The Playboy Panel: The Womanization of America

Panelists

Edward Bernays, generally regarded as the father of public relations, and a pioneer in dignifying and professionalizing the field, has been an active publicist since 1915. The nephew of Sigmund Freud, he has written several psychologically oriented books on public opinion and its manipulation -- among them Public Relations and The Engineering of Consent -- which are considered the definitive texts on the subject.

Dr. Ernest Dichter, onetime Viennese psychoanalyst, is the founder and president of the Institute for Motivational Research, whose clinical probings into the nature and manipulation of consumer psychology have profoundly influenced the marketing techniques of Madison Avenue since the early 1950s.

Alexander King, erstwhile painter, illustrator, playwright and Life editor, belatedly became a national celebrity as the asp-tongued raconteur-in-residence of The Jack Paar Show, subsequently as the prolific author of three consecutive bestselling volumes of personal philosophy and reminiscence: Mine Enemy Grows Older, May This House Be Safe from Tigers and I Should Have Kissed Her More. His fourth book is presently in progress.

Norman Mailer (Playboy Panel: Sex and Censorship in Literature and the Arts, Playboy, July 1961), the iconoclastically outspoken author of The Naked and the Dead, The Deer Park and Advertisements for Myself, has most recently penned a controversial first volume of poetry, Deaths for the Ladies and Other Disasters, and is currently at work on a massive fourth novel.

Herbert Mayes (On the Scene, Playboy, April 1961), the dynamic editor whose experimental daring has transformed McCall's into the world's top-ranking women's magazine, recently capped a long editorial career at the helms of such publications as Cosmopolitan and Good Housekeeping with his promotion to the presidency of McCall's.

Dr. Ashley Montagu is the distinguished anthropologist, anatomist, educator and social biologist whose much-publicized belief in the biological supremacy of women, as expressed in numerous TV interviews, lectures and books on the subject, has won him a reputation as their most articulate champion.

Dr. Theodor Reik, a 30-year disciple and colleague of Sigmund Freud, and one of the progenitors of modern psychoanalysis, has conducted a lifelong campaign of popular indoctrination -- as author of such authoritative laymen's texts as The Search Within and Of Love and Lust -- in the aims and means of psychiatry as a science.

Mort Sahl (Playboy Panel: Hip Comics and the New Humor, Playboy, March 1961), precursor and acknowledged elder statesman of the literate, topically attuned new generation of hip humorists, divides his time currently between TV guest shots and infrequent club dates, and is contemplating a weekly video series this fall. His latest Lp is On Relationships.

Playboy: In a 16th Century tract somewhat alarmingly entitled The First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women, a fiery Scottish statesman named John Knox wrote that "The nobility of England and Scotland are inferior to brute beasts, for they do that to women which no male among the common sort of beasts can be proved to do to their females; that is, they reverence them, and quake in their presence; they obey their commandments." So it would appear that the topic of womanization is not entirely original either with Playboy or with 20th Century America. But in the past 20 years it has become a subject of increasing concern -- and a source of both dismay and delight -- to many thousands of people, male and female. Ever since Philip Wylie coined and condemned Momism in 1942, there has been a growing national awareness of the degree to which women have come to power in our society. In many ways, of course, this meteoric ascendancy has been entirely laudable; we are not male chauvinists. But in many ways it has given grave cause for alarm to women as well as men. One need only behold the proliferation of advertising directed at women, public relations directed at women, mass-media entertainment directed at women; or consider the massive upsurge in feminine purchasing power, the kitchen-oriented redesigning of homes, the wall-to-wall decor of American automotive appointments; or reflect on the fact of the female's greater life expectancy; or examine the increasingly blurred distinctions between the sexes in this country -- not only in business, but in such diverse realms as household chores, leisure activities, smoking and drinking habits, clothing styles, upswinging homosexuality and the sexobliterating aspects of togetherness. More than 90 percent of the advice columns in the daily press are written by and for women; women also account for an estimated 75 percent of all consumer purchases; and they comprise the lioness' share of the nation's teaching force, inculcating male and female students alike -- all too often already geared to a mother-dominated home -- with a feminist, not feminine, orientation. In short, the male finds himself confronted with, contributing to, and partaking of a phenomenon which ranges in scope from our society's reliance upon the specialized needs, whims, tastes and appetites of women to the fact that many women take it for granted that a man will chivalrously open doors, light cigarettes or yield his seat on a bus, yet offer him no such return courtesy when they come into conflict in the job arena. There seems to be room for speculation, in fact, about whether women are being masculinized even faster than the country is becoming womanized. Or is it, perhaps, that men are being effeminized? These are but a few of the questions we will scrutinize in an attempt to illuminate cause and effect of this process. In a Playboy article appropriately titled The Womanization of America (September 1958), Philip While offered this capsule analysis: "Enough men have abnegated and enough women have won to dominance so that a broad picture of our national life ... shows it to be in sad condition ... a deadly distaff encroachment of what started as feminism and matured into wanton womanization." Norman Mailer, as a man and as a writer, how do you feel this chain of events was set into motion -- and where might it be taking us?

Mailer: I think it has come out of the whole crisis that America is in. After World War I, and particularly after World War II, America began to see itself not only as a world power, but as the world power. And this was a shift in America's historic function, because after all, before World War I, America was the land of freedom and opportunity. It was not a place engaged in world history, but an island sheltered from world history where people could go and be free of the deteriorating effects of being engaged in all the crises of history. If you went to America you could make a life for yourself. You could build a family, find work that was appropriate to yourself -- ideally -- and found a small dynasty. Now, again, when America became a world power and it began to have ambitions to become the world power, what happened was that men began to see, began to have a different desire, to want something else out of their lives. What they wanted was to be successful; not to be successful in the sense that they build large families, build a business, move into new country, move into new land, move into the frontier, create something that was going to expand; but rather that in a somewhat stratified society -- certainly stratified relative to what America had been 50 years ago -- they would rise through these strata and acquire more and more power over a society which was no longer open and viable, but on the contrary, an enormously subtle and complex machine. Well, when they desired this, they began to look for something different in women than they had looked for before. So I think that the womanization of America comes not only because women are becoming more selfish, more greedy, less romantic, less warm, more lusty, and also more filled with hate -- but because the men have collaborated with them. There's been a change in the minds of most men about the function of marriage -- which isn't necessarily that they're becoming weaker vis-à -vis their wives; it's that they've married women who will be less good for them in the home and more good for them in the world. The kind of woman who doesn't wash a dish is usually a beauty who'll spend 10 to 12 hours in bed and will take two hours to make up, and has to have a nurse for the children, but she'll be a wow at a party and she will aid the man in his career because when they both go to the party, everybody envies him, covets his woman, and so forth. What he wants is a marvelous courtesan with the social arts. A courtesan who can go out into the world, side by side, with him.

Sahl: That's true, all of it goes back to us. We're driving. But I'm not blaming myself. I'm not one of the guys responsible. Chicks have more time than we do for compassion and for kindness and all the qualities I look for in a woman -- and rarely find. All the romanticism in my love affairs comes from me. I'm the guy who flies over to see her for a weekend. They don't do anything like that. They cry when you get there. They're practical people.

Playboy: Mort, in your latest record, On Relationships, you point out that "A woman who demands equality renounces her superiority ..."

Sahl: When I say that they renounce their superiority I mean that the chicks who would theoretically do anything for the guy -- they're in a better spot than the chicks who fight the guy. They always are. They always come off better. In other words, it's like where a chick comes on and says, "I'm sick and tired of everybody thinking that you're God" -- not realizing that if she thinks I'm God, and I know that she is -- well, she's in a pretty good position. That's what I'm talking about. If you ever want to stop a chick, look in her eyes and say, "What do you want?" Chicks compete in the world, and they think a pair of pants goes with it. They're really unbelievable. And they're not gentle. And they're not women.

