PARTISAN REVIEW
187
before
The Prisoner of Sex,
his attack on sexual permIssIveness
was implicit in his attack on technology. Contraception, one of
the by-products of technology and itself an intrusion of technolog–
ical rationality into the sexual act , has made all kinds of sex rela–
tively equal. Criticizing Paul Goodman in
Th e Armies of the Night
for having declared "in rough that heterosexuality, homosexuality,
and onanism were equal valid forms of activity, best denuded of
guilt," Mailer asserts that "the super hygiene of all this mental
prophylaxis offended him profoundly. Super hygiene impregnated
the air with medicated Vaseline--there was nothing dirty in the
damned stuff; and sex to Mailer's idea of it was better off dirty,
damned, even slavish! than clean, and without guilt. For guilt was
the existential edge of sex. Without guilt, sex was meaningless.
One advanced into sex against one's sense of guilt, and each time
guilt was successfully defied, one had learned a little more about
the contractual relation of one's own existence to the unheard
thunders of the deep--each time guilt herded one back with its
authority, some primitive awe--hence some creative clue to the
rages of the deep--was left to brood about ... to him it some–
times seemed that much of life and most of society were designed
precisely to drive men deeper into onanism and homosexuality;
one defied such a fate by sweeping up the psychic profit which
derived from the existential assertion of yourself--which was a
way of saying that nobody was born a man; you earned manhood
provided you were good enough, bold enough."
One hears the galloping steed of John Wayne in the last
phrases. Aside from that, the passage and much else in Mailer's
talk about sexuality, suggests that precisely because he does find
in
human nature the sources of the social systems that in turn
repress it, he can end up turning that repressive agency into a
human attribute. Technology is thus a villain for promising to
release
us from this sense of repression, to release us from guilt.
Mailer finds his way back to very old and tired formulas whereby
the mystery and dignity of the self is threatened by an overwhelm–
ing external power of science and technology. He is more tentative
than Wilhelm Reich, who insists that "alienation is not of biologi–
cal but of social and economic origin" and that "it was not found
in human history before the development of the patriarchal social
order." But the tentativeness is inconsequential. What matters, for
