Those only with tickets.
I have to go to the table to get my tickets.
Okay, go ahead.
Have your tickets, please.
Broad stairway, the second stairway over.
Second stairway over.
- Second stairway over. - Righto. Thank you.
- Second stairway over. - I wanna leave this for someone.
Women's lib betrays the poor!
Norman Mailer betrays the poor!
Germaine Greer betrays the poor!
Diana Trilling betrays the poor!
Jacqueline Ceballos betrays the poor!
NOW betrays the poor!
Why? Why? Why?
What price liberation, people?
Have your tickets, please. Please, always have your tickets.
I would like to welcome you to Theatre for Ideas...
and to thank you all for saving us once more from falling apart financially.
I'd also like to say that we will be making a donation
to the women's liberation,
since they are having similar problems.
The topic for discussion this evening is a dialogue on women's liberation.
Jacqueline Ceballos, Germaine Greer,
Jill Johnston, Diana Trilling and Mr. Mailer.
Mr. Mailer.
We are going to have a particularly simple format tonight.
Each of the ladies is going to talk for about ten minutes.
At the end of that time, if I have been listening carefully,
I might be able to have a decent question to ask
which they'll conceivably answer immediately or choose not to.
The evening was billed at one time as, um,
uh, "Norman Mailer versus," and then the four ladies were listed.
If I may say, that was done almost over my dead body.
I may have vanity,
but I do not have the vanity to think that one man can take on four women.
And, on top of that,
I suspect that I'll probably find myself in the middle of this dispute.
In the recent demise of Harper's Magazine, one of the sad facts that got lost
was that "The Prisoner of Sex" was advertised as -
that this is the piece that's gonna have women's lib picketing the newsstands.
That was a disaster. It was one of the reasons why the magazine failed,
failed in the sense that they failed to be able to keep Willie Morris and his staff.
It was because the advertising people had a different idea of how to go at things,
and there was something so barbaric and crude about the whole notion.
I mean, anyone who read that piece would be aware
that I wasn't interested in trying to -
uh, uh, uh, to pull the tail feathers of women's lib.
It was the most important single intellectual event of the last few years,
and that -
At the least. At the least.
And that one had to engage it.
I think tonight may be an extraordinary night
because I think two enormous intellectual currents
that have been going on in New York for many years
are finally reaching their floodwaters.
Uh, one of them is that peculiar spirit of revolution
which inquires further and further and further
into the nature of man, woman and society,
and the other is, of course, that blessed spirit of nihilism
which will rip everything apart, including free speech and assembly.
I suspect we may have elements of both before the night is out.
For now, to save time, let me introduce each of these splendid ladies
with the simplest of introductions,
since I know one of them very well and one of them hardly at all
and everything in between.
So let me introduce first Ms. Jacqueline Ceballos,
who is the president of the New York chapter of NOW,
the National Organization for Women.
Ms. Ceballos.
When Shirley asked me to be on the panel at first,
I have to tell you, frankly, that I refused.
She asked me to think about it overnight,
and then I thought that it would be cowardly of me not to come here
because, um, first of all,
NOW is supposed to be fighting within the system for changes,
and Norman Mailer really represents the establishment.
Of course, sort of a liberal part of the establishment,
but still, he does represent the establishment.
I'm not interested in fighting with Norman Mailer.
I really think that in his article in Harper's Magazine
he was sincerely trying to understand.
And I guess that's all we can expect of the majority of men.
We are too busy doing the work we have to do
to fight with the men who disagree with us.
And most of us believe
that sooner or later they'll come along with us anyway
because they won't have any choice.
I represent that large middle-class group of women
who could have all the comforts and conveniences of life.
In fact, I did, but I opted out.
Instead I decided to devote my time
to fight for equality of women.
I'd like to tell you what we do in the National Organization for Women.
This is considered the square organization of women's liberation.
But we're not too square
that we still don't frighten off many, many women and men
because they're afraid of the whole women's liberation movement.
I don't think it is necessary to argue about, um,
whether women are biologically suited to stay home and wash dishes
and take care of men and children all their lives.
I don't think that's important.
What is important is that the world is changing
and that women, at last, are awakening to the fact
that they have a right and a duty to enter into the world and change it
and work towards governing the society that governs them.
What about all people?
- Yes. - All of them!
All of them! Not just half of humanity!
- That's right, all of humanity. - All of humanity!
My goodness.
The excitement has already started.
...of all humanity!
You're just getting half of humanity!
All right! All of humanity!
...to answer man -
You are absolutely right!
- But let me speak. - Is that somebody I know?
Gregory, you'll have your turn at the question period.
Oh, come back!
Ohh.
I think we are fighting for all of humanity,
but I'd like to tell you one of the reasons why we don't divert our time
fighting for the peace movement or the civil rights movement
or - or - or changing the environment.
Because we believe sincerely
that the root of everything is women's liberation.
Whoo!
We fight on every front.
First of all, in employment.
In spite of the fact that 40% of the women are working in the United States,
we all know - and I know that this is a very sophisticated audience -
that women are underpaid and overworked
and there is no chance for advancement anywhere.
We, in NOW, teach women how to fight discrimination
against their own companies, how to sue their companies.
There's a woman outside who can't afford to get in!
She's on welfare, and she gets thrown out!
Oh, bull.
- Hey, knock it off. - It's true!
It'll always be true until it's not true.
Go out and look!
- Why don't you give her $10? - Give her your seat!
On the marriage and, um, and divorce front, we have been accused -
And many women, especially,
are very worried that we are against marriage as an institution.
What we're against is the structure of marriage,
and even though the structure of marriage is changing in spite of everything,
we intend to direct it in what we think is the right direction.
If women are to be married in a society that pushes them towards marriage,
they should be paid for the work that they do.
We believe that every person getting married
should receive a booklet stating all their responsibilities in marriage.
We believe that every married couple should have marriage insurance
in case the marriage breaks up
so the woman will not be subjected
to receiving and begging for humiliating alimony.
We are working for women, or the dependent partner,
to have Social Security benefits
independent of their husbands' or their wives' income.
Women should receive pensions.
And some of us go so far as to say that women should get paid
and they should receive vacations with pay.
As far as the image of women is concerned, we're attacking the advertising industry.
You know that the woman, as portrayed on television, all over in the media,
is a stupid, senile creature.
She gets an orgasm when she gets the shiny floor.
Before marriage she is encouraged
to keep herself deodorized and as pretty as possible
in a doll-like way, in a plastic way, to get the man,
because the man is going to be her life.
Once she gets him, all the advertising is geared
to her cleaning her house and taking care of the children.
When she gets a little too old for that, she's the bitter shrew,
she's the mother-in-law who is coming to taste that coffee,
and she's the poor woman who is losing her husband
because she's losing her looks
and has to use all sorts of ways to get him back.
Uh -
He's telling me my ten minutes are up. All right, thank you.
Thank you, Ms. Ceballos.
I am going to ask you that question that you don't answer now,
that you can think about for a while and answer later.
