Norman Mailer in 1965. (Photo by Keystone-France/Gamma-Keystone via Getty Images)

Fifty years ago this week the hottest ticket in New York was to see one male chauvinist author take on four feminists: Norman Mailer versus Germaine Greer, Jill Johnston, Diana Trilling and Jacqueline Ceballos. The Town Hall debate, immortalised in D.A Pennebaker and Chris Hegedusâs 1979 film Town Bloody Hall, was conceived after Mailer published his essay on the womenâs liberation movement for Harperâs magazine.
Entitled âThe Prisoner of Sexâ, and later published as a small book, Mailerâs essay is largely a rebuttal to Kate Millettâs book Sexual Politics, which, alongside D.H. Lawrence and Henry Miller, denounced Mailerâs work as misogynistic. When âThe Prisoner of Sexâ was first published, the editor of Harperâs magazine took out an ad in The New York Times announcing: âThe Favourite Target of Womenâs Lib Chooses His Weapon. Harperâs Magazineâ. Adding: âPick up a Copy. Before Your Newsstand is Picketedâ.
The Prisoner of Sex is an odd book. Mailer refers to himself throughout in the third person. It contains literary analysis of the smutty bits in Miller and Lawrence, long and technical digressions on female anatomy, and meditations on the metaphysical nature of sex. For Mailer, the main problem with the womenâs liberation movement is it evades the fundamental fact of biological difference: âWomen, like men, were human beingsâ he writes, âbut they were a step, or a stage, or a move or a leap nearer the creation of existenceâ.
Women, because of their reproductive capacities, were menâs âonly connection to the futureâ. Without women, men would be alienated from nature: they would just bundle along, without any point or significance to their lives. This is why Mailer, who was a serial womaniser, was opposed to contraception and masturbation: they interfered with the organic, procreative essence of sexual relations. J Michael Lennon, Mailerâs authorised biographer, writes that, âfrom one perspective, his sixty years of writing can be seen as an untrammelled examination of all things sexualâ. Alfred Kazin once described him as âthe Rabbi of screwing, the Talmudist of fucking, the writer who has managed to be so solemn about sex as to make it grimâ.
Joan Didion endorsed the book, writing that Mailerâs view âstrikes me as exactly rightâ. Joyce Carol Oates was also sympathetic: Mailer, she writes, âis shameless in his passion for women, and one is led to believe anything he says because he says it so wellâ. Anatole Broyard, critic for The New York Times, called it Mailerâs best book. But it was also often panned â and badly. Brigid Brophy, in a review for The New York Times, contends that the âprose proceeds from malapropismâ to âthe rhapsodic plateau of the inside of a Christmas cardâ. The book was nominated for a National Book Award and earned Mailer $200,000 in royalties; but the only way I could buy it this year was to wait four weeks for my second-hand copy to arrive.
At the time of the debate, in 1971, Mailer was at the peak of productivity. Between 1965 and 1975, he wrote 16 books, directed three films, produced a play, and ran for Mayor of New York City. Mailer had been a key figure in American literary culture since his debut novel, The Naked and the Dead, was published in 1948. It spent 19 weeks in first place on the New York Times bestseller list and 40 translation rights were sold. Mailer was 25.
A year later, he briefly moved to Hollywood and hobnobbed with Charlie Chaplin, Marlon Brando and Humphrey Bogart. In the 1950s, when his follow up novel, Barbary Shore, was not as well-received as his first, he became the Philosopher of Hip. Fuelled by marijuana, booze, coffee and sleeping pills, he became a countercultural essayist who celebrated the intense immediacy of life. The fact that he stabbed and nearly killed his second wife Adele Morales in 1960 didnât really hamper his fame. In his career, he gave over seven hundred interviews.
Millett was invited to take part in the Town Hall debate but she declined. Gloria Steinem, who was friendly with Mailer, also said no. But six months before the debate, an Australian academic at Warwick University published a book entitled The Female Eunuch. It became a bestseller and made the author a celebrity. For many people, the Town Hall debate was simply Germaine Greer versus Norman Mailer â the icon of Womenâs Lib against the quintessential Male Chauvinist Pig.
