I think the reason for that is pretty obvious - women are less threatening than men.” Male authors like Miller have generally been recuperated by a more sex-positive attitude that sweeps across gender or identity, a point Mailer was at pains to make in his criticism that straddled the threshold of a bygone modernist sexual liberation and a developing New Left sexual de-liberation in vogue in some contemporary art enclaves. Women could write more intensely about sex and it would be accepted in a way it wasn’t from men. For a while, writing about sex was almost the purview of women. People thought he was disgusting then, as well. Although at the time, too, he was not approved of - he couldn’t get published in America for a long time. Mary Gaitskill claimed recently that “Today, I don’t think any man would dare write what Miller wrote, which is unfortunate.

Mailer’s essay burns as a piece of literary criticism that clarifies the philosophical, aesthetic, and political motives of modern authors like Miller, who have gone the way of the dinosaur. In it, he analyzed in detail the passages quoted by Millett and restored to their full meaning what Millett had cut down to make her points, occasionally even putting words in their mouths. Mailer’s article “The Prisoner of Sex” was subsequently published in Harper’s. Sexual Politics was a bestselling cornerstone of the Women’s Liberation movement, and Norman Mailer was invited to respond as a journalist not only to the charges against him in the book, but to cover the women’s movement as a whole. Lawrence - and celebrated the homosexuality of Jean Genet. In 1970, Feminist Kate Millett published Sexual Politics, a dissertation that attacked the literary misogyny of three modern male authors - Henry Miller, Norman Mailer, and D.H.

Tropic of capricorn novel