In every part of your powerfully concerted and impassioned speech -
There were not only forceful political points -
Would you let me finish?
- Why is a man chairman? - There were not only -
Shut up!
The true perspective of the future
is that it will end with nothing but assholes talking to assholes.
The question I'd like to ask you, Ms. Ceballos,
is that while everything you presented was certainly to the point
and even politically feasible,
I would ask if there's anything in your program
that would give us men the notion
that life might not continue to be as profoundly boring as it is today?
And sometime in the next 45 minutes, we'll bring it up and talk about it.
- Boring? - Boring.
- Boring? - Yeah.
All right.
Shut up!
There was reported to be the most extraordinary jockeying
for positions on the order of speech.
As it turns out, the way the ladies will speak is in alphabetical order.
The next speaker, who I suspect has done a great deal to fill this house,
is that distinguished and, um, young and formidable lady writer,
Ms. Germaine Greer from England.
I'm afraid I am going to talk in a very different way, possibly,
than you expected.
I do not represent any organization in this country.
And I daresay the most powerful representation I can make
is of myself as a writer, for better or worse.
I'm also a feminist,
and for me the significance of this moment
is that I am having to confront
one of the most powerful figures in my own imagination,
the being I think most privileged in male elitist society,
namely the masculine artist,
the pinnacle of the masculine elite.
Bred as I have been -
Bred as I have been and educated as I have been,
most of my life has been most powerfully influenced
by the culture for which he stands,
so that I am caught in a basic conflict between inculcated cultural values
and my own deep conception of an injustice.
Many professional literati ask me in triumphant tones,
as you may have noticed,
what happened to Mozart's sister?
However they ask me that question,
it cannot have caused them as much anguish as it has caused me,
because I do not know the answer and I must find the answer.
But every attempt I make to find that answer leads me to believe
that perhaps what we accept as a creative artist in our society
is more - is more a killer than a creator,
aiming his ego ahead of lesser talents,
drawing the focus of all eyes to his achievements,
being read now by millions and paid in millions.
One must ask oneself the question in our society,
can any painting
be worth the total yearly income of a thousand families?
And if we must answer -
And if we must answer that it is,
and the auction reports tell us so,
then I think we are forced to consider the possibility
that the art on which we nourish ourselves
is sapping our vitality and breaking our hearts.
But the problem is very deeply seated, as you can see.
I'm agitated in this situation
because of the concept I have of the importance of the artist,
because of my own instinctive respect for him.
Is it possible that the way of the masculine artist in our society
is strewn with the husks of people worn out and dried out by his ego?
Is it possible that all those that have fallen away,
all those competing egos,
were insufficiently masculine to stay the course?
I turned for some information to Freud,
treating Freud's description of the artist
as an ad hoc description of the artist psyche in our society
and not as in any way
a metaphysical or eternal pronouncement about what art might mean.
And what Freud said, of course, has irritated many artists
who have had the misfortune to see it.
"He longs to attain to honor, power, riches, fame and the love of women,
but he lacks the means of achieving these gratifications."
As an eccentric little girl
who thought it might be worthwhile, after all, to be a poet,
coming across these words for the first time was a severe check.
The blandness of Freud's assumption that the artist was a man...
sent me back into myself to consider whether or not
the proposition was reversible.
Could a female artist be driven
by the desire for riches, fame and the love of men?
And all too soon it was very clear
that the female artist's own achievements will disqualify her for the love of men.
That no woman yet has been loved for her poetry.
And we love men for their achievements all the time.
What can this be?
Can this be a natural order that wastes so much power,
that breaks a little girl's heart to pieces?
I had no answers except that I knew the argument was irreversible.
And so I turned later to the function of women vis-à-vis art as we know it,
and I found that it fell into two parts -
that we were either low, sloppy creatures, or menials,
or we were goddesses.
Or worst of all, we were meant to be both,
which meant that we broke our hearts trying to keep our aprons clean.
Sylvia Plath's greatest poetry was sometimes conceived
while she was baking bread.
She was such a perfectionist.
And ultimately such a fool.
The trouble is, of course, that the role of the goddess,
the role of the glory and the grandeur of the female in the universe
exists in the fantasy of the male artist,
and no woman can ever draw it to her heart for comfort.
But the role of menial, unfortunately, is real.
And that she knows because she tastes it every day.
So the barbaric yawp of utter adoration for the power and the glory
and the grandeur of the female in the universe
is uttered at the expense of the particular living woman every time.
And because we can be neither one nor the other with any peace of mind,
because we are, unfortunately, improper goddesses and unwilling menials,
there is a battle waged between us.
And, after all, in the description of this battle
maybe I find a justification of my idea
that the achievement of the male artistic ego is at my expense,
for I find that 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 achievements.
So is the scope, after all, worth it?
Again the same question,
just as if we were talking of the income of a thousand families for a whole year.
You see, I strongly suspect that when this revolution takes place,
art will no longer be distinguished by its rarity
or its expense or its inaccessibility
or the extraordinary way in which it is marketed.
It will be the prerogative of all of us,
and we will do it as those artists did whom Freud understood not at all -
the artists who made the Cathedral of Chartres
or the mosaics of Byzantium,
the artists who had no ego and no name.
The sentiments were exquisite.
But the means - the means you offered,
and in fact the means that women's liberation offers,
to go from here to that point where we will be artists all,
belongs to a species of social instrumentality
that I call "diaper Marxism ."
For instance, the question which I now present to you
that I'd like you to think about and we'll talk about later is,
is there anything necessarily
so finally debilitating to the human notion
that a woman be both a goddess and a slob at separate hours of her existence?
The element in women's liberation, both liberal as personified by NOW
and radical women's liberation,
as personified by the electronic forces just without,
uh, both subscribe to a unilinear notion of human nature
that has absolutely nothing of the dialectic within it.
In other words, there seems no notion at all implicit
in anything I've heard in women's liberation
that it may be precisely through leading double existences
and through going through certain extremes of experience
that one begins to achieve a higher state.
Now, I know you're dying to answer immediately,
but you've got to hold it and think about it.
The next speaker...
is that master of free-associational prose in The Village Voice. ..
Ms. Jill Johnston.
What did you say?
Master of free-associational prose.
I think Germaine was born in Australia, and I was born in England.
- Were you born in Australia? - Yes, I was.
I was born in England.
I can't help it. That's just the first thing I thought of, but -
The title of this -
The title of this episode is "New Approach."
The -
All women are lesbians, except those who don't know it, naturally.
They are but don't know it yet.
I am a woman and therefore a lesbian.
I am a woman who is a lesbian because I am a woman,
and a woman who loves herself, naturally, who is other women is a lesbian.
A woman who loves women loves herself. Naturally, this is the case.
A woman is herself, is all woman, is a natural-born lesbian,
so we don't mind using the name.
Like any name, it is quite meaningless.
It means, naturally, I am a woman, and whatever I am, we are.
We affirm being what we are,
the way, of course, all men are homosexuals.