Reik: Because before, man was the breadwinner, and now the woman sometimes earns more than he does; it gives her a certain independence. In general, I would say American women are the most independent in the world. I would say there is a law -- a law as binding as the laws of chemistry or of physics -- namely, that a masculinization of women goes with the womanization of man, hand in hand. There is no doubt about who is the boss of the house in Europe, or let's say olden times, but that's not true any more.

Dichter: Biologically, a change has taken place. The woman is no longer just a woman; she has become a partner in the biological sense, in the psychological sense, and also in the whole concept of family planning, professional activities. Womanization has taken place only to the extent that it has brought the modern woman up to par with the male -- though there is still not 100 percent equality. The reason for it comes from both sides. The male, of course, and particularly the insecure male, is very much afraid of losing his illusion of superiority by this equalization between himself and the woman. One thing that always impressed me -- there was a scene which appeared in The African Queen where something went wrong with the propeller, with the screw of the boat, an old-fashioned fishing boat in Africa, and Humphrey Bogart is all tired out with his diving several times trying to repair it, and finally Katharine Hepburn says, "I'll go down and repair it," and he says, "Oh, no, you can't do that." And she answers, "Why not?" He says, "Well, a woman just can't do that." And she repeats, "Why not?" And he looks at her for a few seconds and says, "I really don't know." She goes down and repairs it. So when approached logically the man has no explanation. Why can't the woman dive down and repair a propeller shaft just as well as he, particularly if he's tired out? It has taken several thousand years for the male to permit the female more and more equality. In the last analysis it's going to be the male who will profit by it. He's going to have a partner rather than a little doll that he has to take care of, which gives him a feeling of superiority, but in an illusory fashion.

Playboy: Philip Wylie disagrees. If we may refer again to his Playboy article on womanization, he commented as follows on the repercussions of suffrage: "The ladies won the legal advantages of equality -- and kept the social advantages of their protected position on the pedestal. They thought 'equal' meant identical' in the days before they decided 'equal' meant 'in full charge.' They said they wanted to be partners with their males, and to 'share everything.' That turned out to mean that the ladies wanted to invade everything masculine, cover it with dimity, occupy it forever -- and police it."

King: But there is a law in physics, you see, stating that with one rear end you can only sit on one chair and not on eight chairs. Women are discovering this now -- that you can't have it in all directions. I haven't the slightest doubt that this absolute, unquestioned equality is a great mistake and in violation of all natural laws. It is a mistake because democracy is all right politically, but it's no good in the home. Because somebody has to make up his mind and somebody has to have an image, as I have, of what my family is. I don't ride roughshod over anybody's opinions or wishes or hopes; that goes without saying -- no imaginative man could -- but I certainly would be baffled if my wife made major decisions without consulting me, and even bowing to the superior reason I have, as to why certain things should not be done. Democracy means that everybody has all the say about everything. Well, I think this is nonsense in the family. Absolute nonsense. It's the loss of this authority which has undermined marriage.

Bernays: A lot of this so-called feminization is a direct result of a very healthy trend in society: simply that nobody wants to be anybody's servant any more. Women want to be free and independent people in a free and independent society. There has been a movement toward egalitarianism of the sexes ever since, I suppose, the matrons of early Rome. But in the last 50 years this movement has been greatly accelerated by the suffrage movement, by the vote, by higher education -- as a result of which women have gained a great deal. But from every practical standpoint, I think this is still a man's world, and I think that men, not as a conspiracy, but simply to maintain the old patterns, have created the illusion that women have many more equalities and rights than they actually have.

Sahl: The happiest chicks -- the ones who are really ready for marriage, in a sense -- are the ones who don't try to run it and are junior partners. They have it all -- by letting the guy do it all for them.

Dichter: And so the woman still plays the role of having to be conquered, being weak, being the doll. The perfume, the dressing up, the evening gown -- all these things are playful continuations, manifestations of what originally were necessities. The carrying across the threshold of the newlywed, for example. This is the strong male actually raping the woman, taking her in there, throwing her on the bed. Well, many of our wedding ceremonies come from that. So you have a vast array of such rituals that we are maintaining in our daily lives. But we are doing them playfully, in a gamelike fashion. The original meanings have gotten lost. We don't need them any more.

Playboy: What about such social niceties as coat-holding and cigarette-lighting for the ladies? Have we also outgrown the need for these chivalrous amenities?

Mailer: Women want chivalry and they don't respect the price of it. Chivalry consists of opening a door for a woman; that means you've got to be alert, you've got to be thinking, you can't retire for a moment into your own preoccupations, which might be pressing. So there you are, in position to open the door. And the moment the woman begins to think this is something to be taken for granted, then a certain small injustice creeps into the relation -- to use that despised word. The irony is that when women get the kind of man who's marvelous at these small attentions, they are always profoundly dissatisfied by his lack of depth. But when they get a man with depth, they are miserable at his incapacity to take care of them in small ways.

Montagu: I think that since women got the franchise, males have sort of felt, well, if they're going to be equal with us, we don't have to get up in buses and give them our seats, and we don't have to open doors for them because Ashley Montagu says that they're constitutionally stronger anyway. But the fact is that politeness is something which, even between members of the same sex, helps to make the wheels of society go around a great deal more smoothly than they otherwise would.

Mayes: Knowing that women physically are not as strong as themselves, men traditionally want -- by thought and gesture, I think -- to offer them what protection they can; it's more a courtesy than anything else, the same kind of courtesy that a man would extend to a child in crossing the street. That doesn't imply that men are superior and women inferior. It's simply a tradition, and a pleasant one, the same kind of tradition that prevails in wooing. It's the man who asks the woman if she'll be his wife, not the woman who asks the man if he'll be her husband.

King: I say women can't expect a chivalrous attendance from men and at the same time challenge them on every score. The woman's status has changed completely in the last 50 years. I think we're in an interregnum right now where the man is no longer willing or ready to accept complete responsibility for the family as he did in my father's and grandfather's days -- father was the boss in our house and there wasn't any argument about it. I don't mean that the women didn't have a great deal to say. I'm sure they knew more about how the finances were being handled or should be handled, and so on. These were the matters which were surely of common concern to both parents, and I'm sure the mother had the greater influence. But there were other aspects of family life -- the way they faced the world, the image that the family gave to the world -- and in this image there was no question that the husband was the dominant factor. Now, with the liberation of the woman from housework and chores, and with her getting the vote and feeling her new freedom, an uneasy period has set in, in which neither of the two knows quite what to do. And the man, sheepishly and very foolishly, I think, has in some ways resigned his prerogatives, and by default woman has taken over.

Montagu: I do think that there's been an abdication on the part of the male of his role as a male, and one of the principal causes and effects that I see is the lack of seriousness of the American male, who is kidding all the time, who is one of the boys, who in relation to his own children feels that he has to be a pal rather than a parent. This, of course, is indeed an evasion of his own responsibility as a father, let alone as a parent, which means also an evasion of his wife as well as his children. And this general attitude that you see among so many men in America is very well described in the word "kidding." There are large numbers of men I know who go through what seems to be the whole of their lives without ever attempting to be serious. Anything for a laugh, horsing around. Now this sort of thing makes it impossible for boys in America to grow up as anything but technical adults. They remain immature, and also in their relation to women -- this light approach and lack of seriousness in their relationships with women -- this, then, makes it imperative for the women to do something about the situation. And, of course, most of them bemoan this type of man, and so they assume increasingly larger burdens and loads which should, or did, normally fall upon the shoulders of the male. I think this has come about largely as a result of the industrialization of America and the taking of the husband out of the home and apartment, often at a great distance, from which he leaves in the morning and returns late at night and can no longer play the role even of husband, let alone of parent. And this emasculation is largely a result of what Kenneth Murdock up at Harvard once described as "the leisure of the theoried classes" -- by which he meant that the more the male was able to learn, the more he was able to give his wife and children, but at the same time absolve himself of all the responsibility for the direction and regulation of their activities. So this has all come about largely as the result of the change from the rural to the urban industrial civilization which America is now doomed to become almost completely.

