00:00:20.940And whether we like it or not, we're in bed with the right.
00:00:23.200So 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,
00:00:44.680We talked as our example of the pervert about Norman Mailer, this like titan of 20th century American literature and his very particular gender politics.
00:00:58.120And that got me thinking about this strange little episode in 1970 called The Prisoner of Sex.0.72
00:01:06.880So, Adrian, what do you know about The Prisoner of Sex?
00:01:08.920So 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 am familiar with, you know, I don't know Norman Mailer, but I'm familiar with his work, as they say, the writing and the stabbing and, you know, all of it.
00:01:38.920And this book, I know he got a lot of criticism.
00:01:42.380He was made the topic of a book by a very famous feminist critic.
00:01:46.280And he, in characteristic mailer fashion, took it super well.
00:02:36.600book from the year before, Sexual Politics, which is a critique of the sort of assumptions and
00:02:44.540practices and like sort of ideological modes under undergirding heterosexuality,
00:02:50.400as applied through a couple of different lenses. Sexual Politics is a weird and interesting little
00:02:55.800book. It was Kate Millett's dissertation. And she sort of turns to an articulation of sexual
00:03:01.840politics. Then she turns to a history of sexual politics. Her like longest and I think strongest
00:03:07.320section is a critique of Freud. But then at the end of the book, she has four chapters
00:03:14.240addressing the sexual politics of various different influential male writers in English,
00:03:21.440right? So she goes through a chapter on D.H. Lawrence, a chapter on Henry Miller,
00:03:26.840a chapter on Jean Genet. And one of the last and one of the shortest chapters is on Norman
00:03:31.580Mailer. It's about a 22-page chapter. So a 22-page chapter on Norman Mailer in the book by a feminist
00:03:39.080literary critic led to Norman Mailer's 250-page response. Always a measured guy, yeah.
00:03:45.600Yeah, it was a kind of like disproportionality, right? Now, I think it might be good to sort of
00:03:51.900place Millett and place Mailer like where they were in 1970, because I think part of the asymmetry
00:03:58.980of Mailer's response is also a reflection of like the asymmetry of power between him and Millett.
00:04:05.800So social politics was Kate Millett's doctoral dissertation, I believe, from Columbia. She has
00:04:11.900a PhD in literature from Columbia University. And she was sort of a grad student artist activist on
00:04:20.020the radical fringes of New York City's radical feminist scene that emerged in the late 1960s,
00:04:26.520Not 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?
00:04:39.560So 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?
00:04:57.300So Millett 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.
00:05:16.940His biggest book was The Naked and 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.
00:05:28.300That 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.
00:05:45.720And 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, Adel Morales, at a party full of elite people while he was running for mayor of New York.
00:06:02.500So you've got these people who are of different generations.
00:06:05.700There are different points in their careers.
00:06:08.260And one of them has quite a bit more cachet than the other, right?
00:06:12.740Yeah, 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?
00:06:20.800Actually, he's totally not mad at all, Adrian.
00:06:23.760Yeah, no, no, no. That's right. He, again, in a theme that I'm sure will not reoccur at all, handles it super well.
00:06:32.040So The Prisoner of Sex is Mailer's response to Millett and really to the women's liberation movement more broadly, right?
00:06:40.820And 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.
00:07:01.520So he does divide this into four sections, all of which are named after different aspects of himself. So section one is the 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.
00:07:20.460These 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.
00:07:32.740And 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.
00:08:56.780Oh, actually, he's talking in the same section about one of his mistresses who he said linked
00:09:02.760up with him right after he gets out of Bellevue after the stabbing of his wife, because it
00:09:08.140had actually given him this sexual cachet and made him seem more dangerous and appealing
00:09:12.680to straight women. I don't know if I trust Norman Mailer's account of women's heterosexuality,0.75
00:09:17.540but that's how he thought. It's a trap, girls. It's a trap.1.00
00:09:21.440Ladies, if he stabbed his last girlfriend, maybe swipe left. Anyway, he goes to Maine,
00:09:28.900right? And he is without his wife and he is with five of his children. He's got three
00:09:33.720teenage daughters and two sort of like school age, like under 10 year old sons. And he spends
00:09:40.220a couple days or he at first has the idea that he's going to be the only adult there. And he is
00:09:46.080going to sort of submit himself to caring for these children to try and better understand the
00:09:53.180life of the wife who just left him. Right. But then he thinks, no, that's ridiculous. I'm actually
00:09:56.740going to hire a maid. So he hires a local woman up in Maine to do a lot of the housework and0.98
00:10:02.320caretaking. And then that's too much. So he delegates his older daughters to taking care0.98
00:10:07.900of his younger sons. And then that's still too much on him. So he has his mistress come up for
00:10:14.220the rest of the summer and also contribute to the care of these children. I mean, you say that so
00:10:18.820judgmentally, but the man just almost won a Nobel Prize. I mean, like, you know, you can't take you
00:10:24.000can't change a diaper in that sort of state. Obviously, Benice's dignity, right? But like at
00:10:28.160At 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.
