Sexual Politics

Miller considered himself to be a “disciple of Lawrence” (296) and certainly he shares similar preoccupations with the reactionary reestablishing of traditional roles and the professed aim of challenging puritanical views of sex. However, his approach is radically difference from Lawrence’s own. Where Lawrence’s heroes use “expert psychological manipulation” (296) to distort “feminist claims to human recognition […] into a vegetative passivity calling itself fulfillment” (297), Miller does not credit women with the personality or psychological depth to require such manipulation. Instead, he simply reduces them “to ‘cunt’—thing, commodity, matter” (297), existing only to be used for male gratification. In other words, Miller’s hero “just ‘fuck[s]’ women and discard[s] them” and, as such, is “merely a huckster and a con man, unimpeded by pretension, with no priestly role to uphold” (296). In this case, then, male sexuality is less about “taming” women than it is about proving masculinity. That is, Miller is preoccupied with a model of manhood that must be proven through “masculine achievement” (298) measured through sex and money and, despite rejecting the “money mentality,” he recreates it by “converting the female to commodity” so that “he too can enjoy the esteem of ‘success’” (298 by proving his masculinity through abusive sexual “conquests.” Reinforcing the preoccupation with proving masculinity is the fact that these conquests are then bragged about to “an ubiquitous peer group jury” of other men, to such an extent that that Miller’s “strenuous heterosexuality depends, to a considerable degree, on a homosexual sharing” (303). Although differing in approach, like Lawrence, Miller claims to be challenging traditional prudishness but is in fact a reactionary force in sexual politics. Despite his claims, his work actually reflects “the disgust, the contempt, the hostility, the violence, and the sense of filth with which our culture, or more specifically, its masculine sensibility, surrounds sexuality” (295). Parasitically dependent on the “conventional morality” (306) his work claims to challenge, he is largely simply retelling “the old story: guilt fear, a reverence for ‘purity’ in the female; and a deep moral outrage whenever the ‘lascivious bitch’ in woman is exposed” (310). As such, despite his recognition as a radical challenging outmoded prudery, his true “value lies not in freeing us from such afflictions, but in having had the honesty to express and dramatize them” (295).

Early in his career, Mailer presented himself as “a hero of the sexual revolution” (322). However, once he identifies “the real implications of a sexual revolution”—that women’s liberation would mean the end of “the double standard and the subtle way in which ‘shame’ is manipulated to control women—he realizes that it is “incompatible with his own male-chauvinist propensity to give guilt a coercive function in sexual politics” (323). Instead, he becomes an “archconservative” (323), turning “lyric about ‘chastity,’ ferocious about abortion, and wildly opposed to all birth control” (322). His work is primarily made “in defense of male supremacy” (323). Key to this is an understanding of masculinity as something that must be earned and proven, as “a precarious spiritual capital in endless need of replenishment and threatened on every side” (329). Mailer himself makes this understanding explicit in The Armies of the Night when he writes that “nobody was born a man” but rather “you earned your manhood, provided you were good enough, bold enough” (327). A way to achieve this is, for Mailer and his characters, through violent sexuality and abuse. He creates a world in which a “rapist is a rapist only to the ‘square’” (317), writing books through which the “reader is given to understand that by murdering one woman and buggering another, Rojack became a man” (15). Curiously, he sees much cruelty and violence as the product of repressed homosexuality. However, he actually believes this to be “inevitable and beneficial because [cruelty and violence] constitute the only defense against homosexuality which […] [he] regards as a greater evil than murder” (332). That is to say, it is “the secret terror of homosexuality […] which drives Mailer to his heterosexual posturing” so much so that he believes violent male sexuality is necessary to save men from “slip[ping] to the level of effeminacy and succumb[ing] to homosexuality” (331) which he considers to be a profound threat to “American virility” (322). Ultimately, Mailer is painfully aware of the dynamics of sex relations and the fragile nature of modern masculinity. However, he is only able to “dramatize and illustrate the character of masculinist sensibility while remaining totally incapable of reasonable criticism of it” (330). He cannot move beyond the limiting sex roles and the conflation of male sexuality with violence and domination and so remains always a “prisoner of the virility cult” (314).