IF FREEDOM is the American dream, prison is too often the American reality. Most kids in this country spend the best years of their lives in schools with bars across the windows. Then they graduate, and get locked into nine-to-five jobs or military service or marriages that frequently end in jail-breaks. Even when they look for heroes and heroines, they tend to choose people who speak from behind bars. The young turn to David Harris, Angela Davis, or Cleaver; the middle-aged look to Johnny Cash, and the old, bereft of heroes, sit out the last years of their lives in the jails of homes for the aged.

Two of the loudest voices in this country are convinced that the prison which confines us goes beyond the military or the job rat-race. Both voices seem to agree that the prison should be called sex, but after that they diverge radically. One voice (really, many voices), the voice of the Women's Liberation Movement, has been making itself heard for over a year now. But until recently, the voice of the ideological opposition has only rumbled intermittently on talk shows and in Playboy interviews. Finally, Harper's magazine has allowed Norman Mailer to speak his piece on life inside the prison.

Mailer is at least honest about the corner of the jail in which he sits. He admits his biases quite plainly. "His sympathies," he tells us, "remained with his own sex." If this avowal seems selfish, remember that the first Principle of the New York Radical Women, a liberationist group started about a year and a half ago, is similarly one-sided. They declared in their initial affidavit, "We take the woman's side in everything."

Loyalty to one's own sex being, of course, not only natural, but even laudable, it's certainly not to be criticized either in Mailer or in the New York Radical Women. But as loyalty degenerates into chauvinism, it begins to intrude on compassion for the opposite sex. Thus, when Mailer's point of view evolves out of sexual loyalty, out of his concern for the fragility and vulnerability of his own sex, it is usually tenable. But when it seems based on male-chauvinism, or even worse, on Mailer-chauvinism, when sexual self-interest is used to evade recognition of comparable needs in women, his point of view becomes a lot shakier.

Apart from the priorities of his sexual sympathy, Mailer's other avowed bias is his reverence for the question of women and sex and the fear it inspires in him. "No thought was so painful as the idea that sex had meaning," he tells us. "For give meaning to sex and one was the prisoner of sex." For Mailer, "giving meaning to sex" entails emphasizing the differences between the sexes-their desires and their roles. It also means exploring (and sometimes exploiting) the perplexities of sexuality-Since these two concerns build the walls of Mailer's prison, they must be surveyed without delay in order for us to decide whether or not the walls can be scaled.

FOR A WRITER with an imagination as many faceted as the Hope Diamond, Norman Mailer is a disappointment when he starts thinking about the role of the sexes. Not only a disappointment, but a damn fool. His lack of ingenuity in realizing the possibilities for the energetic woman in this society or the next is only overshadowed by his stubbornness in clinging to female role-models that would seem Victorian to his Mother, God bless her and probably fascist to his ex-wives, God bless them, all four of them.

Try as he might, and indeed there are moments when Mailer certainly does try, he can't seem to rid himself of the preconception that the Archetypal American Woman is The Dutiful Little Homemaker. He begins the piece in Harber's, in fact, by recreating a scenario intended to prove just how sympathetic he is to the plight of the Sink-Chained American Woman.

The scenario stars Norman himself as Dutiful Little Homemaker and features our bold hero trudging off to the Maine woods for six weeks, five of his six children in tow, so that the soul of eagerness, he can "get some idea of what it might be like to raise a family." But he does find himself a little help, it seems; a few bit players are added to the cast: "a good Maine woman" who does the cleaning and laundry, and his sister who comes up for two weeks, and finally, as by now you may yourself have gathered, his "dearest old love," his rainy day woman.

Then, having convinced himself that this bed of roses simulates the daily drudgery of the American homemaker, he admits gaily, "Yes, he could be a housewife for six weeks, even for six years if it came to it!" Now picture our hero taking a greasy, soapy hand out of the dishwater to pat himself on the back.

But his next admission takes him out of the dishpan and into the fire. For though he can make himself believe that in a pinch he could become a housewife, honesty forces him to add, "But he did not question what he would have to give up forever."

So, after all, Mailer does realize the tremendous discrepancy between the scope of a man's activity and the scope of a woman's in our society. But he attributes this discrepancy to the preeminence of the woman's desire to function as wife and mother over any other life-style she'd ever want.

In an interview several years ago, Mailer made a casual remark which he repeats several times throughout the essay. It would not be accepted casually today. "The prime responsibility of a woman," Norman Mailer said years ago and is still repeating, "probably is to be on earth long enough to find the best mate for herself, and conceive children who will improve the species."

If only "probably" carried at least some of the weight of the argument! If only "probably" carried the weight of the women who don't want to get married, or don't care to have children, or would rather loose their creative spirits on a symphony or a novel, or indeed, run away to Israel and join the Army. But given Mailer's novels, his journalism, his marriages and his latest essay, "probably" not

For Mailer's rigidity about the roles of the sexes is sorrowfully consistent. In his elaborate and egocentric scheme of things, men are always the aggressors, the activists, the world-beaters. And though he concedes (whimpering in a spasm of pain and pleasure, to be sure) that some women are strong, even tyrannical, still, he's convinced, most women are the subordinates, the stay-at-homes, the steady salt of the earth.

Thus it's not at all surprising that one of Mailer's sharpest criticisms of Kate Millett is that "she has a mind like a flatiron, which is to say a totally masculine mind." He reacts against Millett and her feminist tome, Sexual Politics, on an immediate, instinctual level, the way he might balk if a woman sauntered into an all-male sauna in which he was sweating and luxuriating. He seems to feel instinctively that Millett simply doesn't belong where she roams, that she's misguided and out of her ken. His bafflement over another liberationist, a female pamphleteer he mentions early in the article, doesn't subside quickly. "Women everywhere," he sighs, "were certainly learning how to write on many a male subject."