And what he finally decides is as simple as it is complex: Norman Mailer does not want to believe that the vaginal orgasm is a myth, so he just doesn't believe it. His reasons range from the lofty and approach the ridiculous. Above all, he wants to cling to the mystery of sex, to the "enigma of orgasm," as he puts it, to "the orgasm as the mirror of one's existence." As a result, he will not give credence to laboratory evidence presented by Kate Millett (collected from Drs. Masters and Johnson and Dr. Mary Jane Sherfey) that an artificial phallus could induce, in an hour's time, twenty to fifty orgasms in some guinea-pig of a woman lying on an operating table. For "what value," he wants to know, "would be attached to the mirror of the sexual moment when orgasms could be measured by periodicity and count?"

Then, there is his own admission about the myth, his own reasons for desiring to deny it. "What of his own poor experience?" he mumbles. "All lies?" he asks and at last confesses that "he felt a hate for the legions of the vaginally frigid."

The barely concealed anger of that admission prompts suspicion. For something remains in Mailer's voice even when his reverence for the orgasmic mystery seems to have subsided, even when his fear and protestations at the technological onslaught seem to have quieted down. Somewhere in the farthest reaches of his herculean psyche, somewhere fluttering between his mind and body, his body and soul, is a small voice, a nervous, restless, jealous voice, crying out that "men look to destroy every quality in a woman which will give her the powers of a male, for she is in their eyes already armed with the power that she brought them forth."

A brief digression before the argument concludes. A piece of biographical data (which may or may not be at all to the point) found in an appendix to Sisterhood Is Powerful, an anthology of writings from the Women's Liberation Movement:

Valerie Solanis should be known primarily as an artist, not as someone who shot Andy Warhol.... She is still being persecuted by police and "mental health" authorities for her "attempted murder" of Warhol, and has been in and out of prisons ever since. Interestingly enough, Norman Mailer was charged with the same crime when he almost fatally stabbed his wife. He was never imprisoned; all charges were dropped; his reputation was enhanced; he subsequently ran for Mayor of New York. Enough said-Ed. [Robin Morgan]

Evidently, in Mailer and in the Women's Liberationists, we are faced by people who are in the same prison but who do not agree on the future. For Mailer, after all, the prison is an existential state, a dilemma of birth, sometimes painful, sometimes sweet as Blake's "loss of liberty." But for the Women's Liberation Movement, the prison can only be temporary. Recognizing it as such is the first step to finding freedom; self-assertion and sympathy for one's own sex are the next steps.

SOMETIMES behind the bars, we look at the four walls and reconsider. For if, after all, we are sure that the prison is really sex, if its walls are really built of the most profound and puzzling differences between the sexes and of the mysteries of sexuality, then who knows but Mailer may be right, after all, and maybe we'd be happiest being brave in the prison, making love and babies in it, and carrying on. For if the prison really is sex-nothing more or less vital-then outside the prison, the land may be lonely, and the species may die out.

But if the prison is not sex, after all, but sexism, if the bricks of its walls are sexual hostility and narrow-mindedness and chauvinism, then more than a few of us want more than parole.