CHANGES.(The Talk of the Town)(feminism past and present)

One of the achievements of the feminist movement of the late sixties and early seventies, along with the winning of reproductive freedoms and the right to a paycheck equivalent to a man's, was the introduction of the orgasm as a proper topic for conversation. In these strenuously sexualized times, it may be hard to remember an era when to speak of erotic climax amounted to a political act; but "Town Bloody Hall," a documentary by D. A. Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus that chronicles a 1971 debate on sexual politics between Norman Mailer, Germaine Greer, Diana Trilling, Jill Johnston, and Jacqueline Ceballos, and which was screened recently at the National Arts Club as a benefit for the Veteran Feminists of America, serves as a reminder of that heady and urgent time.

During the 1971 debate, which was conducted at Town Hall before an audience comprising New York's most sparkling intelligentsia, Ceballos, then the president of now, sneered at the advertising industry's representation of domestic womanhood: "She gets an orgasm when she gets the shiny floor!" Greer, who had recently published "The Female Eunuch," was queenly in a sleeveless black crepe dress and fox fur stole, cutting off a question from Anatole Broyard about what the sexually liberated woman might actually want from a man with the deflating line "Whatever it is they're asking for, honey, it's not for you." Johnston, wearing tight jeans, a denim jacket, and a subversive smirk, delivered a free-form poem that stated, "All women are lesbians except those who don't know it," and was promptly knocked to the floor in an enthusiastic embrace by two female audience members who seemed to know it quite well. Mailer, whose essay "The Prisoner of Sex" had just appeared in Harper's, bullied his fellow-panelists--"Come on, Jill, be a lady" was his response to Johnston's anarchic threesome--and made a remarkable offer to his detractors: "If you wish me to act the clown, I will take out my modest little Jewish dick and put it on the table and we can all spit and laugh." Meanwhile, Diana Trilling, lofty in thick-rimmed glasses, distanced herself from her more radical sisters by announcing, "I could hope we would also be free to have such orgasms as, in our individual complexities, we happen to be capable of."

Ceballos now presides over the Veteran Feminists of America, an organization of women's-rights advocates whose eyesight and hair color may not be what they used to be but whose commitment to the ...