Dichter: In the modern home, the woman is the family doctor, she is the cleanliness expert, she is the cook, she is also the professional advisor to the husband. Should he change his job? Should he not change his job? To this extent, I think the woman's role has always been very strong; probably it is stronger than it ever was before.

Playboy: Again in his Playboy essay on The Womanization of America, Philip Wylie took a dim view of her influence in this area: "When it became evident that technology could provide myriads of families with luxuries and comforts always hitherto restricted to the few, America's men, more than males elsewhere, abandoned the arts, sciences, and so on -- for business enterprise. And when the ladies saw what goodies even a middle-income husband could furnish, they put the heat on men for more, and the men accepted the burden."

Dichter: Still, I would maintain my thesis that women are just coming up to par now, and that it is being officially recognized at last. We've found in our studies, apropos this point, that the male, while unmarried, will try to step up his purchases in status and quality and size until he gets married. Then all kinds of other demands set in: furniture, children, the buying of a home. He's almost inclined at this point to settle down and say, "Well, I've got most of the things I want." It is then that the woman starts pushing him. We've even recommended that this technique be used in many approaches to salesmen. It is the wife of the salesman who can often be used to stimulate him and urge him to make more money.

Mayes: I hate to think of what most men in business would be like if they didn't have their wives to depend on. There isn't a reasonably intelligent woman who won't help out in her husband's business when and if she can. And invariably she is willing to do so if called upon.

Bernays: Concerning her influence, I've gathered that such decisions as where a family will take the two weeks' vacation, for instance, are pretty much the wife's, because she takes the children along. The decision as to the type of clothes the girls or boys wear -- that is also her decision. But the decision as to where they will live is pretty much the husband's. I've had women work for me over the years, very good ones, who were married; they might be earning more than their husband, but if their husband was transferred to the Denver office, there wasn't a question in their mind about leaving. Now there is another factor to indicate that when it comes to the disposal of money by the family -- that is, in a will or whatever -- the man is usually in charge. If you look at the records, you'll find that the men take out the life insurance -- though of course they take it out for the women. And I find, to my surprise, that at no point in the early life of a woman -- in primary school, grammar school, prep school, high school or college -- does she ever impinge on the economics of life.

Playboy: Yet, as Max Lerner asserts in his massive America As a Civilization, "The most striking fact about American consumption is that it is dominated less by a class than by the tastes, fantasies and standards of the American woman."

Dichter: The old saying that woman holds the purse strings is only partially true. I think that as far as major decisions are concerned in the modern household, it is usually a joint concern, very often a family decision. As a matter of fact, I think that even the children exert more influence than the woman.

King: Well, I'm quite sure that most of the purchases made nowadays are made with woman as the decisive factor in making the decision as to what is to be bought -- from the family car down to the table napkins and to ashtrays, because you can say that she has a better sense of decoration, you see, of what is becoming to the home. Since she spends most of her time there, she should. But this has become now a complete woman's prerogative.

Mayes: I think that this is a woman's country, as opposed to England, for example, which I think is a man's country. In the United States, every consumer product is manufactured with the woman's needs in mind. Here the most advanced developments in home equipment, for instance, are put on the market just as soon as possible. In England, old models will be kept until the dies wear out; but if it's a matter of men's boots or clothing, everything that's new comes out immediately. In this country, women want the best that's available, the most efficient, and what's new must come on the market immediately -- women here won't settle for anything less. Factors of taste and style are most often left up to the wife, whether it has to do with the furnishing of a home, with the choice of clothing for children, or with the provision of food for the family.

Dichter: Women usually have more security as far as taste is concerned. You know, the male will ask his wife or girlfriend to help him out in choosing shirts or a suit. To that extent, at least, I think the female plays a very strong role.

Bernays: I think, by and large, one can make the generalization that women buy most of the food; yet even that is changing; nowadays you'll find as many men as women in the supermarkets, going through impulse buying. My daughter's husband, for example, goes to the supermarket once a week. But the mother purchases the children's clothes, and that I think is not changing. To a great extent, the man purchases the mechanical appliances that go into the home. In certain cases, however, shopping becomes a family function; we found in Honolulu that the families of Chinese background would come into Sears Roebuck as a unit, four or five people, to look at a vacuum cleaner. They would buy it as a family. Whereas in a German culture pattern, let's say in Milwaukee, you might have an entirely different situation, where only the man would buy it. Despite its national advertising, America has more diversification than any one European country; we've got greater variety technologically, greater variety in terms of immigration, greater variety in terms of acculturization of various groups. But when you look at the reality of who controls the economy, the only thing you can say is what the antisuffragettes used to say: woman should maintain her indirect influence over man.

Playboy: Yet there are many who would say that her influence has been anything but indirect -- particularly in such areas as the apportionment of domestic duties. As increasing numbers of American wives have graduated from the responsibilities of housekeeping to those of wage-earning, thousands of married men have found themselves sharing such traditionally distaff chores as dusting, sweeping, dishwashing, bottle-warming and even scrubbing. Couldn't this blurring of male-female roles be viewed as an encroachment of womanization?

Mailer: The fact that men are washing dishes doesn't necessarily mean it's the womanization of America; it's that there's been a shift in the social and biological function of the woman to where she is expected, as I said before, not so much to create a home as she is to be an aide-de-camp or a staff general to an ambitious opportunist. Part of this unspoken contract is that therefore she won't wash a dish. She won't wash it because she realizes that's not part of her function. He would love her to wash the dishes as well, but he knows damn well she won't, because it's precisely the kind of women who have a great many choices who won't wash the dishes.

Reik: Well, I've never washed a dish in my whole life. I don't say anything against it; if men in America help their women in the home, it's just a difference of customs.

Montagu: When I married, I told my wife that I feel a good husband should share the responsibilities of doing such little chores around the house in order to relieve her. I don't like the patriarchal European attitude.

King: If you care about your wife, you instinctively help with the chores. As long as she doesn't get up and hand me the apron; that ends the idyl and the supposition that this is a voluntary thing that I'm doing out of affection and a sense of responsibility. The man in the apron was just a gag once upon a time, but today they actually sell special aprons for men, made of denim with hand-stitching, and so on. Aprons were worn by carpenters years ago, and by blacksmiths, but the aprons modern man wears are sold at Hammacher Schlemmer and cost $16 apiece.

Mayes: What the devil difference does it make whether a man wears an apron? He wears it to keep his clothes from getting dirty. And his position is in no way denigrated when he washes a dish or uses a vacuum cleaner. There's much more nearly a partnership in this country between men and women than there is anywhere else in the world, and if there's something a man can do around the house to make life easier for his wife, he's either a fool or a most inconsiderate person if he doesn't.

Sahl: I have a theory about the kitchen. If a chick said, "I'll do it," I might even help her. But this is all academic. No one has ever said it to me.