Being, having a more sense of their homo, their homoness, their ecce-homoness,
their ecce-prince-and-lord-and-masterness,
the 350 years of Abraham inter-sample.
Abraham lived 350 years
because the Bible ages are only a succession of sons and fathers
and grandfathers intensely identifying with their ancestors.
Their sons so identified naturally with the father
that he believed he was the father, and, of course, he was,
as was Abraham, Isaac and Jacob and Esau -
And Reuben and Simeon and Levi and Judah and Joseph.
Each one lived 350 years.
But who are the daughters of Rachel and Ruth and Sarah and Rebecca, the rest?
We do not know the daughters. Never had any daughters.
They -
They had only sons who begat more sons and sons.
So we have very little sense from that particular book of -
Of the lineage and ligaments and legacies and identities
of mothers and daughters and their daughters and their mothers
and mothers and daughters and sisters,
who were naturally not lesbians
if they had nothing of each other, save sons.
So now we -
So now we must say, "Verily, verily, I say unto thee,
except a woman be born again, she cannot see the kingdom of goddess."
A woman must be born again to be herself, her own eminence and grace,
the queen queen self,
whose mother has pressed upon her mouth innumerable passionate kisses so sigh us.
There is in every perfect love a law to be accomplished, too,
that the lover should resemble the beloved and be the same,
and the greater is the likeness, brighter will the rapture flame.
Ah, lover and perfect equal,
I meant that you should discover me so by my faint indirection,
and I, when I meet you, mean to discover you by the like in you.
I want she who is a tomboy in me.
I want she who is very female in me.
I want she who is British about me.
I want she who is ugly American about me.
I want she who is the cunt and the balls and the breasts of me
and the long straight brownie hair
and the gangly boarding school adolescent in a navy blue blazer.
Narcissisme qui consiste à se choisir soi-même comme objet érotique-
Excuse my French.
And I want the men to carry my boxes of books for me
and carry me upsy-daily piggyback and pay for me everywhere
and adore me as a "lesberated" woman.
Over the inevitable we shall not grieve.
This is the body that Jill built.
Uh, ecce Lita the lesbian, ecce Greta the gay, the gay Gertrude,
the gay-gay-gayness of being gay, of being.
To be equal we have to become who we really are
and women, we never will be equal women until we love one another, women.
Special from the White House.
The president of the United States announced last night
the appointment of a lesbian to his cabinet.
"It's nice if you can invite them in. They usually come in without knocking.
Yep, yep. Liberal, shmiberal.
Maybe, uh, we should invite her, uh - one of them to dinner."
"Uh, one of what, dear?"
"Uh, well, she is a bit odd, isn't she?
I mean, you know, how we'd feel
if a black man was interested in our daughter."
"Oh, God, and she might make a pass at my wife."
What do you say to the naked lady? Please, sorry, thank you.
We're getting to the bottom of women's lib.
We're going down on women's lib.
I'm beside myself -
I'm beside myself with love for you when you are beside me, my love.
The beginning of the "unifirst" is right now.
If all "tinks" are at this momentum being cremated
and the end of the "unihearse" is right now,
away we went to see the dairy of the skins of pretty girls.
Oh, why didn't her mother straighten out her teeth when she was young?
Oh, she is involved in many strange and wondrous adventures.
Oh, in short, she had come into that abnormal condition known as elation.
Oh, she did not yet love and she loved to love.
She sought what she might love and love with loving.
Oh, what can she say now that is not the story of so many others?
"Oh, do not fail me," she says.
"You are my last chance. Indeed our last chance to save the West."
And who vants the Moon ven ve can land on Venus?
Thus, too, is the heterosexual institution over, spiritually over,
and the new thing now that is happening is the withdrawal of women
to give each other their own sense of self, a new sense of self.
Until 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,
thus affirming their second-class status.
Until all women are lesbians,
there will be no true political revolution.
Uh, I suppose I should be leaning on my sword, describing my defeat.
Some women want to have their cock and eat it too. And -
And "lesbian" is a label invented by anybody
to throw at any woman who dares to be a man's equal.
And "lesbian" is a good name.
It means nothing, of course, or everything,
so we don't mind using the name.
In fact, we like it, for we can be proud to claim allusion
to the island made famous by Sappho.
The birds are talking to us in Greek again.
And isn't it wonderful what a lot of devotion there is
to us flying around the universe?
Especially to those all involved
in some penis she's wrapping her cunt around.
Oh, well. Lily and over-and-out.
He said, "I want your body."
She said, "You can have it when I'm through with it."
Flash from the White House.
Last night, the president of the United States, clad only in a scant -
Jill, you've written your letter. Now mail it.
Go on!
It's not fair to the other speakers. Jill's had 15 minutes already.
And you all want a chance to ask questions.
We want to have a little debate between us.
- Hey, Jill, what about me? - Oh!
Hey, it's great that you paid 25 bucks
to see three dirty overalls on the floor...
when you can see lots of cock and cunt for $4 just down the street.
Is there a possibility I can skip my question and finish my statement?
Jill, you did it already. Now come on.
Either play with the team or pick up your marbles and get lost.
Come on. There's a lot we want to talk about tonight.
And I want to talk to you about lesbianism, goddamn it.
You know, I'm interested in what you said.
Now you can play these games, but they're silly.
- Go ahead, Jill! - Let her finish!
Let her finish!
The people who argue that their favorite speaker should finish
are the kind of people who like to play checkers on moldy boards.
No, we're all women, goddamn you!
Come on, Jill. Be a lady.
What's the matter, Mailer?
You're threatened 'cause you found a woman you can't fuck?
Hey, cunty, I've been threatened all my life, so take it easy.
- You gonna throw us all out? - Can I finish my statement?
What do you want to do, Jill? You wanna skip to your last sentence?
Read it. What can they do?
- Read it. What can he do? - Wait a minute -
All right. I'll tell you what we'll do.
Wait a minute.
All right, we'll take a vote.
We'll take a vote.
But I'm gonna do the counting.
If you don't think that I've got enough fairness to do the count properly,
then come and get this mic away from me.
Those that wish Jill to continue say, "Aye."
Aye!
Those who wish Jill not to continue say, "No."
No!
From the bottomless pits of my honesty, I think you lost a squeaker, Jill.
No!
The, uh, next speaker -
The next speaker is Diana Trilling, whom I'll introduce from the rostrum.
- How are you? - Fine.
- Diana's getting on. Okay? - Sure.
Come on!
Get off the stage!
Hey, if you wanna go over there or -
Diana's gonna talk, you know.
The next speaker, whose soul will doubtless improve
from the fortitude of having to hold your attention for the next ten minutes...
is that lady of much soul and much establishment,
who has been one of our leading, if not our leading,
literary lady critic for many, many, many years, Ms. Diana Trilling.
When, some weeks ago,
I was first asked to join the discussion this evening,
I, of course, already knew that women's liberation
represented no single movement,
no single point of view about the condition of women,
but that it probably had as many definitions
as there were women attracted to the idea of changing their lives,
or men aware of the mounting tides of female unrest in our society.
