Post: #1

I picked up an old yellowed paperback of a book of Mailer essays, Cannibals and Christians, from a street vendor here. Just for bedtime reading.

I always liked Mailer's commentary, especially the later stuff in the NYRB. I met him once at an event and we discussed Harlot's Ghost. He was an ancient Yoda-like guy then. It was shortly before he died, but he was still sharp.

I read The Prisoner of Sex when I was in high school, and liked it, it rang true from my very limited experience with high school girls. Mailer might have been the first anti-feminist.

Found a few prescient and insightful quotes in this book I bought. These are from a Playboy interview in 1962.:

Quote:. . . when America became a world power and began to have ambitions to become the only world power, American men began to want something else: not to be successful in the old way of building large families, a business, moving into new country, into the frontier, creating something that was going to expand; but rather, living in a relatively stratified society now, they wanted to rise through these strata and acquire more and more power in a world no longer open and viable but on the contrary like an ennormously subtle and complex machine. Well, when they desired this, they began to look for something different in women. I think the womanization of America comes not only because women are becoming more selfish, more greedy, less romantic, less warm, more lusty, and more filled with hate - but because the men have collaborated with them. There's been a change in the minds of most men about the function of marriage - it isn't that they're getting weaker vis-a-vis their wives, it's that they've married women who will be less good for them in the home and more good for them in the world. The kind of woman who won't wash a dish is usually a beauty who'll spend 10 to 12 hours in bed and will take two hours to make up; she has to have a nurse for the children, but she'll be a wow at a party and will aid the man in his career . . What he wants is a marvelous courtesan with social arts.

This is an observation on what we call alpha/beta now:

Quote:Chivalry consists of opening a door for a woman; that means you've got to be alert, you can't retire for a moment into your own preoccupations. There you are: in position to open the door. The irony is that women who get the kind of man who's marvelous at these small attentions are always dissatisfied by his lack of depth. When they get a man with depth, they are miserable at his incapacity to take care of them in small ways.

Quote:I think there may be more homosexuals today than there were 50 years ago. If so, the basic reason might have to do with a general loss of faith in the country, faith in the meaning of one's work, faith in the notion of oneself as a man. When a man can't find any dignity in his work, he loses virility. Masculinity is not something given to you, something you're born with, but something you gain. And you gain it by winning small battles with honor. Because there is very little honor left in American life, there is a certain tendency to destroy masculinity in American men. The mass media, for instance- television first, movies second, magazines third and newspapers running no poor fourth - tend to destroy virility slowly and steadily. They give people an unreal view of life. They give people a notion that American life is easier than it really is, less complex, more rewarding. The result is that Americans, as they emerge from adolescence into young manhood, are very much like green soldiers being sent into difficult terrain ignorant of the conditions. A lot of virility immediately gets massacred.

This country's entering into the most desperate, nightmarish time in its history. Unless everyone in America gets a great deal braver, everything is going to get worse - including the womanization of America.

Post: #2

Impressively prescient.