Bernays: The fascinating thing to me is that the man doesn't even wash the dishes; he dries them. So what he is doing is not assuming half the burden as half of the family, but rather a sop toward the half. Now my own feeling is that, what with the dearth of servants, the husband would really be a slob if he didn't do something toward lightening the burden of his wife. But there are very few husbands I know who scrub the floor or take the diapers out to the container; they're much more likely to do the symbolic helping things, rather than what might be called the dirty work. I think that many men who dominate the mass media through advertising, and who dominate big business, are unconsciously trying to get the woman back into the kitchen. They're depicting her with the appliance and making it enticing so that they can give themselves the feeling that they have a free slave at home who will attend to their wants.

Playboy: On the other hand, there was an advertisement a few years ago for a washing machine, showing a group of people gazing raptly at a demonstration of the machine; and standing at the front of the admirers was a burly, squarejawed Marine -- a traditional symbol of virile masculinity.

Bernays: It could have been a man with an eye-patch or a five-legged horse; I would not attempt to evaluate the aberrations of art directors. But just as one swallow doesn't make a summer, one ad wouldn't make either a trend or a valid interpretation. If you take ads as a whole, what do you see? You see the man dominating the appeal to women; you see him selling goods to women in terms of projecting himself in a way that satisfies his happiness and his ease by making her in rapport with a washing machine or an iron or a vacuum cleaner.

Mayes: I guess the ad was supposed to be an eye-catcher and to indicate that men as well as women are interested in washing machines. But if you were to find out how many men are actually interested in washing clothes, I think the number would be insignificant.

King: I think the advertising boys were being very, very shrewd, and that's all -- throwing a sop to the men; so they pick out a superman, a Marine, the least likely man to be interested in such a transaction. The man who invented this ad probably got a bonus for the idea. And I don't think it reflects anything. However, it prefigures something: probably every woman will take along a Marine every time she picks out a washing machine from now on.

Mailer: This ad, I think, would be an attempt, by that part of the mass media embodied in the word advertising, to bolster up the ego of the American male by saying, "See, even the most virile of men will consider, will study a washing machine." And the reason behind it is probably that there are many, many more men putting wash in washing machines these days, and it's beginning to bother them; they're beginning to feel a certain amount of resentment toward it, which no doubt motivational research has discovered. So this is a way to draw the fangs of male resentment. But then you can't tell. It might have been simply that the copywriter was a homosexual and queer for Marines, so he put it in because it made the ad exciting to him.

Dichter: Probably the ad was supposed to imply that there are many jobs among the daily household chores that originally or at least psychologically are men's jobs -- and laundry is one of them. In our studies we've found that washing machines are masculine rather than feminine: they are the masculine burly helpers; they are this burly Marine who represents the washing machine. He doesn't permit his tiny, delicate little woman to exert herself. It's like Mr. Clean, you know -- the same kind of effect. And by the way, Mr. Clean is the eunuch, you know; he's a castrated male, psychologically speaking. He's the genie, he helps the housewife without being interested in her in an erotic sense. And all of these -- the washing machine, the instant coffee, the frozen foods, the various cleaning products -- they all represent the role of the ideal husband who takes over all the chores and permits the woman to be pure woman without any responsibilities. However, she knows deep down that this is wrong. What we're dealing with is equality; modern conveniences and appliances have helped to speed up this equality. It doesn't have to be the male any longer who washes the dishes; he refuses more and more to do so. Here the husband buys his freedom from this role by buying a dishwasher instead. That's his ransom.

Playboy: Is this a common approach in contemporary advertising?

Dichter: Yes, there are quite a few ads that make use of this appeal. I saw a recent one for mink coats which was very cleverly done: how to sell your husband on buying you a mink coat. It was supposedly addressed to women, but I read it as a man; and it was the first time I ever came close to the idea that maybe I ought to buy my wife a mink coat -- because it really told the wife what arguments to use to convince her husband that he is really successful when he can afford to buy his wife a mink coat.

Montagu: Well, I think this has to do with the fact that in America a great deal of our merchandising is based on the validation of the quality of the article by means of its external rather than its actual quality. If you can only make it look good outside, you are more likely to sell it. This, of course, has paid off on the American scene. It is part of the American value system which evaluates success by external demonstration -- by money, by the house you live in, by the car you drive. And in order to attract the female, you have to make it quite sufficiently elegant for her to feel that when she is driving the car -- alone or with her husband -- that its appearance will validate for the rest of the world her success in having acquired the kind of man who can afford this kind of car.

Playboy: On the other hand, Dr. Montagu, you state in one of your most celebrated books, The Natural Superiority of Women, that the female has not fared so well in the realm of noneconomic prerogatives: "Apart from the right to vote, American women have no more Constitutional rights than they had in 1789; in other words, medieval English common law is the law which still governs and places upon them the stigma of inferiority and bondage."

Montagu: Anything you can think of that (continued on page 133) Playboy Panel (continued from page 50 has ever been said about the Negro has been said about the female by males. This is why I often refer to females as the inferior race of the masculine world. And when the inferior race attempts to assert itself, of course, then it's called pushing, aggressive and all the other epithets hurled at it. This is the logic of people who roll you in the mud and when you come up dirty, won't have anything to do with you. This is a great loss to the whole world, and one of the sad things about our present situation: that women are not playing the role they should be playing in bringing some sort of sanity back to the masculine world. Many a man has said to me, "You should have seen this office before we had women working here; it was like a jungle." These feminine touches help civilize civilization.

Mayes: I think one reason we have a less effective government than we might have is due to the fact that fewer women are in Government than ought to be. We have token representation, that's all. We have, I believe, two women as United States Senators: Maurine Neuberger and Margaret Chase Smith. Of the hundreds and hundreds of members of the House of Representatives, only 60 are women. We've had only two women as state governors. There've been only two women in the President's cabinet since the beginning of our century: Frances Perkins and Oveta Culp Hobby. We've had only a handful of women ambassadors, Mrs. Luce having been the most important. Ruth Bryan Owen was assigned to Denmark; Eugenie Anderson also to Denmark, at a later time; Frances Willis was assigned as minister to Switzerland; Perle Mesta to Luxembourg: and, I believe, Mrs. J. Borden Harriman to Norway. What's important in any Government job is financial and economic know-how, and of course a thorough knowledge of international affairs. There is also a certain physical stamina that's required in a top Government job. Men, obviously, are stronger physically than women and probably are better equipped to stand the pressures; we must remember that seven of our Presidents have died while in office. But women in Government could do no worse than men have done. Can you imagine a women doing a worse job with Tammany Hall in New York than men have done? Can you imagine women school superintendents doing a worse job than has been done by men in this country? Women, I think, would be inclined to function in high positions with a greater sense of dignity; it would be hard to conceive of a woman in the United Nations taking off her shoe and pounding a desk with it.

Mailer: In short, the reason there's a womanization of America is that men have been directing history directly, and their navigation has brought us to the edge of disaster -- possibly even to extermination -- and so women have begun to develop a profound distrust of the supposed biological superiority of men. By biological superiority, I refer, of course, to the notion that man is the stronger animal and a wiser one.

Montagu: I think that women are becoming masculine, in the sense that they're taking over male values. And the male values are those which have brought this world to the disastrous state in which it now finds itself. The most important of these, I would say, states that you can settle arguments by force. Now women notoriously do not like to settle arguments by force; they will make every possible appeal to any other compromise, do anything but resort to force, make concessions, and so on. I think we need a great deal more of this in the world. They have not yet been completely victimized by these male values; but to a large extent they have. If you took a vote among those who wished to drop hydrogen bombs on someone or other, a large number of them would nowadays be women.