I knew that there were people for whom
it meant a new strategy of personal assertion,
people for whom it meant a new occasion for cultural assault,
people for whom it meant a long-delayed revivification
of the women's rights movement,
people for whom it was a prophetic vision of an erotic utopianism,
people for whom it was Thurber's War Between Men and Women.
What I did not know and only learned
as I watched one woman speaker after another drop away from this panel,
as if under penalty of some special form of female torture
should she submit to the presence of a male moderator -
and, in particular, this male moderator -
was that women's liberation was an authoritarianism
already this advanced in purpose and efficiency.
Here we have accomplished 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 loneliness.
And are we already so sure we can name the enemy and get him into our gun sights?
Well, I am not at all sure that I can so easily name the enemy of my sex.
But much as I dissent from some of the attitudes
which inform Norman Mailer's celebrated article in Harper's Magazine,
I am fairly certain it is not Mailer.
I hope he will forgive me for saying this,
but big as he looms on the literary scene,
and I long ago put myself on record
as considering him the most important writer of our time,
he is not that big.
He is not as big as biology, for instance, or culture.
Certainly he is not as big as the combined forces of biology and culture.
Although as I recall,
Mailer makes little or no explicit mention of biology in his Harper's piece.
The concept of biology, of course, permeates "The Prisoner of Sex."
Indeed, it provides the chief determinant
of Mailer's view of the relation of men and women.
This cannot come as an entire shock
to anyone acquainted with his previous work.
It was possible to have adumbrated a good deal of Mailer's present position
from, say, his old and persisting rejection of birth control.
Still, I don't think we could've been prepared
for quite this much of a deterministic emphasis
in a writer, who in so many areas other than that of the relation of the sexes,
has always been so preeminent a spokesman for the unconditioned life,
an unconditioned culture and even an unconditioned politics.
Rigorously as I would oppose myself to such dangerous poetic excesses of Mailer's
as his stand against contraception,
I am wholly disinclined to join the current female attack upon him.
For the simple fact is that I would gladly take even Mailer's poeticized biology
in preference to the no biology at all of my spirited sisters.
I think there is not only more life in it -
I think there is not only more life in it, but better life.
But - and this is a big "but" -
I am also not inclined to join in any attack
upon even the extreme female liberationists,
much as I might reject their views,
if this attack has its source
in the wish to protect the sexual culture in which we now live.
Mailer accepts our sexual culture pretty much as given,
or at least that part of it which has to do
with the relative status of the sexes.
I do not.
Where I separate from most of the radical liberationist views,
which are winning the facile assent
of women troubled by their present situation,
is that they seek a culture which will invalidate
the biological differences between the sexes.
Where I separate from Mailer is that, while honoring biology,
he implicitly acquiesces in the intolerable uses which culture has made
of the biological differences between the sexes.
In something of the same speculative spirit,
Erik Erikson talks about the existence in women
of something he calls inner space,
which he says defines their sense of themselves and their possibilities.
It is not my impression that either of these gifted clinicians
is undertaking to put limits on the capacities of women
to employ and enjoy their fullest possible range of activity outside the home.
But Freud, unhappily, is undertaking exactly this,
and so, I think, is Mailer,
though he doesn't come out with it as bluntly
as the middle-class doctor in Vienna.
I defer to none in my high regard for Freud.
I will nevertheless take from him, as from Mailer,
only that which affirms and adds to life -
- Women's lib is for rich bitches only. - ...discarding from his work,
as from the work of anyone, including Mailer -
I'm on welfare! I can't afford to get in here!
The police fucked me over!
- I just want to finish. - All of you are traitors and whores!
Germaine Greer, you're a traitor! All of you are traitors!
Hear, hear.
I defer to none in my high regard for Freud.
I will nevertheless take from him, or Mailer,
only that which affirms and adds to life,
discarding from his work,
as from the work of anyone, including the female liberationists,
whatever is impoverishing and absolute.
And among those efforts of the women's liberationists
which I find most impoverishing and most absolutist
are the doctrines now being promulgated on the female orgasm.
Surely it is remarkable that the same people
who properly criticize our society
for its harsh and unimaginative treatment of homosexuals
have no hesitation in dictating to women
where they are to find their single path to sexual enjoyment.
I am talking, of course,
about the campaign now being mounted to persuade women
that there is no such thing as a vaginal orgasm,
therefore they might as well dispense with men even in bed.
Nothing in the sexual culture of recent decades
has been more justifiably attacked than the idea of a single definition
of what is or is not normal in sexual desire or response.
As an added benefit of our deliverance
from a tyrannical authority in our choice of sexual partners
or in our methods of pursuing sexual pleasure,
I could hope we would also be free to have such orgasms
as, in our individual complexity, we happen to be capable of.
My last sentence, Norman.
Biology is all very well, Norman.
All these women have biology.
But they also have a repressive and life-diminishing culture to contend with.
Your piece in Harper's has your always beautiful intention of life enhancement,
and it is full of a certain kind of splendid imagination about women.
I suppose we could call it the imagination of women in love.
But it fails in its imagination of the full humanity of women,
as it would never fail in its imagination of the full humanity of men.
Now, that concludes the first phase of the evening.
The formal phase if you will, or the most formal phase.
I really would like to present a question to Jill Johnston, wherever you are, Jill.
And I'll also try to give Mrs. Ceballos and Ms. Greer a few more minutes
because they were the kindest of the two ladies
in keeping into the ten minutes that I asked for.
To wit, they went over less than the others.
Slopped over less than the others.
All right, now the -
I was not surprised to find that my dear old friend Diana Trilling
had, as usual, misread just about everything I'd said.
Because you can only be dear friends with literary critics
who never do read you straight,
but read you with their full and specific sympathy.
What I was trying to say in my usual incoherent fashion
in "The Prisoner of Sex"...
was that biology is not -
or physiology, if you will, is not destiny...
but it is half of it.
And that if you try to ignore that fact,
you then get, at least so far as I can see any prospectus of the future,
you then get into the most awful totalitarianism of them all,
because it's a left totalitarianism.
I think there's something in the human spirit
that can somehow bear the notion of a fascist or right-wing totalitarianism
because it offers us at least the romantic dream
that we can all form into some sort of underground cadres
and have an adventurous life at the end,
where all of us, men and women, are equal and comrades.
But if we get a left-wing totalitarianism,
that means the end of all of us
because we will have nothing but scrambled minds
trying to overcome the incredible shock
that the destruction of human liberty came from the left and not the right.
And there is an element in women's liberation that terrifies me.
It terrifies me because it's humorless.
Because with the exception, let's say,
of Germaine Greer's book on The Female Eunuch,
there has been almost no recognition that the life of a man is also difficult
and that all the horrors that women go through,
some of them absolutely determined by men,
even more of them I suspect determined by themselves -
Because we must face the simple fact
that it may be there's a profound reservoir of cowardice in women
which had them welcome this miserable, slavish life.