00:10:58.160And 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.
00:11:09.720So it's weird because the piece was commissioned by Time, but it winds up at Harper's, which is a sort of like editorial detail that he doesn't really explain.
00:11:18.080It's like, OK, at some point, Time magazine read what you gave them and went, I'm guessing we can't publish this.
00:11:25.560but harper's magazine decided to valiantly take it on to just bump their movie reviews and
00:11:30.900whatever like whatever norman needs another 10 000 words which again like i can't norman needs
00:11:36.300another 35 000 words like based on like how long a magazine really unbelievable i mean like
00:11:41.420for those of our listeners who don't write for like pitching a 4 000 word piece is like0.96
00:11:47.620kind of a lot like you you better have like been solicited to write that shit but like 40 000 is0.92
00:11:54.360astonishing and to read i mean like that's what like like something like 80 pages right i mean0.98
00:12:00.120in the print book it was 250 i don't know how much it would be like 40 000 words is like it's
00:12:05.480like i was hoping that was an expanded edition uh no i actually looked it up it's just reprinted
00:12:10.480it's like it does not seem to have been it does not seem to have expanded or changed the manuscript
00:12:14.940significantly before it was published as a book yeah i mean not not the point here but like can
00:12:19.220you imagine like who finished that thing like i i've had this experience before with like atlantic0.51
00:12:25.700pieces especially where like uh but harper's does this too where you're like how fucking long is0.75
00:12:30.380this thing right you're like you kind of grooving with it for like three pages like whoa i'm sorry0.76
00:12:33.960there's more and like imagine this happening like for 40 more pages it's just astonishing i mean0.90
00:12:39.340this is i finished it for my sins i finished this fucking book i will say it's a it's quite a quick0.93
00:12:46.260read it's yeah 250 pages but you know they're small it's like biggish type on smallish paper0.97
00:12:53.280and it does go smoothly but it has quite a few digressions and quite a bit of you know
00:13:00.720autobiography and it should also be said that norman mailer does in the prisoner of sex something
00:13:04.980he does throughout his non-fiction work which is right of himself in the third person yeah he never
00:13:12.260says I he says the prisoner or the acolyte or like the advocate was the last one the prisoner
00:13:19.540the prize winner yeah he never says I Norman Mailer he sort of deflects his experience and
00:13:25.820opinions onto a third character a third person which I think I wanted to I want to touch on
00:13:33.460that later and really get your insights Adrian because something that Mailer does throughout
00:13:39.220the prisoner of sex throughout his refutation of kate millett and then later in his sort of like
00:13:45.940public defense of this piece in a appearance on a panel that was documented in a movie called
00:13:51.680town bloody hall in april 1971 he always says i don't mean it that's my character right uh he0.70
00:13:59.020always triangulates it's the lamest fucking thing right and kate millett in her critique0.68
00:14:09.160of Mailer in sexual politics I'm going to try and pull this up because she does she says this really0.98
00:14:14.180nicely you know this is the kind of defense of all of these writers you know it's like oh this
00:14:21.100is not what I mean this is a character and the character is being pilloried or parodied sometimes
00:14:29.220is the justification or just you know just kind of an identity line drying in the sand exactly the
00:14:34.780people criticizing you just don't pick up on the subtle irony and the subtle friction between
00:14:39.540your authorial persona and your real beliefs what are your real beliefs oh well that's for you to0.96
00:14:44.280know and for them to find out right like it's it's such a fucking tired game right it positions0.95
00:14:49.260the critique as coming from a place of like ignorance or unsophistication and then insulates0.92
00:14:54.040the actual professor exactly or or like dunderheaded literal right yes it's uh it's like
00:14:59.140no no no i'm not evil you merely think that because you don't understand how smart i am
00:15:04.540So 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.
