Those occasional all- (or almost all-) male extravaganzas, from Melville’s Moby Dick to Dickey’s Deliverance, ask to be considered, to the extent they are womanless, as complex prose poems whose significance is in their exploration of the sui generis existential embattlements of the free, male spirit, allegorically dramatized in landscape or decor. Kate Millett to the contrary, this is true even of Genet. But these books are never to be taken as social commentary, unless, like Kesey’s Cuckoo’s Nest, they contain one Awful Woman and/or, like Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead, a herd of faceless, immoral ones. Should we mistakenly examine what we can of the author’s social ideas from his depiction of actual life on a nineteenth-century whaling voyage, or a twentieth-century canoeing trip, the picture seems oddly fascistic. And that certainly could not have been the author’s intention. …

The fictions of writers like Djuna Barnes, Virginia Woolf, or Ronald Firbank at first appear as a much needed respite from this standard stance. Is it that their casts are all- (or almost all-) female? Perhaps their characters simply tend to have what is so easily labelled a “female sensibility,” i.e., they seldom act or particularly think of themselves as apart from society and consequently seldom act or particularly think of themselves as “free.” Yet the socially marginal and the insane are important characters for all these writers. Take a second look: These are the “Uncle Remus” tales of a slave culture. “Society is women” is still their unquestioned supposition. They simply choose to ignore the attack that is the “novelist’s duty.”

But either in whole or in part, the moral stance of the novel is as absurd and self-perpetuating a lie as the one given by those Southern critics of American Slavery who claimed that the only flaw in the society of the American South was the appallingly weak character, lack of honor, laziness and scheming of its nigger chattel—who, according to them, had been given too much power and responsibility at every level already.

This is ridiculous.

In our society, men have all the real social power: men are society. Women, at best, are men’s viceroys in its administration. If some women think of this as freedom, few men will trouble to dispute them. Man has created the institution of womanhood, all to his own profit. And any woman who would move even slightly beyond the allowable margins of that institution is likely to become man’s hunted and hounded victim, economically threatened and jeopardized at every turn, jeered toward any slough of guilt and madness she can be shoved into: Man will commit any indignity upon those human beings he has set aside into that minimal social area he has reserved for women.

On observing the newborn infant, he notes the minutest physical distinction and sets all who bear it apart linguistically: They are “shes,” “daughters,” “girls,” “nieces,” who will grow into “ladies,” “women,” “females,” “aunts,” “mothers,” and “grandmothers,” forever cut from the linguistic collective of mankind. (Whoever claims the word “mankind” includes women is simply ignorant of the language’s history: “… she knew too much of the obstinacy of mankind to oppose any of their ridiculous humours,” writes Fielding in Tom Jones, Chapter 5, paragraph 2; it is only 1920, i.e., the year women forced men to cede them the vote, that, as an appeasing gesture, anyone even suggested the obviously masculine word might, on occasion, be interpreted with such generous inclusiveness.)