But in any case, whether it is their fault or men's fault,
what has to be recognized is there's nothing automatic about female liberty.
Every female liberty is going to be achieved
the way every liberty is achieved,
which is, it's going to be achieved against the grain,
against the paradox of the fact
that there's much in human life which forbids liberty.
So I'm not here to say that every woman must have a child,
or every woman must have a vaginal orgasm,
or that every woman must conceive in any way that I lay down.
Anyone that says that about me just doesn't know how to read my sentences.
What I'm trying to say is,
let's really get hip about this little matter
and recognize that the whole question of women's liberation
is the deepest question that faces us,
and we're gonna go right into the very elements of existence and eternity
before we're through with it.
The whole question of how much liberty men and women can find with each other
and how much sharing of those dishes that they can do
goes into the center of everything.
And I'd like the discussion to go at that level.
I'm perfectly willing - If you wish me to act the clown,
I will 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 I'll walk away and you'll find it was just a dildo I left there.
I hadn't shown you the real one.
But if we're gonna have a decent discussion -
We all got here tonight at great various efforts to ourselves -
let's have it on the highest level we can.
I would ask Jill Johnston something, which is that she put very neatly
half of the notion, I think, of women's liberation right up front,
which is, women's liberation is two things -
it is a profoundly political movement and it is a profoundly sexual movement,
which, quite naturally,
takes on huge lesbian overtones.
That does not mean at all that every woman who is interested in women's liberation
is a lesbian - obviously not.
Anyone who would go ahead and say I then said that is a fool.
But what I am saying
is that it's quite natural for lesbians to center on women's liberation
because there's a peculiar difficulty to lesbianism,
which homosexuals, although they are much cursed, would I suspect not have,
which is, every man is vulnerable to homosexuality
because he cannot have it with a woman.
He must go to a man to fundamentally feel like a woman.
To wit, he must go to a man to have something up his anus or in his mouth.
Up your anus!
Not up mine, buddy.
Up yours! Up yours!
With women, the difficulty is that any man who's really a superb lover
can be about 90% as good to a woman as a lesbian,
just doing the things that a lesbian does.
And then he's got all the other stuff.
So the result is that lesbians do have a tough time,
and I think it accounts in part for that intense detestation they have of men.
And it's around that intense detestation of men
that the worst aspects of women's liberation are forming.
So the question I would ask Jill Johnston...
is, what is she going to do about all us 90-percenters?
All right. Thank you.
And the ladies can talk in any turn they wish.
I think my formal attempts to hold this evening in restraint
will now be kept down to dealing occasionally with a brilliant contender
from the outer human spaces.
Okay, the evening is all of ours now,
but I still will try to wield some limp sort of gavel.
Thank you.
Oh, you poor thing.
Who'd like to talk first?
Ms. Greer, you made this very quick,
as I said, this very quick dismissal of the biological cell,
but after that, eight times you referred to something
that you described as the oedipal family or the oedipal situation.
And as I understood it in the context each time,
you meant the family that rejects the child is an oedipal family.
Now, if that is the way you are going to read Freud,
you will have to dismiss him as a fool because he never said things like that.
I was talking about Freud when he said,
"In marriage one repeats the oedipal situation."
No, I have the actual places marked.
Well, by all means quote them, but that's my impression of what I meant.
I adopt the same attitude to Freud as you do.
I quote him where it suits me and I don't where it doesn't.
Uh, yes, right.
I didn't say that I quote him where it suits me.
I said I take from him that which suits me.
I don't misquote him.
Uh, in, uh -
- Oh, dear. - The thing about, uh -
One of the characteristics of oppressed people
is that they always fight among themselves.
What?
I said, "One of the characteristics of oppressed people
is they always fight among themselves."
I don't feel as oppressed as you do, and I'm not fighting with you.
I-I really can't -
You see, the thing is that I can't let all women be spokesmen for me
because I'm not for their program necessarily.
I have a great deal of loyalty to my sex, a great deal, as a matter of fact,
and I've had it for a very long time.
But that doesn't mean that I can be indiscriminate
about the positions that I subscribe to
just because they're put forward by other women.
That would seem to me an abdication of intelligence.
But that is understood.
- Is it? All right. - Absolutely.
Okay, then you mustn't accuse me
of quarreling with someone within the minority.
It's just that we are having a great deal of difficulty understanding each other
and, um, the use of the word "misquote" could hardly be construed as magnanimous
under the circumstances.
That's true.
I just would like to say that the emphasis in this -
...is that the whole tortur - tortur - torturesome problem for women
of how much of their destiny is biological or physiological
can begin to be answered by this means.
In other words, I'm not gonna sit here and say
that I know what women's destiny is and it is biological.
Of course that's absurd. How can I know?
We can all have our guesses.
But the notion is that if you have a number of societies,
all working on fundamentally different principles,
there's no reason at all why, in a technological age,
that human liberty, at least, cannot be finally arrived at.
And it would be possible that at the end of 50 or 100 years
we'll begin to discover extraordinary things
about the nature of human relations in different kinds of societies
and the ways in which they can work.
And whether they'll be able to live peacefully side by side or not
is, of course, best left for liberal claptrap.
It doesn't matter. They'll probably not live that well side by side.
But we certainly don't live that well side by side now.
The important thing is we'll find out whether children can raise themselves.
There are going to be any number of victims of this all over the place.
There'll also be people - When people want to have a child
and live together and raise children by themselves,
they'll be able to do it with an extraordinary sense of freedom
and not that heaviness they feel today
where they wonder if something is wrong with them.
Even Greer, who has written this absolutely lovely book,
fails manfully, let me say, to -
I kept getting lost in her argument
because she didn't really know quite where it all happened.
But, for instance, when you were talking about the English clergy
in the 17th century and stuff,
maybe my mind wandered, but I didn't feel you got to the point.
- What? - Sixteenth.
Well, then obviously my mind wandered.
You see, I really have a stubborn mind. I can't remember numbers.
Every population study reveals
that something happened in the structure of the family
between feudalism and the Renaissance,
but I couldn't really give you the exact day
upon which everybody stopped living in stem families.
No, but I think you can agree that, um,
it hasn't been a simple matter of the men tyrannizing the women.
I mean, if it's just that,
that we men have been tyrannizing you women for all these years,
then we really do have an enormous dialogue to continue because -
And the work hasn't been done.
I mean, my God, if Kate Millet's the one who's done the work,
then we're all doomed.
What did you say?
I said if Kate Millet is the one who has done the historical work
which establishes that men control women in a political class system,
then we are all doomed.
No one would be more surprised than Kate
to hear that she had been charged with having done this.
Every single feminist knows
that the analysis that we have to make as a society is very intricate
and will take a long time.
If it took Mao Tse-tung so long to actually define
the particular causes and problems involved
in what was a blank slate situation,
we have the most overwritten slate,
the most over-indoctrinated and cowered population to try to turn on.
