Prisoner of Sex
Norman Mailer
Language: English
Pages: 67
ISBN: B000PYGZ82
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Here, by America's foremost candidate for the Nobel Prize, is the book that created a firestorm among true believers of the women's liberation movement, and which on rereading and contemplation emerges as one of the most sensible, sensitive and probing works on the ageless dialectic of man, woman, man-woman ever to be written.
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Amazon Review:
The Prisoner of Sex by Norman Mailer is more than what the title alludes; it delves into man in the modern age.
From references of feminism, to literature, to sexual identity, Mailer masterfully cuts through the noise and goes deep into to the heart of man. This is raw Mailer as he deconstructs the world around him to discover one reason for living - sex.
We are guided by sex's force and the urge limits our potential. What makes this book enjoyable is that Mailer is able to weave so many issues around one basic human act. At the time the book was written it created a stir and was counter to the burgeoning feminist movement.
The work is very relevant today and hits on similar issues we face today with the overloaded information age in a politically correct world.
dear as the right to think of herself as an exploited class. For that power she was ready to turn the purse inside out. “Such Work must be overthrown!” Discussions of radical women passed even beyond the sexual revolution with its insistence on a “single standard of sexual freedom” all permissive, all hierarchies of moral precedence bombarded, all eschatologies withdrawn. Yes, the argument went beyond that quite foreseeable time when monogamy and legitimacy would be gone, when distinctions
plastic ether of some scalded libidinal bilefilled psychosocial air. Where would their message go? For nothing, he believed, was ever wholly lost, no curse, no cry of wasted come. But we are already on to the men, and the passion to be male. Angels and devils are collecting in the embrace at Revolution Hall. III THE ADVOCATE By any major literary perspective, the land of Millett is a barren and mediocre terrain, its flora reminiscent of a Ph.D. tract, its roads a narrow argument, and its
where there is no speech and no terms of agreement. There we are two stark, unknown beings, two utterly strange creatures. I would want to approach you, and you me. And there could be no obligation, because there is no standard for action there, because no understanding has been reaped from that plane. It is quite inhuman–so there can be no calling to book, in any form whatsoever–because one is outside the pale of all that is accepted, and nothing known applies. One can only follow the impulse,
to take care of him. So the prisoner thought to use his work for no more than an occasional example. He could travel a narrow path, he would treat homosexuality as no more than a corollary of the heterosexual condition; he would, in short, take the short cut: pass through jail. Here are two affidavits on the suppression of the revolt at the Long Island City Men’s House of Detention in New York, 1970: Friday, October 9, 20 or 30 C.O.s came onto my gallery and ordered everyone to strip naked. We
fair, for it suggested a colloquy between the liver’s passions and the justified claims of the spleen, the spirituality of the lungs in conflict with the wage demands of the muscles, all subjected at last to the logic of intestinal morality where the funerals were planned, yes, sharp criticism always kissed your thought up another notch. His strength was to love the job a good critic could do on him–in this regard, he was equal to one of those prodigies of paradoxical health who thrive on