Oh, god--she's 53 years old and can't resist the impulse to tell young whippersnappers on the Internet how they can't possibly understand the greatness of Henry Miller (who really loved and respected women! Uh huh! Really!), or that sex "isn't always lovey-dovey and pretty and sweet and politically correct."

And explaining that "No, no! You don't get it! It's a metaphor!" on weeping_cock, of all places? [facepalm] I can hear my neighbor's 13-year-old daughter roll her eyes and say "This is why old people don't belong on the Internet" from here.

Yes, Miller broke new literary ground with Tropic of Cancer. And like any novel that does something truly...well...novel, it's an important book. It made other, better books possible.

And yes, some contemporary readers might think Miller's work is still a joy to read. Personally, I find his rampant misogyny and reduction of women to parts (literally cunts) thoroughly repulsive, and I have no idea where deborahkla gets the idea that he loved and respected women (beyond, perhaps, Anais Nin). For all the raw frankness of his writing about sex, it's inescapable that he was terrified and resentful of women, while at the same time he desperately needed them (and the more passive and submissive, the better).

Reading her apologia for Henry Miller gave me flashbacks of a 20th century American lit class I took ca. 1988 that was all Miller and Bellow and Hemingway and Mailer and other members of the He-Man Literary Women-Hater's Club. Just...EEW. NO.

...

BRB, gone to get the mop...