We have so many intricate problems involved in each level of our society
that it's quite absurd to demand of any woman at this stage
that she show you the complete analysis
or that she stand convicted of having made it.
I - I -
I'm all for that. I'm all for that.
But I would ask you why then do you women keep saying,
without having made the analysis,
why do you keep being so certain that it's entirely the male fault?
I didn't know that any women were certain that it was entirely the male fault.
I mean, as far as I'm concerned,
that's precisely what we're trying to, uh, elicit.
And if the fact is that men have been unconsciously tyrannical,
and I think it probably is the case,
then it's certain also that they were debauched by their own tyranny
and degraded by it and confused by it
almost as much as the people they tyrannized over.
But we're in agreement on this.
This is just old socialism when you get down to it.
...say anything! You're dominating the whole night!
He is not. He is not.
I'm trying to get a dialogue going,
and I'll be perfectly willing to disappear into the woodwork when the dialogue flows.
I think what we'd like to do -
There's an old tradition in the Theatre of Ideas,
which is there are any number of people who have been invited specifically
because of their particular knowledge or general knowledge on a subject,
and they are generally seated in the first few rows
because they've been invited to come.
A monstrously unfair procedure, we all know.
And they are given the privilege,
because the Theatre of Ideas is an institution founded on privilege -
They are - It is an enclave that you are visiting here, young nihilists,
and you will have to learn in the society of the future, where we have many worlds,
that when you visit the other turf, you gotta conform to the other turf,
and you can have your fun if they ever dare to visit your turf.
Now -
The first questions, then, will be addressed to any of the panelists,
except myself, because I have indeed been talking much too much.
Betty Friedan.
Wait! Louder!
Be accurate, Betty.
Norman, I will define accuracy for myself. I don't need you.
That will still give me the leisure to have opinions -
I - I was - I -
I was wondering if it might possibly, even tonight,
indicate that the world might be much less boring
when instead of the monolithic, changeless, eternal face of Eve,
who never transcends her biological self,
we finally reach the beginning point of self-definition,
which you are reacting to somewhat like your predecessors 100 years ago
who said "The dog talks," you know.
That a woman should be here talking at all
is something you are finding a little hard to take,
but that we talk in different tones.
We don't all agree.
We have the right to define our own differences
and quarrel over our own accuracies and find our own ideologies,
and even you might find that less boring in the end.
I simply don't know what you're talking about.
Betty, you are just making speeches.
You are app - You are app -
Y-You are - You are appealing -
You are appealing to the lowest element in this audience.
And - And you've been a mucker.
I've been on platforms with women all my life.
My God, you act as if suddenly women are in public speaking.
They've been doing that for a hundred years.
We're not talking about that.
What we're talking about is the extraordinary possibilities
that exist in women's liberation.
You're still talking about it as if I'm completely opposed to it,
which I never was.
What we hear is patronizing.
Well, you ladies are very patronizing too. We're all stuck-up snots. How's that?
Maybe the lowest level is where you're at, Norman!
Maybe. Maybe. We'll all find out, maybe.
Susan Sontag.
I want to ask - I want to ask a very quiet question to, uh -
I want to ask a very quiet question to Norman and to Diana also,
although it obviously applies to the others.
Norman, it is true that women find, with the best of will,
the way you talk to them patronizing and, uh...
one of the things is your use of the word "lady."
When you, uh -
And this is what I wanted to ask Diana.
When you said, "Diana Trilling, foremost lady literary critic,"
if I were Diana, I wouldn't like to be introduced that way,
and I would like to know how Diana feels about it.
I don't like being called a "lady" writer, Norman.
I know it doesn't - It seems like gallantry to you,
but it doesn't feel right to us.
It's a little better to be called a woman writer.
I don't know why, but you know words count.
- We're all writers. We know that. - How about a writer?
Well, how about a woman doctor, a woman lawyer?
Yeah. I mean, if you were introducing James Baldwin,
you wouldn't say our foremost Negro writer.
- Wouldn't say "a man writer" either. - We certainly wouldn't say "a man writer."
So in - A lot of it - A lot of it -
A gentleman writer!
- Susan - -I ask not in an argumentative spirit -
If Paris is worth a mass, I will never use the word "lady" again in public.
I want to answer Susan -
Uh, I - Susan, you put the question to me too.
I don't like it and I recognize the point you're making very well.
But sometimes I think that it's like saying "lady runner"
or "lady high jumper" or something of that kind.
Within the culture it has that peculiarity, doesn't it?
And so I permit it on that basis.
I don't really like it.
Hmm?
I think you ought to object to it.
At least he didn't say, "a housewife who writes."
Look, I would like to answer Susan, if I may.
I could have called Diana a woman critic or a female critic. I could not call her -
- A critic! - Or I could've called her a critic.
But I wished to say - I wished to say that she was the best in kind.
Now -
Let me - May I say the word? I mean, may I answer the question?
- You already did! - May I answer the question?
- You already did. - No, I didn't.
The fact of the matter is that literary criticism
has not been an activity that women have engaged in for nearly as long as men.
And there are good reasons -
There are good reasons why there are very few good lady critics around.
And anyway, as you all should have known, if you had had the wit,
I was doing it precisely to put Diana on.
Who gave you that right?
You're all singularly without wit.
Uh, Lucy - Lucy Komisar.
I'd like to ask Germaine Greer
whether she thinks that there is a relationship between the way sexuality
and the relationship between men and women has evolved,
namely that masculinity is based on dominance over women,
power over women, ultimately violence over women,
and the fact that our civilization has been one
in which men have always striven to have power over other men
and this has led again to violence.
As a matter of fact, a lot of the words that we talk about to describe sexuality
are the same words we talk about to describe war.
In fact, in Norman's book The Naked and the Dead,
I recall a passage where he goes back and forth from one metaphor to the other
in describing a shell that is blowing something up
and sometimes he talks about it in sexual terms,
and sometimes he talks about -
Uh, when he's talking about sex, he talks about it in terms of war.
At one part he talked about his penis as "the avenger."
And I wonder whether part of the problem
that we will solve when we do away with the notion
of male dominance over women and male power over women -
And the question of wife-beating, incidentally, is not a joke.
It's very serious, you know.
During the Middle Ages, the church regulated this.
This was something they did out of goodness.
They said that men could beat their wives with whips and cudgels,
but not with iron bars.
Maybe it's kind of funny, but it's a sick joke.
It's a very sick joke.
And this kind of violence, which has gone on for centuries,
which men have used against women,
and which they have also used against each other -
One of the things which I found very interesting
when I finally got around to reading Lionel Tiger's book,
-when it got into paperback - -Your question! Your question!
...was that he was not only saying that men were superior to women,
he said that there are some men who are superior to other men and to women
and they should rule, and to me that's fascist.
Shirley - Shirley, I'm going to have to respond just for a moment.
I look forward very much to the advance of women's liberation
because women are finally going to have to come into contact
with the best aspect of the male brain,
which is its modest accuracy.
I didn't -
Dear Lucy Komisar, I did not make those remarks.
