Sex Wars, What Are They Good For?
Felice Basbøll's Critic essay revisits Mailer's quarrel with 1970s feminism — Kate Millett's Sexual Politics, his riposte in The Prisoner of Sex, and the 1971 Town Hall debate with Germaine Greer filmed as Town Bloody Hall — to argue that the Mailer–Greer exchange models a respectful, full-throated intellectual combat absent from today's sex wars. An about-Mailer clipping.
Read an excerpt (rights pending)
Felice Basbøll. “Sex Wars, What Are They Good For?” The Critic (Artillery Row), 21 June 2026. https://thecritic.co.uk/sex-wars-what-are-they-good-for/
An essay on the uses of intellectual combat that takes Mailer as its case in point. Basbøll recalls how Kate Millett‘s Sexual Politics (1970) cast the male artist’s ego — Miller, Lawrence, and Mailer — as the root of patriarchy, and how Mailer answered in The Prisoner of Sex (his 90,000-word Harper’s piece, then the book): “Biology is not destiny, but it is half of it.” Her real subject is the 1971 Theatre for Ideas debate at Town Hall — Mailer chairing Germaine Greer, Jacqueline Ceballos, Jill Johnston, and Diana Trilling, filmed as Town Bloody Hall — which she reads as a lost model of adversaries who respected one another enough to fight. Mailer’s exchange with Greer, and his line to Martin Amis in 1991 that “you need to write for your adversaries as much as for your friends,” become the essay’s measure of a combat that today’s sex wars have replaced with avoidance.
Related pages
- The Prisoner of Sex | Kate Millett | Germaine Greer | Diana Trilling
- Town Hall (New York) | Theatre for Ideas | Martin Amis
- About this project