[When] Norman Mailer [came] in with The Prisoner of Sex … [he stole] the show from the bluestockings. He is what it lacked: a go-getting whistle-stop clown. In an interview, he once let out the joke that he didn't hate women; he just thought they ought to be shut up in cages. Nothing for it then (when one of the women beat him to the front page of Time magazine) but to get into the cage with them. A paranoiac with a good boyish punch, a gentle eye, a sentimentalist—four wives, clearly not interested in women but in something they had got—yet with sensible flashes in his rage and savage laughter, determined on the spotlight, he rips around. He is as sweeping and discontinuous as an excited woman, yet he has considerable relics of what Norman Douglas called the "male attributes of humility, reverence and a sense of proportion." He has brought a sparkle to a dismal scene, and if, at the end, one can't make out whether he is swimming or sinking—nor can he—he has one huge advantage over his enemies: he is a brilliant writer with sharp insights, and he has passion, which they have not. His satirical metaphors are very funny. They are also accurate.

Mailer's answer to Millett ("The Prisoner of Sex" in Harper's) gave the impression of being rather longer than her book Sexual Politics. Part of this is due to a style which now resembles H.P. Lovecraft rather more than the interesting, modest Mailer of better days. Or as Emma Cockburn (excellent name for a Women's Libber) pointed out, Mailer's thoughts on sex read like three days of menstrual flow.