I had characters who made them.
I had a general who was a profoundly latent homosexual, in his own right.
Not my latent homosexuality. His latent homosexuality.
And he -
he had these wonderful images about the shell as a phallus,
and I had a great deal of fun at the time I was writing it.
I was thinking, "Oh, that shows how homosexual those generals are."
So I wasn't saying that for me.
The same thing when I was writing about Sergius O'Shaughnessy.
He was a man as tall as Germaine Greer. He was a god, and he spoke of -
But you did call your own penis "the retaliator"
while referring humorously to Sergius O'Shaughnessy,
who resembles you in many ways.
"The retaliator" -
"The retaliator" is not quite so formidable as "the avenger."
I'm afraid I'll have to take a women's view of that.
You are free to take my view, but in fact I overtook your question.
If you still remember it, would you answer it?
I do remember it.
I think the whole problem is that we all realize one way or another
that we've been ruled by force,
and the world has been ruled by force as long as anyone can remember.
And that if we are on the brink of a revolution -
and it's that or death -
then it must be the only revolution
which will exchange the rule of force for something else,
for a more intricate and sophisticated social order
built on some much more complicated interaction of faculties and people.
Our enemy seems to be as impersonal as General Motors.
- Should we go to the audience? - Sure. Cynthia Ozick.
The reason Mr. Mailer appears not to comprehend and appears to patronize,
um, I think I'm on to it and I'll let you into it also.
- Uh, he's not - -Speak closer.
He's not not comprehending and he's not patronizing.
He's a priest.
And, uh, I'm not indulging in mockery or clowning,
which you warned us against, Mr. Mailer.
It's just that having read "The Prisoner of Sex" -
And I finished it on the subway coming.
Um, the - the thing that's going on in there,
uh, is a return to the primal erotic, basic religion of the world
that we know in the Indian lingam which grows -
A stone phallus growing out of dusty white waysides in India
and ringed round with laurel wreaths.
See, the women here, and particularly Ms. Sontag,
have been talking in terms of justice, which is the basis of civilization.
But a priest does not -
A sacerdotal, sexual transcendentalist priest like Mr. Mailer -
Cannot be concerned with justice rooted in civilization
because he has left Jacob's tent to become Esau.
And this was a statement. I do have a question.
This question, I have been fantasizing it for many, many years,
since Advertisements for Myself,
only I always thought it would take place at the Y and now it's here.
Would take place where?
This is the truth. This is a fantasy.
This is my moment to live out a fantasy.
Mr. Mailer, in Advertisements for Myself you said, quote,
"A good novelist can do without everything but the remnant of his balls."
For years and years I've been wondering, Mr. Mailer,
when you dip your balls in ink, what color ink is it?
Ozick, if I don't find an answer in a hurry,
I think I'm going to have to agree the color is yellow.
I will cede the round to you.
I don't pretend that I've never written an idiotic or stupid sentence in my life,
and that's one of them.
A hand. Peter Fisher of Columbia University.
I'm addressing this to the women.
I think we've heard enough from the chairman there.
Mr. Mailer, both here and in his Harper's article,
referred to homosexuals, or described them, as "female men."
And I think his negative attitude toward homosexuals
reflects a perhaps subconscious or deeper level negative evaluation of women.
I'd like to hear whether the women feel there's a connection
between the women's liberation movement and the gay liberation movement.
Actually, I've always thought it was part and parcel of the same movement.
I know this means that some of my sisters part company with me on this issue.
Um, I think the simplest way for me to describe my attitude to the whole question
is that it seems that sexual politics, by and large,
has something to do with the act of fucking
being, um, to the advantage of the one who fucks
and to the disadvantage of the one who is fucked.
And as far as I can see -
And the one who is fucked, be it male or female or a goat or a pig or a stone,
is always characterized as female and inferior.
And we all have an interest in changing the grammar of that verb,
of opening it out to all its many, many possible permutations
and getting our eyes off the retaliator for five minutes.
- Which also reminded me - -Would you mind giving your name?
Ruth Mandel.
And I have an insecurity to add to the insecurities here.
I'm asking, as a woman, I think,
who does not feel right now the need for children,
who does not feel right now that she wants to merge
with a man or a woman or anybody, but just to find myself.
If, biologically, I don't find myself tied down to my body
so that it limits the definitions of me, doesn't that kind of -
I'm asking - Maybe Mr. Mailer can answer me.
Is he that tied down so much to his body
that he can't define himself outside of it?
- What about your work? - I'm gonna try to answer your question.
But I'm gonna answer it on my own terms, if you don't mind.
That is, I'm gonna try to turn it around a little
and perhaps I'll answer you, perhaps I won't.
What I was trying to say in "The Prisoner of Sex" over and over again
is that there is nothing in women's liberation,
or in that matter in most left thought that men have come up with,
that deals with what I think is the heart of the problem.
Now, this is what I think the heart of the problem is.
If you hate the fact that I think this is the heart of the problem, fine.
But I do think the heart of the problem
is that human nature strives, in the way it works,
against painful, torturing paradoxes.
And that I'm quite aware that many women,
perhaps most the women on earth by now, don't want to have children,
don't want to be in that sexual, organic, biological game.
And maybe they are right.
I don't know and I'm not saying stop them.
I'm not saying they're evil. I'm not saying they're wrong.
I'm saying we're gonna have to find out,
that human history has gotten to the point
where the majority of women are essentially rebelling.
But we can save a lot of time if we cut out the crap and the name-calling,
because the one thing that really
is going to close off the ranks of men against the power of this movement
is precisely the fact that men have had to deal
with the abysmal lack of a sense of justice
that women have from their point of view.
Now, you may counter by saying, "Yes, 'cause that's a male sense of justice."
All right, and maybe it is.
But in the dialogue you've got to allow us our terms as well.
If you're going to quote something that we say,
you've got to learn to say that we didn't say it in our own voice,
we said it in the voice of one of our characters.
Which means next that we may or may not have meant it ourselves.
We may have meant the opposite of it.
Don't you know the simple functions of the novel?
In the novel, you have characters who tend to represent your point of view
and characters who represent the opposite of your point of view
and characters who represent some passing facet of your point of view.
And if you ladies are not going to go in for that,
but are just gonna go in for a lot of baseball abuse,
then let me point out to you
where the paradox of male and female violence takes place.
When a man and a woman have a bitter, furious, violent quarrel,
there comes a point, if the man is stronger, as he usually is -
not always, but usually -
when he is either gonna hit that woman or not.
Now if he hits the woman, he has lost the argument
because finally he has blown up the premise of the argument.
On the other hand, if a man swears to himself that he will never strike a woman
and he's dealing with a woman who has less honor than he does,
which believe me, ladies, is conceivable,
then that woman will proceed -
You're asking for a dialogue. Here it is.
This is my half of the dialogue. You can counter.
I'll teach you and you teach me. Fuck you. I want to teach you too.
I mean, fuck you, you know.