Mayes: To me that sounds like sheer nonsense. Although women will certainly participate in mass demonstrations, they are not, in this country, participants where violence is concerned. I don't believe that women in America hold that position at all. To return to the subject of government, however, my general feeling is that the conduct of a government should be no less a two-sex relationship than a marriage. The better the marriage, the greater the likelihood that the two partners will supplement each other's judgment. Opinions may be different, emotions may be mixed, but with give and take, with concessions here and adjustments there, the right solutions can be arrived at. We have every right to expect more effective government if we can achieve a somewhat more equal partnership of the sexes. No man can do more to hurt his wife than to cheat in marriage, and it may be that our male population in the main is cheating in government by considering it a one-sided affair. There shouldn't be in government, any more than in marriage, a double standard.

Playboy: In connection with this concept of partnership in public and private life, why did McCall's drop its identification as "The Magazine of Togetherness"?

Mayes: "Togetherness" implies that the magazine might be fundamentally a family magazine. It's a family magazine only to the extent that women run the family. The slogan was dropped merely to indicate that it's a magazine primarily and fundamentally for women.

Dichter: Interestingly enough, we found in some studies done for Time magazine that the modern woman does not necessarily want to be reached by a special type of women's magazine, though she still reads it. It's a step forward from the time when she didn't read at all -- or just read a cookbook or the Bible or whatever she read -- that she now has begun to read the Ladies' Home Journal, and so on. But the next step that the really emancipated woman is interested in is to read a magazine that is addressed to people rather than to men or women.

Mayes: Well, more women buy McCall's than any other magazine in the world. I assume this is so because we come closer to giving them what most interests them; and much of what interests them wouldn't be of the remotest interest to men.

Dichter: In line with that, we did some work for True magazine. We found that True appealed primarily to the male who wanted at all costs to hold onto his den and to his den psychology; that he felt very much annoyed when his woman, whatever type she was -- girlfriend, and so on -- read his publication. It's like a woman coming along on a hunting or fishing trip -- you know. What's going to be left to him, he thinks; rather than accepting the fact that he'll have a partner; that a woman as a fishing partner is as good or better than a man as a fishing partner.

Sahl: No -- let's face it. It's like when I want a friend to talk to -- no woman is available to me. They are not mature, dignified people whom you can turn to and intellectualize with; you turn to a guy. Chicks talk about being friends, but they don't know what the hell the word means. When they say "Be my friend," that means "Don't make a pass at me." That's what they're talking about. And then they start competing. Play a girl's role and don't fight guys, you know? Don't go out and look for a superior guy; a bright girl always does that, and then the minute she gets him she starts putting him down. I knew a very bright girl, and I said to her, "You always try to quell every remark instead of surrender," and she said, "Yes, and you always rise to the bait." There's a woman for you. They have no passion.

Montagu: I think the male is largely at fault. The male is in the position to do what the whites could have done to make the so-called inferior races feel that they were as good as anyone else and no longer inferior. They didn't and will probably pay the penalty for it in the long run. And, similarly, males. Instead of saying to women, "We will assist you to develop your qualities and potentialities to the best of our ability and your ability," they went ahead and said, "Sink or swim," just as we did to the Negro in the Reconstruction period. This brought women forth into all sorts of hysteric responses calculated to prove to the world they were as good as men by being like men, taking over masculine values instead of having been taught to realize their own values, their own contributions, their own potentialities as women. At this very moment, all our educational institutions are teaching girls as if they were boys. I don't know of a single institution in which they're teaching girls that girls are different from boys. They allow them to find this out in an ad hoc manner such as is customary in our culture -- but what they find out, of course, is largely wrong, and they're getting no help. We're not teaching the males what women are. We're not teaching the women what males are. We're not teaching them how to reciprocate, how to complement each other's potentialities to the optimum.

Reik: Women in general, as little girls, are no doubt envious of boys. Once I saw a little cartoon on a postcard, showing a little girl looking at her brother or another little boy, who is urinating against a tree, and the caption was, "How practical!" And something of this kind is mentioned by Dr. Spock. A little girl complains to her mother about a boy and says, "He's so fancy and I'm so plain." Meaning the comparison of the genitals. And from this has come the tendency of women to beautify themselves. That means originally that the little girl, when she discovers the difference with the little boy, is, so to speak, envious and cross with her mother about the little boy.

King: Penis envy does exist, it's true -- I think that perhaps it's not conscious, but it exists. I have no doubt of it. I have known a great many women in my life and they've all been enormously competitive on all levels, you see, particularly in the last few years. I think they do deeply and instinctively resent these outward manifestations of masculinity of which they have none.

Mailer: Well, since I've never been without a penis, I don't understand what penis envy is. I've always found that rather a ridiculous phrase, anyway; why not just say that women hate men, biologically? I mean it's simpler, it's probably truer. It might be that women hate not only men's penises, but they hate their brains, they hate their legs if they're stronger, they hate their chests if they're hairier. Why not speak of testes envy? But I do think that if penis envy exists in women today, it existed in them 200 years ago, 500 years ago, 1000 years ago, and that you can't ascribe this shift in the sexual habits and marital habits of people in America today to penis envy. You've got to ascribe it to a certain historical phenomenon; let's say the historical phenomenon allowed penis envy to express itself.

Montagu: But we are in a masculine-dominated culture, of course, and the male-dominating values assert that females envy the superior creature because he is so "superior."

Dichter: I think that the woman is afraid she may have to compete and will not be able to compete with the male. I remember a study we did many years ago -- we set up two types of women and their historical evolvement. First you had the homebody type, the woman who only felt happy at home but actually was insecure -- she was afraid of the outside world; a woman's place is in the kitchen, the rearing of children, and so on. The normal, biological approach. But the real reason why she put these things up as ideals was that she was afraid of having to face the male in the outside world on his own grounds. Then we had the other extreme -- sort of a Hegelian evolvement from thesis to antithesis: the career woman who was afraid of being just a woman, of not being able to fulfill herself -- the Rosalind Russell type in the movies, the advertising woman with the male voice, whom the pure male finally conquers and makes aware that she can fulfill herself in her biological female function. Now this career woman was a misfit who was really awfully insecure. She didn't want to be a woman. She was afraid that she might not be able to fulfill herself in her biological female function. The new type -- and this again continues my whole thesis -- that is emerging more and more is a balanced type of woman who can do both, in a sense: rediscover in a modern, creative fashion her own function, her biological function, if she wants to. She is not a submissive partner in sex, but goes as far as invited.

Reik: What is astonishing to me is that women, more and more, are taking over the active roles in sex, which was not so before. The men finally will resent it. They should. It is, so to speak, in their masculine capacity. I treated a patient who dated an actress several times, and once she invited him to her apartment for a nightcap. He came up, and she went into the other room and changed into a negligee, and then she came back in and said, "Now, look here, Oscar, about this farce; it's so unnecessary, let's go to bed." And he was absolutely disgusted. He took his hat and left her because he wanted to take over. He wanted to woo her. To conquer her. He wanted to wait.

Montagu: Well, look, I heard about such propositions 45 years ago on the part of actresses. This is nothing new, though I wouldn't take actors and actresses as good samplings in this area. I think it is true that women are taking the initiative a little more comfortably than they used to. Women have always taken the initiative; it's only the dumb male who's unaware of the fact. But now women are likely to be very much more uninhibited about it, and I think this is all to the good.

Reik: Women in the past had at least some subtlety in such matters. I remember a case in which the wife and husband both went to bed, and the wife asked her husband, "Are you tired?" And he said, "Yes." And after some minutes, she said, "Are you too tired?"

Dichter: Just as being partly dressed is more erotic than being undressed, I would rather have a woman invite me subtly rather than a "Let's go" kind of thing.