In any case, the first speaker of the debate was Jacqueline Ceballos, the leader of the New York chapter of the National Organization for Women. In her speech, Ceballos argues that the root of everything â the peace movement, the civil rights movement â is âwomenâs liberationâ. She mentioned that at work women are underpaid and overworked. And that we should encourage women to sue employers who discriminate against them.
She is not against marriage, but rather wants to change the direction so that âIf women are married in a society that pushes them towards marriage, they should be paid for the work they doâ. They should also receive pensions and vacation pay. And she attacks how women are portrayed in advertising as âstupidâ and âsenileâ. A woman âgets an orgasm when she gets the shiny floorâ. Doll-like before marriage, afterwards she is presented as a bitter shrew.
After her speech, Mailer says to Ceballos: âWhile everything you presented was certainly to the point and even politically feasible I would ask if there was anything in your programme that would give us men the notion that life might not continue to be as profoundly boring as it is todayâ. She is too square for him.
Greer is next to speak, âthat distinguished and young and formidable lady writer Miss Germaine Greer from Englandâ in Mailer’s words. Speaking in a posh British-Australian accent, Greer proclaims that she has to confront âthe being I think most privileged in male elitist society â namely, the masculine artist. The pinnacle of the masculine eliteâ. The audience breaks into laughter: the statement seems to be directed at Mailer.
Women artists were either âmenialsâ or âGoddessesâ. Women can âneither be one nor the other with peace of mindâ because âwe are unfortunately improper Goddesses and unwilling menials. There is a battle waged between usâ. Greer adds that: âThe achievement of the male artistic ego is at my expense for I find the battle is dearer to him than the peace would ever be. The eternal battle with women, he boasts, sharpens our resistance, develops our strength, enlarges the scope of our cultural achievementsâ. Mailer says in response that the women’s liberation movement is insufficiently âdialecticalâ. That itâs possible for women to be both âslobsâ and âGoddessesâ. And itâs only through âextremes of experienceâ that women can achieve a higher state.
The next speaker is Jill Johnston, a dance critic at The Village Voice, who would two years later publish a book entitled Lesbian Nation. She argues that âUntil all women are lesbians, there will be no true political revolutionâ because women must give each other a new sense of self, and âuntil women see in each other the possibility of a primal commitment, which includes sexual love, they will be denying themselves the love and value they readily accord to men â thus affirming their second class statusâ.
Mailer tells Johnston itâs time to close her speech, as she has gone over the allotted time. Two of her friends come on stage, and they start rolling on the floor together. To which Mailer responds: âHey you know itâs great that you pay 25 bucks to see three dirty overalls on the floor, when you can see lots of cock and cunt for four dollars just down the streetâ.
The next and final speaker is Diana Trilling, who identified as an old-school feminist and was a key member of âThe Familyâ: the group of writers and intellectuals in New York associated with magazines like Partsian Review, Commentary, and The New York Review of Books. Trilling states that the women’s liberation movement, as evidenced by the hostility to Mailer, has âan authoritarianism already this advanced in purpose and efficiency. Here we have achieved virtually nothing on behalf of women other than perhaps to open a door on grievances which they have either tried to suppress or lived with in lonelinessâ.
Trilling is opposed to many feminists âwho will invalidate the biological differences between the sexesâ. She objects to Mailer because while honouring biology, he âimplicitly acquiesces in the intolerable uses in which culture has made of the biological differences between the sexesâ. She adds that: âBiology is all very well Norman. All these women have biology. But they also have a repressive and life-diminishing culture to contend withâ. And Mailerâs essay âfails in its imagination of the full humanity of women, as it would never fail in its imagination of the full humanity of menâ.
After Trillingâs speech, Mailer reiterates his position: âBiology or physiology is not destiny. But it is half of itâ, and if we ignore this we get the âmost awful totalitarianism of them allâ because it is a âleft totalitarianismâ. He dislikes what he considers the humourless aspect of the women’s liberation movement. And he states that female liberty, like every liberty, will be achieved against the grain, against the paradox that âthere is much in human life that forbids libertyâ.
