Into the Underbrush

Not long ago on Open End, that antic situation comedy in which David Susskind subs for Lucy, Pamela Mason observed that a man’s unexpendability around the house ends with impregnation; after that, he might as well follow his natural tendency to “crack up and disappear into the underbrush.” (Although she had been asked—along with Shelley Winters, Richard Breen, Dr. Frank Baxter and Steve Allen—to discuss National Purpose, the colloquy kept veering dizzily toward The Roles of the Sexes in a Changing World.) Because I considered Mrs. Mason’s position fairly unexceptionable, I was both startled and enlightened when everyone else adopted, undeviatingly, the straight McCall’s line. “You’ve rendered the male impotent,” protested Susskind, once again exhibiting his sure grasp of the issues, and Breen delivered the majority decision by ruling that “the only sensible dictum for governing society is that a woman’s place is in the home and so is a man’s.”

A Sense of Values, by Sloan Wilson. Harper, $4.95

JD

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Joan Didion

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Not long ago on Open End, that antic situation comedy in which David Susskind subs for Lucy, Pamela Mason observed that a man’s unexpendability around the house ends with impregnation; after that, he might as well follow his natural tendency to “crack up and disappear into the underbrush.” (Although she had been asked—along with Shelley Winters, Richard Breen, Dr. Frank Baxter and Steve Allen—to discuss National Purpose, the colloquy kept veering dizzily toward The Roles of the Sexes in a Changing World.) Because I considered Mrs. Mason’s position fairly unexceptionable, I was both startled and enlightened when everyone else adopted, undeviatingly, the straight McCall’s line. “You’ve rendered the male impotent,” protested Susskind, once again exhibiting his sure grasp of the issues, and Breen delivered the majority decision by ruling that “the only sensible dictum for governing society is that a woman’s place is in the home and so is a man’s.”

A Sense of Values, by Sloan Wilson. Harper, $4.95