00:15:23.600And this is kind of a, this is something I rewatched Town Bloody Hall last night, which 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.
00:15:35.780And 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 the second clause of the sentence is quite different.
00:16:04.320He'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.
00:16:18.240And then he says, or he sort of reveals himself to believe through a series of irony, social positioning, and 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.0.89
00:16:37.640And 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?
00:17:07.540But, and that strikes me as like a straightforward, like pervert masculinity, but then he also
00:17:12.700becomes like quite creepy because he starts talking about his hatred of technology.
00:17:20.340And by technology, it becomes clear that he meets contraception and his rationale.
00:17:55.120You know, he equates male sexual aggression and response with sort of the entire human project.
00:18:02.420And 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 interesting. 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.
00:18:28.520And this is something that he seems to get from Freud, but I wonder if you might have
00:18:34.360more insight into where it comes from.
00:22:57.820I 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.
00:23:14.160That's an extremely common trope of late 19th century antisemitism. 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?
00:23:29.680this idea that new jewish masculinity was something that had to be proven was something that you know
00:23:34.540comes straight out of 19th century anti-semitism as a you know little i guess it testifies to the
00:23:40.140power of self-hatred for someone to adopt it again in 1969 well it's also it's also a common
00:23:46.900feature of anti-semitic misogyny right the idea that jewish women are sort of monstrously masculine0.98
00:23:53.120Right. Or they've got a sort of devouring maternal possessiveness that then in turn emasculates their Jewish sons. Like this is, you know, Betty Friedan, a Jewish intellectual of Mailer's generation, basically recreates this whole anti-Semitic archetype in the feminine mystique.1.00
00:24:12.920She's like, you know, we are too overbearing as mothers because we are like psychically constrained by being housewives.0.91
00:24:29.980And the sort of bastardization of Freud or like misuses of Freud against mothers in this misogynist mid-century project is, I think, really, really interesting.
00:24:39.540And it's definitely hanging heavily over both Mailer and Millett.
00:24:42.920we should probably get back let's get back to prison let's get back to prison yeah let's get
00:25:04.740back to prison let's get back to the substance of these critiques right so millett's critique
00:25:10.300of Mailer is that he associates sex with violence. He eroticizes violence. Mailer actually has this
00:25:18.080great quote where he just kind of steals de Beauvoir. He's like, nobody is born a man. You
00:25:21.380have to make yourself a man all the time. And the way that you do that in Mailer's schema,0.89
00:25:26.080as I think Millet charts like quite persuasively, is you do it through sex and violence, right? And
00:25:31.460this is the way that manhood is demonstrated, maintained, and created. And she views this as
00:25:38.160like, first of all, she kind of dispenses with, she articulates the sexual politics of eroticized
00:25:43.040violence. She pulls out a lot of pieces from Mailer's war novels in particular, where, you
00:25:50.560know, explosions are compared to ejaculations, guns are penises, etc. And then she sort of0.98
00:25:57.000dispenses with his claims to ironic detachment and says, you know, look, these are not actually
00:26:02.940anti-war books. These are books that glorify the violence of war as a demonstration of masculine
00:26:10.840virility. Right, as a proving ground kind of. Right. Which I think might strike us now in 2023
00:26:16.600as somewhat a pedestrian critique. But at the time, it was totally revolutionary. And frankly,
00:26:22.300Miller kind of agreed with her. He's like, yeah, my understanding of violence has changed. I do
00:26:26.960think it's necessary. He says that writing The Naked and the Dead changed him from being a
00:26:31.180pacifist to being somebody with an appreciation of violence, which is a crazy way to rate the
00:26:36.880naked and the dead. Yeah. It's been a while, but that's not, you don't come away being like,
00:26:42.280oh, that was awesome. It reminds me of when Sally Rooney in one interview said she thinks
00:26:48.440that conversations with friends is a beautiful love story. And I was like, wow, you really were
00:26:54.360born in 1993. I was like, that is not the impression I got from that book, but authorial
00:27:00.800intent. It's crazy. But you know, Millett's reading. Here's the thing is like Millett and
00:27:04.680Mailer actually kind of have the same assessment of Mailer's politics, right? It's just Millett
00:27:09.460thinks it's bad and Mailer thinks it's good, which is this like sort of classic clash we have between0.81
00:27:15.440the radical feminists and the gender conservatives, right? It's like they can actually articulate the
00:27:19.740same phenomenon. They just have different sets of values and priorities around it. But Mailer's
00:27:25.840critique in The Prisoner of Sex, his response is kind of not totally consistent, right?
