I LAIN DEALER, MUNDAI, FEDRUANI 64, 177 1

Battle Is Joined in War Between the Sexes

By Amei Wallach

Newsday

J

"I have this fantasy,' sald Kate Millett last July, "of Norman Mailer coming up to me and socking me in the jaw."

It was the night of the day that her "Sexual Politics" came out, the book that would put her face on the cover of Time and win her the often onerous title of spokeswoman for the Women's Liberation Movement.

Norman Mailer was a big part of that book. Over 25 pages worth, most of them derogatory. He was a repressed homosexual, she said. A bully. And "a prisoner of the virility cult.”

SO ALL that hot July day there had been hopeful little whispers that Norman Mailer would really show up at that crowded literary bar on the Bowery where Kate Millett and her friends were celebrating. The least he could do was make a scene. Wasn't he a man who lived a good battle? A man who got a kick out of calling himself "a slightly punchdrunk and ugly club fighter who can fight clean and fight dirty, but likes to fight"? A man who prided himself on facing sex and his own sexuality, his own magical masculinity, squarely. And defending it to the past parentheses?

Of course he never did show up at that party.

He was in Maine, he tells us now, spending “six hardworking mindless weeks with his daughters, his sons and his mistress, his brain

full of menus and shopping lists and projects and outings." He was finding out "whether he would have found it endurable to be born a woman or if it would have driven him out onto the drear avenues of the insane.'

""

INSTEAD, it drove him back to New York, and then to Provincetown, to a lot of thought and reading of feminist texts, and to battle. Then last week, on your newsstands, Norman Mailer the Avenger raised his weapon and took aim at Kate Millett and nearly every other feminist in sight.

Some of them just laughed at him. And some of them yawned. And some of them pretended they hadn't noticed. And only one

or two of them rose to the bait and got very, very angry.

It wasn't quite the rehad expected. "Pick up a sponse Harper's Magazine copy," it's ad campaign read. "Before your newsstand is picketed."

It was Harper's that carried the Mailer attack, in a 43-page article called "The Prisoner of Sex," which gobbles up most of the March issue's available lett and her colleagues with pages and sprays Miss Milsuch epithets as "technologist," "pure left totalitarian," "pug nosed wit," "good laboratory assistant,' "sturdy," "literary Molotov," "literary commissar," "dull cow."

""

WHILE SOME of the fem-

inists, he acknowledges in surprised respect, write like "very tough faggots." her style is "like a gossip columnist," or "suggestive of a nightschool lawyer who sips Metrecal to keep his fig-

ure.

""

And most damning of all, from Mailer. She occupies the regions of the "Upper Mediocre."

But if Mailer had any fantasy that Kate Millett would come up to him and sock him in the jaw, he had to be disappointed.

"I have

nothing to say," she said flatly. "I don't reply to attacks."

And Gloria Steinem, to whom he was oh-so courtly and kind in the article ("the wise, responsible, and never unattractive manifestation

of

women's rights") laughed first and then was kind to Mailer, too. "He's trying to change," she said. "He still ends up thinking the end of woman is to find a

man and mate. He's struggling, though."

And Betty Friedan hadn't read it. But it sounds dull."

And Lucinda Cisler, who is quoted in the article and is president of New Yorkers for Abortion Repeal, dammed him on his own terms. "I could hardly plow through the whole thing." she said. "It was so involved and so boring. He came to very ordinary conclusions."

AND ELLEN Levine, who is coauthoring a history of the women s liberation movement was "disappoint-

>

Antagonists... Kate Millett and Norman Mailer.

ed." "There's something about Mailer that I like. she said, and laughed, then laughed again. “He's sufficiently abrasive to be exhilarating and more willing than most to look at where it's at. But he's stuck. The whole thing was written for the preservation of his private parts.

And Anne Koedt, whom he attacked at great length for her article on "The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm," was disappointed. 109. “Understand," she said. "I don't like Mailer and he is a sexist. But Mailer at his best at least is honest about his feeling. And I think he copped out on that. He just had the standard paranoid reaction. I would have expected a lot better fight. But Mailer is Maiter with all his prejudices hanging out, and if I have to choose between sexists. I prefer Mailer to most of the others."

91

"Norman has this thing about physical courage, Gloria Steinem, "he's just totally caught up in this whole masculine image And it sets up a dichotomy So the woman has to be very submissive.”

BUT, AS all the feminist: said, over and over again "Mailer always tries to be very honest." He tries. And suddenly, at the end of thos

47,000 fantastic, blistering, self-searching, bellicose words, he caves in, saying he "agrees with everything they ask but to quit the womb."

Only for Mailer the womb is everything. He said it once, in one of those abrasive outbursts that won him a proud spot at the top of the male-chauvinist-pig list, and he says it now again:

The prime responsibility of

woman probably is to be on earth long enough to find the best mate for herself and conceive children who will improve the species."

Except he has read all those feminist treatises since then and he, more than most men, perhaps, has made a painful effort to understand them. He knows that what women want in terms of jobs and rights and freedom will never come until something has been

solved in what happens privately between men and women together. So, as he reaches his same old conclusion, he has to say:

"IT WAS finally obvious. Women must have their rights to a life which would allow them to look for a male. And there would be no free search until they were liberated. So let woman be what she would, and she could . Let her conceive her children and kill them in the womb if she thought they did not have it, let her travel to the moon, write the great American novel, and allow her husband to send her off to work with her lunch pail and a cigar ... Finally, he would agree with everything they asked but to quit the womb, for finally a day had to come when women shattered the pear of their love, for pristine and feminine will and found the man, yes that man in the million who could become the point of the seed which would give an egg back to nature and let the woman return with a babe who came from the root of God's desire to go all the way, whatever was that way."

•

And somehow the article was over, and he had avoided a direct attack on those 25 pages Kate Millett did on him. That, he decided was the proper ground for a novel, and he would try it there."

Washington Post/L. A. Times Service