Cynthia Ozick on dipping Norman Mailer’s balls in ink

From an essay by Charlie Tyson on the writer Cynthia Ozick:

If you’ve read this far, you’ve probably seen the clip I’m referring to. The 1979 documentary Town Bloody Hall captures a debate on women’s liberation held in 1971, in Manhattan, pitting Norman Mailer against a panel of feminist thinkers. The starriest figures of the 1970s New York literati were in attendance that night; and it’s Ozick, asking a question from the floor, who scores the film’s most perceptible hit against macho Mailer.

Ozick begins by filleting the mythic pretensions of Mailer’s anti-feminist book Prisoner of Sex, then recently published. “The women here, and particularly Miss Sontag, have been talking in terms of, uh, justice, which is the basis of civilization,” Ozick says. But “a sacerdotal sexual transcendentalist priest like Mr. Mailer,” who preaches a return to the primal religion of the phallus, naturally has other concerns in view. 

All this is prelude to her devastating one-liner. “This question, I have been fantasizing it for many, many years,” she says. “This is my moment to live out a fantasy. Mr. Mailer, in Advertisements for Myself you said, quote, ‘A good novelist can do without everything but the remnant of his balls.’” 

“For years and years, I’ve been wondering, Mr. Mailer, when you dip your balls in ink, what color ink is it?”

The auditorium howls with laughter.

It’s a moment worth celebrating, a snapshot of her erudition, daring, and verbal inventiveness. But it’s worth asking: why is this clip what so many envision when they think of her?