The Prisoner of Sex
The Prisoner of Sex was first published in 1971 in Harper's Magazine and was subsequently published as a book. The piece is Mailer's response to the 1960s Women's Liberation movement, though he spends much of the book attacking one literary critic, Kate Millett. Mailer has many issues with both the Women's Liberation Movement and Millett, who casts Mailer and authors Henry Miller and [[D. H. Lawrence]] as symbols of misogyny. Mailer's core point is that though women may try to equal men, this is unattainable and undesirable due to biological differences between the sexes. Hence the title: we are all prisoners of sex despite our greatest attempts to escape.
Mailer structures his work into four sections and refers to himself in the third person as "the Prize Winner" or "the Prisoner of Sex". Each section casts the author in a different role to explain an aspect of his views of Women's Liberation.
The first section begins with Mailer describing his travails in caring for his children by himself for six weeks. It is Mailer's attempt at understanding being a woman, about which he writes, "he could not know 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."
In this second section Mailer, understood to be acolyte in the title, begins by surveying the writings and participants of the Women's Liberation movement. He considers women as a class in economic terms. Though unwilling to admit many of their grievances, he acknowledges the problem of unequal pay: "even men opposed to Women's Liberation were willing to agree that the economic exploitation of the female was a condition in need of amendment."
It is also in this section that Mailer goes into a long discussion on the philosophical and existential purpose of the female orgasm and what it means for men and man-kind when women figure out how to orgasm without the assistance of a penis. The clitoral orgasm where no man or phallus is needed, as opposed to a vaginal orgasm, is an aspect of the Women's Liberation movement that shows Mailer's inner fear of not being "needed".
This section consists almost entirely of Mailer attacking the work of Kate Millett. He opens the section be proclaiming that "by any major literary perspective, the land of Millett is a barren and mediocre terrain." He attacks Millett for what he perceives to be an unfair assessment of his work and two of his favorite literacy figures, Miller and Lawrence. He critiques her use of quotes and the conclusions that she comes to through her picking of quotes. He believes that it does not give the authors any credit for the work they did to understand women, taking issue with her only drawing attention to their oppression of women.
He then continues his discussion of sex by debating the power dynamics of male prison sex, equating power and dominance to manliness and submission, and penetration to the societal example of a woman. The instinctual power dynamic is representative of male-female relations. He writes that in prison, "one's ass becomes one's woman; one's honor is that she is virginal."
Mailer makes the case that succumbing to the natural depth of womanhood and manhood is a necessity. He writes that it may be necessary for "humans with vaginas, not necessarily devoted from the beginning to maternity, must deepen into a condition which was not female automatically, must take a creative leap into becoming women."
Mailer in this section spends time discussing the genetics of sex. He discusses how sex is determined beyond basic chromosomal knowledge and theorizes as to how the determination of sex may, through the selective fertilization of an egg, be a larger meaning than just chance. Mailer discusses how even the choice of a woman to have sex with a particular man has an impact on the outcome of a child, putting great meaning onto the act of sex. His sentiments about sex are summed up in this statement: "no thought was more painful as the idea that sex had meaning: for give meaning to sex and one was the prisoner of sex.".
Mailer concludes the book by coming full circle to his own life. He describes an example of a couple where responsibilities are shared and are given equal importance. Mailer states that if he were to have this kind of roommate, he would rather have a man. His work should not suffer to help unless her work were more important than his—and that just isn't possible according to himself. Mailer makes a final call for succumbing to the differences between sexes that are rooted in biological differences. A perfect world for Mailer would be one in which "people would found their politics on the fundamental demands they make of sex," one in which Women's Liberation supporters would accept that liberation from sex simply is not possible.