I'm not gonna sit here and listen to you harridans harangue me
and say, "Yes'm, yes'm ."
Let me just - Let me aim the point.
When a man's engaged with a woman -
When a man has sworn he will not strike a woman,
and the woman knows that and uses that and uses it and uses it,
then she comes to a point where she's literally killing that man
because the amount of violence being aroused in him
is flooding his system and slowly killing him.
So she's engaged at that point in an act of violence and murder,
even though no blows are exchanged.
Now all I'm getting at
is this is the simple, existential difficulty of the moment.
The argument about the justice in this human relation is,
where is that point?
Because that's where there's absolutely never any agreement,
whether it's the man or the woman who is playing with the point.
But if you women are not willing to recognize that life is profoundly complex
and that women, as well as men, bugger the living juices out of it,
then we have nothing to talk about, again.
"All women come to resemble their mothers,"
said a character in one of Oscar Wilde's plays.
"That is their tragedy.
No men come to resemble theirs.
That is their tragedy."
I, uh - I'm interested in how the transformations that you envisage
might result in a transformation of that theatrical down curve.
Um, that's a very good question.
I can only say in answer to that question that I do not resemble my mother at all,
physically, if that's what you meant,
and not in any other respect as far as I can make out.
It seems to me to be based on a false premise.
And in positing the question in that way, you, uh, begged it.
I think it's a marvelous question.
It's - The question that -
And Ms. Greer was offended because I don't agree with many things in her book.
I didn't mean to be rude about this disagreement. I hope I wasn't.
But one of the questions that went through my mind all through the book
was precisely the question that John Hollander just asked.
If women are not to grow by identification with their mothers,
what are they to grow by?
In Ms. Greer's book, she speaks of her wish to have a child.
She describes it as a dream of hers
to have a child which she would hand over to some family in Calabria
or some Italian village like that,
and a lot of emancipated friends would hand over their babies, too,
to this couple.
- And the mothers... - Shit.
...would not even identify themselves to their children.
These would be children who wouldn't even know who their mothers were.
Now, of course, what would happen with those children is that
they would identify with whoever was the nurturing female figure on that scene.
The peasant woman who was taking care of them
would be the person they would have to identify with.
In that way, they would have no more relation with you, Ms. Greer,
than you have with your own mother,
so you would have accomplished what you really want to accomplish then.
This is very insidious.
I was brought up by my mother,
so that that doesn't seem to bear out that assumption.
Not only that, but the description of the household
that I was dreaming of so witlessly -
I might have known it would've been turned into a club to beat me with -
was not founded round a peasant couple.
The whole point was that we would live there when we could.
The reality principle intruded
because we had to make enough money to support the household.
And there wouldn't just be one nurturing female.
I have no desire to perpetuate a situation where there is one nurturing female
to be blamed for everything that goes wrong with her offspring.
And as for having something to grow by,
it seems to me that children gain much more
from a variety of female contact
than they do from a single female contact.
And, in fact, most of the people who talk on this subject
in favor of the nuclear family,
when you examine it, you find they haven't even got nuclear families themselves.
That in some of them, there are four females and three males.
In the household described in the beginning of "The Prisoner of Sex,"
there were four nurturing females and three boy children -
Norman and his two sons.
If it comes to accuracy, it seems to me -
I won't mess about with matters of detail.
- But radical accuracy is important. - Yes, but -
Greer, did you come all the way from Australia to land a cheap shot like that?
What was cheap about that shot?
- Well, I mean it's - -Use the mic, Norman.
It's obviously a cheap sh -
Because I think it's too serious to do it
just so I can defend myself against hecklers in the Town Bloody Hall!
Well, I think it is a cheap shot to say that I was one of the boys, that's all.
Um - Um - Um -
It's a cheap shot because everybody knows that I'm profoundly boyish.
And you could have said "one man," and lifted your eyebrow,
and "two little boys"
and made your point with a little more taste, kid.
You didn't have to come all the way from Australia
to use the kind of crap we used to use in Brooklyn, that's all.
Elizabeth, did you want to say something? Elizabeth Hardwick.
I don't think that's fair.
Um -
Well, Norman, I don't think that's fair, what you just said about -
Elizabeth Hardwick is speaking.
Well, I don't have much to say,
but when you wrote your piece in Harper's, you made a great deal about being a man
who had known very little about what it meant to be a woman
and going off with all your little kids
and a new one born and your other wife gone.
So I don't think you're really being honest
when you say that she comes on with that Australian crap.
That isn't true, because that was a big part of your experience.
May I call it that?
- Of, uh - -You may. Yes, you may.
Well, you called it that.
I was very interested in your experiences about doing the dishes and -
So I'm rather unhappy that you are sort of putting down this experience.
No, no. As usual, you don't understand what I'm talking about, Elizabeth.
- Uh, I objected to - -Maybe you don't understand me.
To Germaine's characterization of it as four girls and three boys
because whether I am a boy or not,
I was trying to function as a housewife for those six weeks.
I went into it in considerable d - I went into it in considerable detail.
Everybody who read the section, including Greer,
knew goddamn well that that's what it was about.
Which is, I was trying to function as a housewife
and we were looking at the interest and the comedy and the pain
and the particular little bit of knowledge that I got out of it.
I did not exaggerate the experience, as you know full well.
- Norman - -So I thought to say -
I thought to say four girls and three boys was cute, you know? And, uh -
Except that I'll now explain why I said it.
If you insist you had three daughters looking after the two little boys - Right?
- And you also had - -Four daughters.
...if I may quote, a statement saying your mistress was in the kitchen.
Now, one is left wondering
what the hell housework was there left to do?
What took you six weeks to do?
Well, if you'd read even more closely,
you would have recognized that it started off where I was doing all the housework,
and at about two weeks into this venture
I did indeed invite my mistress up and -
Can we have one last question, Norman?
Okay, Anatole Bro yard will give the final question.
Now I would like to ask Germaine Greer,
as having a peculiar aptitude for this question,
to describe, perhaps, in the form of a one-act play,
what would it be like to be a woman
and to have the initiation and consummation of a sexual contact -
So that now we can get down to the particulars of the evening,
what would it be like after liberation, ideally?
Why do you ask this question?
Because I don't find it anywhere in the literature.
Why do you expect to find it anywhere in the literature?
Norman describes the state of affairs that exist, namely where he is at.
You ask me to describe a state of affairs that doesn't exist.
It's a perfectly unreasonable demand.
What makes you suppose that liberation has happened?
Well, I tried to make my question non-polemical.
Balls, you did.
Well, all right, perhaps I didn't succeed.
I really don't know what women are asking for.
Now, suppose I wanted to give it to them.
Listen, you may as well relax,
because whatever it is they're asking for, honey, it's not for you.
Now -
Norman, you wanna give the closing?
- Close it up. - Yeah. All right, listen.
Thank you all for an incredible evening.
Thank you all.
I'd also like to thank the four women
who contributed nine-tenths to the discussion.
You're great. You really are.
It was worth being on this panel with you.