00:27:31.780So sometimes he claims to be a great advocate and proponent of women's liberation who truly
00:27:37.880believes that the question of, you know, the extent to which women and men can live together
00:27:42.220and freedom and equality is the greatest question of the human project, right? So he sometimes says
00:27:47.220he takes it very, very seriously. And then he sort of adopts this posture of like school boyish,
00:27:53.480like jeering dismissal right he's like contemptuous he can't decide what he means he can't decide if
00:28:00.700he's joking or not uh he can't decide the tone he wants to take something i thought about when we
00:28:05.320talked about the libertine in our other episode in some way the libertine does have to be in favor
00:28:10.700of some kind of liberation because he needs enthusiastic frequent and not very discerning
00:28:17.240partners basically for his libertinism right like and i mean we see that all throughout the 1960s
00:28:22.320that like a lot of men appear to mean bisexual liberation basically are the gendered values0.98
00:28:29.540that structure our society stay the same but i get my dick wet more right like that's that you0.95
00:28:34.860know i feel like that's you know around the bay area right all these communes that basically turn0.96
00:28:39.180into these like patriarchal like nightmares right like or weird cults you know they all sort of say
00:28:45.720like oh you have to get rid of your inhibitions etc and that always means like kind of consenting
00:28:51.060you things that you normally might not have consented to. And even being told that it's
00:28:55.820like, it's actually like traditionalist or Puritan not to want to. So it makes perfect sense to me0.84
00:29:01.220that like, Mailer must be on board with that part of women's lib, given that like, that's what keeps1.00
00:29:05.600Norman Mailer in business. He's just not so cool about the part that would get women to write a0.98
00:29:10.080book about him and about gender politics suck. Yeah, I think this is a really good point,1.00
00:29:14.960because it points to the novelty and the challenge posed by Kate Millett's contribution in 1970,
00:29:22.080right? So feminism had, since the 19th century, been critiquing restraints on heterosexual1.00
00:29:29.480expression, right? There had been free love feminists in the early 20th and late 19th century.1.00
00:29:36.060There had been sort of anti-monogamy feminists. There had been people advocating for the1.00
00:29:42.940destigmatization and really legalization in practice of having children out of wedlock.
00:29:48.140So, advocation for increased sexual expression and access had traditionally been-1.00
00:30:38.740So 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?
00:30:53.840So sex has become a lot more free, a lot more available.
00:30:56.680And it's also been decoupled from a Christian moral framework.
00:31:01.220So the critique of heterosexuality that Millet 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.
00:31:20.560And that is, it's not a critique so much of institutions to 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.
00:31:34.200So 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.0.80
00:31:42.640He's like, women don't make as much money as men.
00:31:46.820He'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.
00:31:57.180Babysitters don't make nearly enough money.
00:32:12.600It's not a sort of like qualitative or moral charge the way Kate Millett's sexual politics is.
00:32:18.440But it's also something where you can like move the goalposts a lot.
00:32:21.040You can always be like, well, what do you mean by the wage gap?
00:32:23.320Or like, oh, look, I'm going to discursively remove the motherhood penalty as a legitimate objection.
00:32:29.720That's something that they can poof away very quickly. But it's also often a way to rhetorically purchase some credibility. 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.
00:32:49.400But like crucially, the wage gap is a critique of institutions.
00:32:53.540It's a critique of corporations, which are entities that somebody from the counterculture
00:32:58.640like Mailer is like very comfortable pointing the finger at.
00:33:02.060Whereas the sexual politics critique that Millett is advancing is one that happens, that
00:33:07.840is carried out by men in private on a person to person, individual basis, right?
00:33:13.480So there's individual culpability that he takes great offense to.
00:33:17.200Well, it also, right, I mean, 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, 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. Basically, you're the ones who are not reading the signs of the time.