King: Anglo-Saxons don't like a buildup; an attractive woman to us is a woman who is easily accessible. This isn't true of the truly sensitive man, of course, but the majority of men like to get drunk so that they get over that first necking period as fast as possible. Well, even a cat needs a buildup. An ordinary alley-cat, no matter how much in heat she is, will let no males approach her until she is physiologically -- and who knows, maybe psychologically -- ready. Only man tries to get away from that.

Sahl: Women are so much more aggressive than they have to be. You say, "Let's talk first." But the women are cold, predatory.

King: Only 50 years ago it would have been inconceivable, even among the most learned people -- I'm talking about psychiatrists 50 years ago -- to presume that a woman is supposed to enjoy herself in her sexual relations with men. There were certain women who did, but they were considered really not quite ladies. The assumption that a woman is supposed to get something out of her sexual contact, something joyful and satisfactory, is a very recent idea. But this idea has been carried too far, too. It's become so that women are sitting like district attorneys, to see what the man can or cannot perform, and this has put men tremendously on the defensive. The tragedies of the bedroom which don't see the glossy pages of magazines are probably horrendous beyond belief. To prove her sexual prowess, woman makes no outward demonstration of her virility; while a man does or must. It's very easily discernible whether he's making it or not. And so, consequently, he's on the defensive from the word go.

Mailer: I think part of the problem is this -- it's certainly true that men are becoming more passive and women are becoming more aggressive. But I don't know that this is necessarily bad, even of itself. Because certainly, as Mr. King points out, women were miserable in many ways 50 and 100 years ago. One senses it. One senses it through all the Victorian novels and through the paintings of that period and through the music and plays. The horror is not that women are getting more aggressive and men more passive, but that this process could have been something very attractive, and it could have enriched the style, the vitality, the air of the nation. I think that America was getting ready for a renaissance. You see, all the prerequisites for a renaissance were here. The woman was beginning to attain a certain amount of leisure in this country after the second world war. A great many people were bursting into all sorts of new worlds. Children were coming out of families that hadn't even had secondary school education, and they were all going to college; so you might say there was an enormous cultural explosion in America. There also was a certain relaxation of the worst aspects of Puritan morality in sex, a certain liberation in sex. And some of it was very good. There was even, perhaps, a certain interesting self-consciousness coming into American life. People were becoming more interested in style and manner. People were becoming more interested in leading their lives with a certain dash and élan. As I say, I think that all the conditions for a renaissance were here. My guess is that during pioneer times, during times when history is beginning to be made -- whether it be the American frontier, or the early years of the Russian revolution, or in the time of the Crusades -- that men tend to be much more men and women to be women. I think that what characterizes periods of renaissance, whenever they occur in history, is that you tend to have this coming together of the sexes; to wit, women tend to become more like men and men more like women. The population creates artists in great number. The artists always have a great sensitivity to the poles of their nature. They're aware of what's masculine in them and they're aware of what's feminine in them. By this I don't mean any crude equation to homosexuality or bisexuality. One can be aware of the feminine side of one's nature without being overcome by it. What happened, I think, was that at this moment when this potential was present in American life, a whole series of things invaded American life: the Cold War invaded American life, the FBI invaded American life, the worst kind of newspaper prose invaded American life, the psychoanalysts invaded American life -- and they all have a very mechanical view of man which destroys any romantic notions, and a renaissance cannot survive without romantic conceptions. One has to believe that life is exceptional, extraordinary and glorious, that one fights the good fight and is rewarded. And all this potentiality, this incredible creative flowering in American life, for the first time in our history, was spoiled by what 1 would call these dull cancerous ways, these totalitarian ways, these authoritarian ways. Because whenever you have a creative period, it also tends to be to a slight extent an orgiastic period. The Italian Renaissance was an orgiastic period. But there was a panic on the part of the people who were running America before this orgiastic tendency -- all the people who were running America were terrified that America was going to run away with itself. So they did everything they could to deaden it.

Dichter: We recently did a study in one of the European countries on birth control and it was appalling to find out how women in this particular country still feel that sex is for the men, so they just submit to it. Quite a large number of these women are still playing the role of inferiority; there are some interesting implications there. Our study dealt with oral contraceptives and the problem that exists where the female has to take the initiative. With other contraceptives, it was the male. The real resistance against the oral was, "It isn't right, it isn't moral for me to take the initiative." It is considered more modern, more practical, more hygienic, better and more pleasure-producing, less neurosis-producing, and so on, but the real resistance against it comes from the attitude, "Well, it would mean that I'm really acknowledging sex," this even among married women. "I don't want to acknowledge sex. That's my husband's idea. He wants -- well, he's just that much of an animal." That's how they express it. "What can I do? That's how men are. So I have to submit to it." Which, to a clinical psychologist is, of course, a frightening thing to find in 1962. Because of our aura, our whole moral concept, we haven't arrived as yet at a point where equality, sexwise, has been accepted.

Montagu: I happen to have been connected from the ground up with the development of this pill and know a good deal about it. In the first place, we know very well that in Planned Parenthood in this country, for example, that it is women who come for the help, women who want the instruction, women who write and say I want some assistance here; it's very rarely the male. In fact, the big problem is getting the male interested at all. You cannot get males to take pills. They just won't. In any event, the female is always expected to protect herself. Even in monolithic societies, primitive societies, it's the women who want to take these pills, women who want the help. It's got nothing to do with the feeling that, well, they're going to be accused or accuse themselves of taking the initiative away from the male or in any substituting for what should be a masculine role.

Dichter: First of all, there's a definite relationship between the social class and the use of birth control techniques. I am talking primarily about the lower-income group -- they show resistance to the whole idea. Our statistical knowledge with the birth control association has shown that the instruction reaches primarily the middle class and upper-middle class. The real problem is reaching the lower-income--group people, for they are the ones who have many children. In every instance, however, the woman is the executor -- though I think it's by common consent.

Sahl: But they're not honest. If you ask, "Are you prepared?" --they'll say, "I'm never prepared, what do you mean?"

Mailer: Well, that's the trouble with motivational research. They come in with an intellectual bureau, you know, with little file cabinets in it. No matter what answer they get they can put that answer in a few of these little cubbyholes. It's all open and shut. There's no attempt to consider the possibility that a woman might be right -- biologically right, instinctively right -- in not wanting to use a contraceptive. Particularly if you take ignorant women, they're not going to be able to express themselves at all, and one could know for a certainty only that their reasons for not wanting to use them would be rather vague. The fact might be not that a lot of women refuse to admit to themselves that they want sex when they really do -- which is a middle-class notion entirely; an American middle-class notion, for that matter -- but on the contrary, what it might be is that they feel a deep biological aversion to having sex without the possibility of conceiving. It may be that a woman obtains a deep biological knowledge of herself and of the world by the way in which she conceives. You see, the fact that she can conceive alters the existential character of her sex. It makes it deeper. Because she's taking more of a risk. It's more dangerous, it's more responsible, it's graver. And because it's graver, it's deeper. And since it is deeper, it's better for her. It's healthier. The reason she may not want to use a contraceptive is because she senses somewhere deep within her -- in a dim fashion, no doubt -- that there's something alien to the continuation of her and her species and her family if she uses a contraceptive. And she may also feel a great shame about all this, because, after all, here's this very impressive gentleman with the eyeglasses, taking down every word she says, and there's the attitude of her husband and all the people around her, and her children about using contraceptives, and so she begins to feel that, well, maybe she's wrong. You might say that in the pit of her stomach -- living one way and her mind's living another way -- confusion is the result. And this pitiful confusion is immediately processed into statistics, which are psychotic in their lack of attachment to the biological reality.