The issue goes at the heart of human existence: âit is the deepest question that faces usâ. He wants the discussion to be at a serious level, but âif you wish me to act the clown, Iâll take out my modest little Jewish dick and put it on the table. You can all spit at it and laugh at it, and then Iâll walk away and you’ll find it was just a dildo I left there. I hadnât shown you the real oneâ. (Mailerâs three oldest daughters, ranging in ages from 21 to 12, were in the audience, as were his mother and sister).
Throughout the debate, the audience is raucous and intense. Audience members keep on storming off and shouting at the panel. The event is ostentatiously theatrical. It is less a debate than a carnival of competing egos. This is no surprise: Mailer was a showman throughout his career.
Greer, meanwhile, was involved in theatre groups in Australia and Britain. At Cambridge, she became a member of the Footlights. Her doctoral thesis was on Shakespeareâs comedies. The image of Greer as the Womenâs Lib icon is also slightly misplaced, for as her biographer Christine Wallace puts it: âShe was not a part of the grassroots feminism that gained momentum in America, Australia and Britain as the 1960s rolled on. Rather she was part of the counterculture, whose âfree loveâ tenet coincided with her libertarian view of spontaneous sex as the universal balmâ.
Greer was involved with the anarchist libertarian group âthe Pushâ during her MA at the University of Sydney. Â She wrote articles for Oz, a countercultural underground magazine, where she promoted sleeping with rock stars. In 1969, she co-founded and edited the pornographic magazine Suck, where she gossiped about the sex lives of her friends. This was a time when many prominent members of the womenâs liberation movement condemned pornography as misogynist. She wrote for Playboy in the 1970s and appeared nude in a copy of Suck published in 1972.
Lynne Segal described The Female Eunuch as âunrepresentative of womenâs liberation in the early days; the movement was predominantly dismissed [by] Greerâs individualistic anarchism and dismissal of collective actionâ. Sheila Rowbotham described Greer as a âscarecrow feministâ who avoid âthe stiff tense humourless tightnessâ of feminism and other revolutionary groups, but end up âbecoming a sophisticated brand of titillation on the mediaâ and âperform for a male audienceâ. Life magazine described her as âThe Saucy Feminist that even Men likeâ. After reading The Female Eunuch, Henry Miller, one of Kate Millettâs bĂȘtes noires, said: âThe one woman in the Womenâs Lib movement Iâm in love with is Germaine. Oo-la-la! She is everybodyâs liberator and she writes like a man. Reading her is like reading Tropic of Cancer.â
The ostensible conflict between Greer and Mailer in the debate also belies the bond between them. Greer did her MA thesis on Lord Byron, and Mailer is in many respects a 20th century Byron: a writer who burst to celebrity in his mid-twenties and is consumed by the multiple dimensions of sex. In a piece for Oz magazine, she writes this about her encounter with a woman called Dr G (who she revealed is actually Greer): âNorman Mailerâs penis blossoms in her headâ. Diana Trilling wrote afterwards that Greer did the event so she could sleep with Mailer.
There are more complicated aspects to Greer’s character. In The Female Eunuch, Greer argues that women should be âfucking for sex instead of ego and prestigeâ. And that they should also âmate downâ â dating men with lower status than them. This was around the same time she was promoting âstarfuckingâ.
Moreover, at the beginning of her book, she states:Â âThe opponents of female suffrage lamented that womanâs emancipation would mean the end of marriage, morality and the state; their extremism was more clear-sighted than the woolly benevolence of liberals and humanists, who thought that giving women a measure of freedom would not upset anything. When we reap the harvest which the unwitting suffragettes sowed we shall see that the anti-feminists were after all right.â
But a year before writing this, she married the first man that asked her hand in marriage. Asked decades later why she married Paul de Feu, she said: âWe got married because he thought it was a good ideaâ and âI thought he knew what he was doing. I am a woman of the fifties, I wait to be askedâ. Elsewhere she states: âMen have to court me and make the running. I have never rung up a man in my lifeâ. This from the woman whose book is about women taking control over their own sexual lives.
