Mooncup that sounds great. I have never had my hands on a copy of said book but this may be the final push that will get me there.
"Mailer married his second wife, Adele Morales, in 1954. They had two daughters, Danielle and Elizabeth. On one occasion Mailer drunkenly stabbed her twice with a penknife, puncturing her pericardium and necessitating emergency surgery.[24] His wife would not press charges, and he later pleaded guilty to a reduced charge of assault, and was given a suspended sentence.[25][26] While in the short term, Morales made a physical recovery, in 1997 she published a memoir of their marriage entitled The Last Party, which recounted her husband stabbing her at a party and the aftermath. This incident has been a focal point for feminist critics of Mailer, who point to themes of sexual violence in his work.[27]" (wiki, obv)
From a Guardian article:
"For many, though, the writerly feuds - and even the writing - were a distraction from the matter for which Mailer has incurred more opprobrium than any other in his career as a literary celebrity: his battles with feminism. "In the 1970s," Gornick recalls, "women in their 20s and 30s knew what he meant, at whose permanent expense 'feeling alive' was to be had. And when we said so, out loud and in print, Mailer turned vicious. The anti-feminism was pathological, a thing we turned away from in fear as well as rage."
It was never entirely clear from Mailer's goading public pronouncements - most famously, that "all women should be locked in cages" - just how much he was in earnest, and whether they mattered less if he wasn't. Today, he pleads misquotation, misunderstanding, and the bandwagon-jumping of publicity-seeking feminists.
"I was on a television show once with Orson Welles, and at a certain point he got very pious about women - Orson Welles, who was married to Rita Hayworth, of all people! And so I made a totally stupid remark. I said, 'Oh, come on, Orson, women are low sloppy beasts'. Now I was going to add, with a great twinkle, and they are also goddesses . But you make a remark like that and you don't get any further. Well, the feminists took over. They used that remark and ran with it. They enjoyed that remark... of course, part of your character is dictated by the nature of your foe, and a lot of those early feminists were just godawful people."
Altogether unexpectedly, he turns out to be a new convert to the works of John Gray: "People have been known to say that men and women come from different planets, and were landed here, and that to me is as reasonable a hypothesis as an other.""
Mailer on Machismo:
"In the 30 books that followed The Naked and the Dead, machismo was never far from the centre of Mailer's preoccupations. That must lend a special poignancy to growing older and more frail? He laughs, a gritty chuckle. "I'm laughing because I'll be 79 in a coupla days - machismo is that faint zephyr I can still barely hear on the other side of the hill. But listen: machismo is not the easiest cloak to wear, the easiest role to assume in life. Machismo is a ladder, and there's always a guy who's more macho than you coming up that ladder. I've never had any illusion that I was high up that slope, and it's a desperate slope, because if you get to the top, you're dead. Macho means taking the dares that come your way, and if you take every dare that comes your way, sooner or later you're gonna be dead. So I'm quite happy to have machismo behind me now. There are pleasures in being macho, but there are great anxieties. It was a great load to carry. I was never macho enough to enjoy being macho. I don't know. I'd fight if it came to it, but people don't go looking for fights with men my age.""