King: You must realize that in the days of my grandfather, the story used to be told how the man was caught by his son coming out of a brothel, and the boy was quite shattered, and the father said: "Would you want me to bother your mother on account of two dollars?" This was the generally accepted concept -- that sex was a burden to the woman, and certainly not anything she looked forward to. The man was a beast and from time to time had to appease himself in this unaccountable way, you see, to still the wilderness and wildness in his psyche and in his blood, by these indulgences. And women were somehow above this or beyond this. Now you have the new woman altogether, who makes measurements and tests and keeps a statistical account of the number of times that she's required, so that the whole picture has changed completely.

Playboy: To what extent, would you say, can contemporary concern regarding the putative eminence of homosexuality -- in fashion, in arts and letters, in government, in society at large -- be attributed to the usurpation of traditional male prerogatives, social and sexual, by the "emancipated" modern woman?

King: I think that this has accounted for a great deal of homosexuality. Not that you make homosexuals that way, but I think it's a component factor -- the fact that women have become so dominant, you see. Remember that the pansies are constantly on the make because that's the terrible situation that they're in; nevertheless, they're on the make only when they feel like it. But if you're married to a woman, and this woman is sexually highly charged, you're really being tested constantly, regardless of anxieties you may have or the troubles you may have, or how unready you may be for a sexual indulgence at that particular moment. The pansies are naturally evasive and want to get away from reality and don't like a big buildup to begin with.

Sahl: You know, the women glory in homosexuals. They love them because it means disengagement: they don't become homosexuals themselves, nor do they become heterosexuals; what they do is disengage. You know, when the homosexuals take over, we men can stay and women can't. That's the irony of the whole thing. And yet women love to dress up in clothes designed by fags, and to have you look like their son in the tight suits. All the women want you to be is quiet. They want your clothes to be quiet so they can emerge. You become one of the textures in the room, along with the wallpaper, the curtains -- "Can't you do anything in good taste?" -- you know, dark navy-blue suit, black tie. The point is, about women, I used to think they wanted me to get dressed when we went out because they wanted me to conform. It's not really that complicated. They just want to get dressed to kill, and they're willing to sacrifice your individuality to do it.

King: That's an interesting phenomenon in haberdashery -- they keep selling vests with golden buttons and those strange trousers that are skintight and have no pockets, and those very tight little shirts -- the shoulderless man and all that sort of business. The people who work in these shops are obviously fairies, and they do set fashions, there's no question about it. The whole Italian look that came in a few years ago is really a pansy look, and I must say a lot of men have resisted this -- like a lot of women resisted the sack, you see. In the arts, in the theater particularly, you can get no-where unless you're a fairy, and I say this without fear that you're going to prove to me that there are two people who are not fairies. In Great Britain it's even worse, it's hardly conceivable -- but in America there are certain musicals where not only the writers and the lyricists and the composer and the director and the choreographer, of course, are all pansies, but where even the ushers are fairies.

Mailer: Indeed, even the audience, sometimes.

Montagu: In this connection, one of the interesting phenomena of our day is, of course, the Tennessee Williams type of writer. Here you see a very sensitive man, very much not in favor of women, and denigrating them altogether, putting them into a kind of pathological framework in which most women, happily, do not function. But nevertheless this man has enjoyed great success, even though people are beginning to catch on that this is largely due to the theme he is exploiting: the unhappiness which exists inevitably between the sexes because they're both wanting different things from one another, each being unable to give what the other expects and wants and even has a right to expect. This can only end in tragedy and disillusionment, disaster; they eat each other up, cannibalistically. And this is popular because it actually satisfies the needs of a great many people who want things like this, particularly, about women. Tennessee Williams and other playwrights not far removed, who see things as through a glass of darkness, are not giving a contemporary view of anything other than their own maladjustments.

King: The people who write these plays make the women out to be absolute horrors. It's no accident that in Proust, for instance, the women's names, the sweethearts, the girls that appear, all have male names like Gabrielle -- never really women's names. Consequently there isn't any question in my mind that much of the playwriting in this country is done by pansies. You know, pansies like only old and broken-down actresses, they account for the popularity of some of the most horrible women in the American theater, those broken-down old crocks who are always drunk, falling all over the place, with their hair in their faces. These are the great stars among the fairies, and they set the fashion, there's no question about it. It does affect the American theater, of course, and American thinking.

Mailer: The moment we get into homosexuality, we face two arguments: one is that there were always as many homosexuals, and they just hid under stones, and now they've come out; and the other is that there are more homosexuals today. Now I think it's impossible ever to run a statistical study that would have any real meaning, so you just have to decide which one you think is true. I think the latter is true. I think there are probably more homosexuals today than there were, say, 50 years ago. And I think the reason -- there are many, many reasons, but I think one of the most basic reasons -- would have to do with the general loss of faith in the country, faith in the meaning of one's work, faith in the notion of one's self as a man. You might say that it's a little bit harder to be a man at the moment, when the price of your knowledge is weakness. So long as men didn't know anything about latent homosexuality, they could express their latent homosexuality in a thousand ways and it never meant a thing. I mean, one's seen any number of Bavarians in Munich, let's say, sitting around hugging one another and feeling one another's knees over a lot of beer drinking, and it never occurs to them that this is a rampant expression of latent homosexuality. Americans can't do that, so a perfectly natural, pleasant kind of latent homosexuality can't be expressed. Therefore the amount of homosexuality in them is intensified. They become self-conscious about homosexuality because the outlets have been destroyed or blocked up. But that is just a small part of it; I think the critical thing is that when a man can't find any dignity in his work, he loses virility. I have always believed that masculinity is not something that is given to you. It may be aided by your physical constitution; if one is born to a very strong father, there is perhaps a greater potentiality to be very virile. But, of course, one knows of any number of homosexuals who are the sons of very strong fathers, who are completely crushed by having very strong fathers, and they end up very weak men.

Reik: There are, of course, other factors in homosexuality. For instance, it is customary at a certain age for the little boy not to play with girls but only with other boys. There comes a certain estrangement between the sexes, which has to be. Among my cases is an exception, a boy who grew up amongst women, sisters, mother and never saw much of other boys, so he played with the little girls; this resulted later on, of course, in a kind of disposition to homosexuality. In general, we say as a pedagogic principle that the father should be a bit more disciplinarian toward a boy, and more easy and tolerant toward a girl; while the mother should be more yielding and kinder toward the boy, but much more critical toward the little girl. When the mother is a very severe disciplinarian to her little boy, and the father is meek and mild, he attracts the boy and the mother pushes him away. There are others, of course, but this is a certain factor in the genesis of homosexuality.

Mailer: So that essentially what it comes down to is an existential series of victories and defeats. In other words, masculinity is not something one is born with, but something one gains. And one gains it by winning small battles with honor. I'm saying that because there is very little honor left in American life, there is a certain built-in tendency to destroy masculinity in American men. I think the mass media, for instance -- television first, movies second, magazines third and newspapers running no poor fourth at all, because they're all so hideous -- tend to destroy virility slowly and steadily. They give people an unreal view of life. They give people a notion that American life is easier than it really is, less complex and more rewarding. The result is that Americans, as they emerge from adolescence into young manhood, are very much like green soldiers being sent into difficult combat. One of the military maxims that makes a lot of sense says that you can't send untried men into a difficult place, because even though they may be brave, they haven't had enough experience to deal with the brutal complexity, the sudden attack of a war experience. If you do send them into a bad place, almost always they break and run. I think this is quite similar to what happens as a young man emerges from the mass media which have been his educator much more than the schools -- because the schools, particularly in the small towns, are unspeakably insipid in what they teach. I mean, no one ever comes within a mile of a good novel in the average small-town high school English course. But at any rate, these people emerge into adult life callow, untried, green and sentimental. And when they realize that the world is much worse than they've been prepared for, they are usually hurt, crucially, and they can lose a lot of their virility just in these first early skirmishes where they get wounded, sometimes even crippled -- where they wouldn't even have been crippled at all if they had been harder and tougher and had a better sense of what it was all about.