Despite her contradictions, The Female Eunuch is, nevertheless, a beautifully written, erudite, consistently fascinating, and very funny book â even if you donât agree with all her arguments. As she states in her Town Hall speech, women should not be compelled to be either âmenialsâ or âGoddessesâ. She is not a feminist icon; she is an immensely gifted and complicated woman.
Ten years after the Town Hall debate, Martin Amis visited Mailer in his New York apartment to profile him for the Observer. Mailer is now married to his sixth wife and has eight or nine children. He needs to âearn $400,000 a year to stay abreast of alimony and tuition feesâ. When Amis reminds Mailer of his previous opposition to any form of contraception, Mailer retorts: âIâve got eight kids. I canât afford to believe that any more. My hopes and expectations have changed. I no longer feel prepared to go to the wall for any big ideasâ. Prisoner of Sex indeed.
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SubscribeAn absorbing and well written piece. It’s so refreshing when an article refuses to simplify inherently rich and complex subjects. More please!
Very well written. Drew me in when I had no interest in the subject at large. I found it a fascinating bit of writing in that on any mainstream media platform it would have been tinged with overwhelming bias, usually to the extreme, with the author not being able to hide their deep contempt for Mailer for not towing the cultural marxist feminist line.
Thank you for clearing the rear view mirror in my brain so that I can better see what began in the sixties. Perhaps brought about in large measure by the birth control pill (originally intended for fertility,) we entered a new land of contradictions and confusions. And look at us today! Where are we headed, what will happen, and why?
Glad I missed this “debate”
Me too. I find Mailer and Amis to be colossally boring for the most part. The Trillings (Lionel and Diana) were good people, and quite interesting. I am one of perhaps only six or seven people to have read one of Trilling’s novels, or his only novel. His book The Liberal Imagination is much more widely known.
Germaine Greer has always been very interesting. I have her book on female artists – The Obstacle Race – sitting unread on my shelves. I really must get around to it.
I find Martin Amis, as opposed to his father, almost unreadable with the exception of Experience. I remember an enormous anthology of literature edited by Lionel Trilling but have never read him.
“Money” is pretty good.
I would just like to mention my favourite Mailer work: the Deer Park is the Great American novel of the HUAC era, a Gatsbyesque roman-a-clef retelling of the downfall of Elia Kazan.
The only feminist name I recognised in the article was Germaine Greer. I haven’t always agreed with her, but she writes well, and can be very down to earth and funny. You don’t get the jargon that academic feminists come up with. And she rightly has no truck with trans-twaddle.
I’m now very interested in female antimony. I didnât realise that a dull grey metalloid was gendered.
Well-written article. The main thing that one remembers from the stupid fuss, 4 against 1, and having read all Mailer’s books, is that Mailer was a better writer than the 4 others, and almost anybody else that century or this.
His novel The Deer Park really is superb.
Martin Amis seems to have given Norman Mailer a lot of thought over the years. I once read something by him where he was proposing to make Norman Mailer’s name a verb for an unnatural act. “You know that woman I’ve been seeing? I normanmailered her last night.”
Were Norman Mailer and Philip Roth related does anyone know?
You know, the similarities between them are easily exaggerated.Roth insisted on not having children. Mailer, for all his lamentable womanizing, had a sense of awe about women. The article includes that quote about how useless and purposeless men would be; women are closer to the âcreation of existenceâ.
A truly excellent article. No bias, just a fair presentation of the time and the people who lived it. Sandwiched between the brilliance of The Naked and the Dead and the forensic journalism of The Executionerâs Song, Mailer managed to produce some rather poor stuff, but as another correspondent has noted, he was a far better writer than any of the others featured.
Mr Owolade writes very warmly about Mailer and devotes only one sentence to the stabbing of Adele Morales. Mailer almost killed Morales. When someone tried to help her, he kicked her and said “Let the b***h die”. The Norman Invasion | The New Yorker
I find it very disappointing that Mr Owolade portrays Mailer in such a positive light. Much too often male violence against women continues to be dismissed when a man happens to be famous. Mailer’s fame and talent for writing don’t make his attack on his wife any less horrifying.