00:33:44.920I'm for women making a dollar to a men's dollar.0.99
00:33:48.280And isn't that the thing that really mattered?0.99
00:33:50.320Are material conditions the most important thing?0.59
00:33:52.240And in some respects, that's a plea back to the liberal feminism of now, right?
00:33:58.060Although it should be said of now that they did not buy this from Mailer whatsoever.0.65
00:34:01.740There's this great moment in Town Bloody Hall when Betty Friedan, who's not on the panel,
00:34:06.280she's in the audience, she stands up and like curses him out.
00:34:10.540But that panel, and it might be a good moment to turn to it really quickly, just
00:34:14.480before we wrap up, because it's a really interesting sort of confrontation between
00:34:20.940Mailer and his critics, not on the page, but in real time, right? So it's a town hall, like,
00:34:27.860you know, at town hall, I used to think, honestly, that town hall in New York City
00:34:31.900was New York City Hall. And then I moved to New York bright eyed and bushy tailed. And it's
00:34:39.040actually a concert hall in Times Square. It's like this, you know, famous theater. It's like
00:34:43.460pretty big it's a it's a broadway theater right and the national organization for women i believe
00:34:49.040like sold tickets like it was like a fight night where norman mailer was going to confront critics
00:34:54.440of the prisoner of sex so kate millett was in the audience but she did not come on stage on stage
00:34:59.840where jacqueline sabalos who was the head of the very powerful new york city chapter of now0.91
00:35:04.660the kind of willowy like sex pot feminist writer germaine greer oh germaine greer nice yeah yeah0.58
00:35:12.480It was weird to see Jermaine Greer in 1971, when she was actually at the height of her powers on this stage, because she's now descended into paranoia and bigotry.
00:35:23.180And so it was weird to see her back when she was in this other era of her life, when she was actually quite intellectually serious.
00:35:30.280And she's kind of the star of the panel.
00:35:33.440Then there's Jill Johnston, who's a radical lesbian separatist from The Village Voice.
00:35:37.740And then Diana Trilling, who sort of plays the role as the anti-feminist woman and this like elder states woman.
00:36:01.580People in the crowd keep standing up to interrupt the speakers.
00:36:05.080it is very much a two-way street between people on the stage and people in the audience
00:36:10.640and Mailer is like varyingly contemptuous he spends a lot of time attacking Greer who is I
00:36:18.040think kind of the best equipped to fight back he patronizes even his ally on stage Diana Trilling
00:36:24.600and he claims that you know simply nobody understands him and that nobody is correctly
00:36:29.240reading his work but then he also makes a claim that he makes variously and sort of partially in
00:36:34.960prisoner of sex or like incompletely but he's he's a little more avowed about it on the stage
00:36:39.860which is that an acceptance of sexual inequality is in fact an honorable confrontation with the
00:36:47.360realities of the world right and this i think he really gets from freud and millet also traces it
00:36:52.540from wilhelm reich but i think yeah this reading of reich is he says like women have this burden
00:36:59.860and privilege of creating life, even though they don't want to. And their psychic and moral task
00:37:06.100is to reconcile themselves to this fate, and to thereby submit to it and play their role in this
00:37:12.080human struggle. And he just kind of keeps like reverting back to, it's not as specific as a
00:37:17.740biological determinism, it's more abstract, it's more like an existential determinism
00:37:21.320of childbearing and sort of feminine submission as, you know, not culturally imposed, but the
00:37:28.260fullist expression of the human soul for women yeah yeah and it's just kind of a brick wall which
00:37:34.120is something that as we saw talked about with the detector like that is one thing that the
00:37:38.540mid-century intellectuals seem to get out of freud with an ease that i can't get it out of freud
00:37:43.720right like their freud was one that was all about learning to cope with these noble but restrictive
00:37:51.200roles that you know the species is forcing us into and i don't think freud ever really i mean
00:37:59.260freud has those kinds of moments but by and large it's a fairly selective reading of freud's work
00:38:04.940i would say and freud thought he was telling as far as i can tell a story of contingencies like
00:38:09.700this actually this can go wrong in many which ways like yes like we all are gonna die we all
00:38:14.940at some point will likely want to be intimate with other people like there are things that are
00:38:19.500just givens. But what's interesting is that we're not actually, we chafe under that quite
00:38:25.860extensively and productively. And I think that that's something that mid-century Freudianism
00:38:30.820had a real tough time with. And we talked with Sam and Matt from Know Your Enemy about this a
00:38:35.140little bit about why that is, why sort of the professionalization and almost straightjacketing
00:38:39.660of Freudianism in the psychiatric kind of establishment really meant that, yeah, you
00:38:46.000had to kind of promise people this is a form of normalization because otherwise you're not going
00:38:51.060to get anyone to cover it you're not going to have enough people showing up you're just going
00:38:54.220to have your flowy willowy germane greer on your couch and not like people could actually pay for
00:38:58.920therapy and it was a way to kind of square let's say the viennese sensibilities of psychoanalysis
00:39:05.100with the very sort of use focused american moralism right yeah historians of psychoanalysis
00:39:10.660Like 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?