Playboy: Columnist Joe Hyams recently philosophized bleakly on the prospects of the changing movie hero. "I often wonder," he said, "what historians 50 years hence will deduce when they sit in a projection room examining the films of today and our heroes, and comparing them with the films and heroes of an earlier time. For our gods of the screen have changed, as has our culture. We no longer worship the man of authority. Instead, we tend to idealize the passive protagonist, the undynamic man." The same appellation has been applied to the ineffectual TV situation-comedy father and to the Maggie and Jiggs, Blondie and Dagwood type of henpecked comicstrip buffoon. How have these bland and blundering male entertainment heroes affected and reflected the image of womanized man?

King: They're depicted as sheep; they always get straightened out by the children and the wife. You wonder how the hell they ever made the money to support these rats.

Sahl: On television, you swing if you're single, and you're an idiot if you're married. If you're a woman and you're married, you're not smart, you're just cunning and treacherous. It's the traditional role for the guy to be impotent, and for the woman to outsmart the guy.

Bernays: In the comic strips, you see, most of the cartoonists are men. I don't know a woman cartoonist, just offhand. Neither do you. So that this may be one way of getting rid of male guilt feelings about holding women in thralldom; they may be purging themselves by showing the man as bumbling.

Reik: I would say that these caricatures are a kind of unconscious mockery of the correlation between the masculinization of women and the feminization of men.

King: That's got nothing to do with it, at least on television. They simply know what the sponsor's going to buy. There was never an art form, or potential art form, in the history of the world so bedeviled by the idiots who pay for it as TV is. No matter who those shlunks were who made movies, they had certain aspirations, and once the picture was decided upon, only the mediocrity of the people concerned could spoil it. But now, the manufacturer of the toilet paper or the gargle or the underarm distillate or whatever the hell he sells -- and his family, and his apple-cheeked children -- everybody can butt into TV. These people want not only the lowest common denominator, but the lowest possible denominator that can be anticipated.

Montagu: Nevertheless, the people who create these characters are simply putting down in comic form, or any other form, what they've observed around them. Often they observe long before the academic critics come upon the scene to take over with a more critical analysis of what is transpiring before everyone's eyes.

Playboy: For example?

Montagu: Well, what I think is the really new phenomenon now--in comics and real life--is the bachelor-career-woman-mother-wife, using all those terms in their really operative meanings. She's a bachelor career-woman, bachelor mother and bachelor wife. And her attributes toward her family are largely the function of her desire to become a success in the world in which men are successes. She has the attitudes and mind of a bachelor, and she has a husband and children only because part of the success that she must ornament herself with, in order to demonstrate it to herself and others, is that she must have a husband and children and a family and a home. But she has no real interest in them. And consequently they suffer.

King: Let's face it. We're surrounded by a world in which the women are becoming dominant and the men are not -- they are losing their gender prerogatives.

Playboy: In the 1954 edition of his explosive magnum opus, Generation of Vipers, Philip Wylie updated his ominous 1942 prophecy of creeping Momism with an even darker forecast: "When we agreed upon the American Ideal Woman, the Dream Girl of National Adolescence, the Queen of Bedpan Week, the Pin-Up, the Glamor-Puss -- we insulted women and disenfranchised millions from love. The hen-harpy is but the Cinderella chick come, home to roost: the taloned, cackling residue of burnt-out puberty in a land that has no use for mature men or women. Mom still commands. While she exists, she will exploit the little 'sacredness' we have given motherhood as a cheap-holy compensation for our degradation of women; she will remain irresponsible and unreasoning -- for what we have believed of her is reckless and untrue. She will act the tyrant -- because she is a slave. ... We are deep in the predicted nightmare now, and Mom sits on its decaying throne -- who bore us, who will soon, most likely, wrap civilization in Mom's final, tender garment: a shroud." Does the future of American womanhood -- and manhood -- really bode so ill, gentlemen, or can we hope for a gradual process of mutual adjustment which will place the sexes on a basis of equilibrium in which each is aware of -- and respects and understands -- that difference proverbially implied in the Frenchman's cry of "Vive la difference!"?

Mailer: I believe there is a biological tide to history. One doesn't attempt to argue with low or high tide when one is at the seashore, but one does speak of a pleasant sun, or a dirty sea, or a strong surf or choppy surf. What I think we've got now is a dirty choppy surf. It comes probably from a failure of nerve, from an unwillingness to face up to the fact that this country's entering into the most desperate, nightmarish time in its history. Unless everyone in America gets a great deal braver, everything is going to get worse -- including the womanization of America.

Montagu: I certainly do not foresee the drifting of America or any other country into a matriarchy. There never was a matriarchal society, if by matriarchal we understand the government of a society conducted by women. The revolutionary events I do foresee involve a restoration of the equilibrium between the sexes, a clarification of the hopelessly confused male, female, parental and sexual functions in our culture, a rather more harmonious development of the complementary roles which men and women should play in the realization of their own and each other's shared and separate potentialities.

Playboy: Thank you, gentlemen, that is about all we have time for -- and you seem pretty well to have stated your positions. Though there has been some difference of opinion, there seems to be a general feeling among you that the womanization of America is, indeed, a fact -- to varying degrees. Some of you see benign elements in it, others see it as nefarious. There are those who feel it is at least partially the fault of the men, and none of you seems completely happy with it. Therefore, it might be safe to assume from what we have been discussing that neither men nor women are separately happy about the relationships of the sexes in American society today. In fact, we seem rather to have stressed the blurring of male-female differences.

It seems apparent, too -- tacitly, from the content of your remarks and their direction -- that womanization is associated in most of your minds with the marital situation. The exception is Mort Sahl, the only one among you overtly concerned about what he sees as a baleful contamination of romance and courtship which -- in his inimitably tangential way -- he decries as the womanizing (that is, anti feminizing) of girls as well as wives. Implicit in his viewpoint is the suggestion that girls today are both competitive and demanding, emotionally and psychologically on the take. Does it not seem odd -- at the least -- that marriage, which has traditionally been the acceptance of loving, honoring and obeying, now appears to be the source of an aggressively domineering womanhood? That is a rhetorical question: our time and space are running out.

But before we close, perhaps it may be interesting to you to be apprised of another aspect of this situation -- or problem. It is one that we, here at playboy, may see a bit more clearly than most. There is a new spirit on the land, evident among our own readership, which would suggest that the younger, urban people of this country are coming to a new awareness of both masculinity and femininity. That is, the men are increasingly aware that one can be masculine without being hairy-chested and muscular; the women, that one can be intelligent and sensitive -- and witty and wise -- and at the same time completely feminine. Perhaps this is a new wave; perhaps it is merely a growing expressiveness -- an acting out at last of latent, pent-up feeling -- in the both sexes. As our nation becomes emancipated from the notion of associating sex with sin, rather than with romance, and as young people are increasingly freed of feeling guilty about a play period in their lives before settling down to marital maturity, so the attitudes of the sexes may well become more healthy toward each other, may acquire a mutuality and mutual appreciativeness which does not entail the obliteration of differences, but rather heightens their pleasures and allows individuals of each of the sexes a fuller and more natural development of psyche and spirit, mind and body.