passes for debate online — but the argument runs back through The Prisoner of Sex and the 1971 Town Hall night that D. A. Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus caught on film as Town Bloody Hall.
Basbøll is clear-eyed about why Mailer made such an inviting target. Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics had enthroned the male artist’s ego — Miller, Lawrence, Mailer — as the engine of patriarchy, and Mailer, who was anti-war, anti-establishment, and no friend of respectable piety, nonetheless could not resist mounting the barricade in the ego’s defense. “Biology is not destiny,” he allowed, “but it is half of it.” It is not a line that has aged into comfort, and Basbøll doesn’t pretend otherwise; she keeps the stabbing of Adele Morales in the frame, and the philandering, and the patronizing tone.
What she’s after is something subtler than a verdict. On that stage Mailer’s one real match was Germaine Greer, and the two of them — wary, combative, openly fascinated with each other — show what the others mostly couldn’t: adversaries who respected one another enough to actually fight. Hegedus said later she half-edited the footage as a love story. That mutual seriousness, Basbøll argues, is exactly what the contemporary sex wars have traded away for the safety of “no debate.”
It chimes with something Mailer told Martin Amis twenty years on, about writing Harlot’s Ghost: you have to write for your adversaries as much as for your friends. He spent a career doing it — picking fights with the war novel, with the new journalism, with the women’s movement, with the Devil himself — and losing some of them in public, which is the only honest way to lose. Whatever one makes of the positions he defended, the willingness to be proved wrong in front of a hostile room is a quality our discourse could use a great deal more of. Basbøll’s piece is a fine reminder of it, and well worth your time.
Norman Mailer during his 1969 New York mayoral campaign.