00:39:23.040Like 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.
00:39:34.720They 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, you know, further incentivized by the marketplace that they found in the US.0.61
00:39:48.180But I want to say also like Freud was a subject of more contention for the mid-century intellectuals than you might think.
00:39:56.240One of the best parts of Town Bloody Hall is Diana Trilling and Germaine Greer just sort of mudslinging at each other over their respective selective quotations of Freud.
00:40:06.460And 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.
00:40:12.680Which 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?
00:40:35.720And 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.0.96
00:40:47.660This is something he reserves for one sex.1.00
00:40:50.020He has both the Freudian right and the Freudian left in the back of his mind, I think, right?
00:40:54.600There's a very good book that might have even been out by the time this event happened.
00:40:59.200I can't quite remember. It was 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, Gesa Roheim, and Herbert Marcuse, 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.
00:41:24.440And it's clear that like, as you say, that Norman Mailer is drawing on that. But then he's also clearly, you know, drawing on the kind of more professionalized sort of anti-revolutionary Freudian, I don't call him Freudian establishment or Freudian right or whatever you want to call him. And it seems like, yeah, Freud is sort of feeding everyone their lines at Town Bloody Hall.
00:41:44.860Before 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.
00:41:55.300Millett calls it Nietzschean, and that reminded me of your comments on Nietzsche's uses of irony.
00:42:00.720I 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.
00:42:11.540I think that's part of what he's doing, but it seems like it's serving other purposes for him.
00:42:16.480Yeah. I mean, I think that the idea that you're publicly enunciating things that you may not
00:42:21.400fully believe, right, is obviously for literary, I mean, it's what makes Nietzsche so difficult
00:42:28.860to sort of assimilate as a philosopher, because philosophy is really not supposed to do that.
00:42:32.960But literature, it's birthright to kind of be like, to just talk out of one corner of your mouth
00:42:37.360and be like, no, I mean, I wrote a person that I found reprehensible. And it's, of course,
00:42:42.060made even more difficult for, let's say, the new journalists, right, which Mailer was most famous
00:42:48.960as by 1970, 71. Because, of course, the whole point of this was like, yes, it's subjectively
00:42:55.620shot through. It really did happen. And the whole point is the authenticity of the author kind of
00:43:01.920vouches for the values or for the value of the observations, right? It vouches for what makes
00:43:08.180these books compulsively readable and exciting, or this reportage, you know, useful and interesting.
00:43:14.060Of course, there's a certain kind of irony built in, in the sense that there's a self-reflexivity
00:43:18.100of what you're doing. That's a very big part of the new journalism. And of course, you're not
00:43:22.820fully identical with the kind of the speaking position you adopt in any article, right? Like
00:43:27.300we always, everyone who writes for a living knows that sometimes you're like, my full argument would
00:43:32.280take too much time. This is the bridge I can build here. And my editor says, I'm already 200 words
00:43:36.580over, unless we're Norman Mailer and it's Harper's, I guess. Like all of us other than Norman Mailer
00:43:41.260will have experienced this. So like in some way, yes, there is this kind of inherent irony. On the
00:43:46.280other hand, I do think that this double game that people like to play and that they, I think, to
00:43:52.840some extent learn from Nietzsche, but by misunderstanding Nietzsche has become really
00:43:57.120this kind of, frankly, this plague on our discourse, this idea that in one moment insists
00:44:02.720that you be taken seriously as though you were being authentic and unironic.
00:44:08.060And then the moment you get pushed back to be like, well, you didn't understand the complex