An intriguing story attends the publication of Stanley and the Women (1984). It could not find a publisher in the United States and the Times Literary Supplement's American correspondent supplies an account. ‘I shall state the obvious and say that there are influential feminists who believe that the reading public should be spared certain fictions … three [of the potential publishers] candidly excused the rescinding of such offers by reference to objections from feminists on the editorial board’ (TLS, ‘American Notes’, November 1984). The novel eventually found a home with an imprint of Simon and Schuster.

The TLS report is partly speculation, but it is underpinned by the fact that Amis's usual American publishers were reluctant to take on a book that many reviewers found to be an outright celebration of misogyny. In 1984 the women's movement had become an active constituent of literary criticism, an association begun with books such as Kate Millett 's Sexual Politics (1970). Millett argued that male authors, specifically Lawrence, Miller, Mailer and Genet, had in their representation of male and female characters reproduced the normative values and expectations of a patriarchal society. Millett did not suggest that their works should be banned or ignored; rather that the reader should respect the literary credentials of the author while recognizing that these carry the ideological burden of male assumptions, prejudices and fantasies. John Carey suggests that with Amis's novel this is an impossible ideal.

According to Millett, good literature cannot alter the prejudices and inequalities of the society which formed its (male) author and from which it draws its material. According to Carey, Amis has written a novel which deliberately and calculatingly promotes the worst features of this society. Consequently, it should not be treated as literature but as a malicious polemic which exploits its literary vehicle.