(Footnote continues overleaf)
If an idea is stupid, presumably it is stupid whether the one who
articulates it is male or female. But that is not the case. Women,
undereducated as a class, do not have to read Aeschylus to know
that a man plants the sperm, the child, the son; women are the soil;
she brings forth the human he created; he is the originator, the
father of life. Women can have their own provincial, moralistic
sources for this knowledge: clergy, movies, gym teachers. The
knowledge is common knowledge: respected in the male writers
because the male writers are respected; stupid in women because
women are stupid as a condition of birth. Women articulate received knowledge and are laughed at for doing so. But male writers with the same received ideas are acclaimed as new, brilliant, interesting, even rebellious, brave, facing the world of sin and sex forthrightly. Women have ignorant, moralistic prejudices; men have ideas. To call this a double standard is to indulge in cruel euphemism. This gender system of evaluating ideas is a sledgehammer that bangs female intelligence to a pulp, annihilating it. Mailer and
Lawrence have taken on the world always; they knew they had a
right to it; their prose takes that right for granted; it is the gravitational field in which they move. Marabel Morgan and Anita Bryant come to the world as middle-aged women and try to act in it; of
course they are juvenile and imprecise in style, ridiculous even.
Both Mailer and Lawrence have written volumes that are as ridiculous, juvenile, despite what they can take for granted as men, despite their sometimes mastery of the language, despite their
(Footnote continued from previous page)
one of the reasons that homosexuals go through such agony when they’re
around 40 or 50 is that their lives have nothing to do with procreation.
They realize with great horror that all that wonderful sex they had in the
past is gone— where is it now? They’ve used up their being” (The Presidential Papers, p. 144). “It’s better to commit rape than masturbate” (The Presidential Papers, p. 140). “what if the seed be already a being? So desperate that it / claws, bites, cuts and lies, / burns, and betrays / desperate to capture the oven. .
(“I Got Two Kids and Another in the O ven, ” Advertisements fo r Myself [Ne
w York: Perigee, 1981], p. 397).
genuine accomplishments, despite the beauty of a story or novel.
But they are not called stupid even when they are ridiculous.
When the ideas of Lawrence cannot be distinguished from the
ideas of Morgan, either both are smart or both are stupid; and
sim ilarly with M ailer and Bryant. Only the women, however, deserve and get our contempt. Are Anita Bryant’s ideas pernicious?
Then so are Norman M ailer’s. Are Marabel Morgan’s ideas side-
slappingly funny? Then so are D. H. Lawrence’s.
A woman must keep her intelligence small and timid to survive.
Or she must hide it altogether or hide it through style. Or she
must go mad like clockwork to pay for it. She w ill try to find the
nice w ay to exercise intelligence. But intelligence is not ladylike.
Intelligence is full of excesses. Rigorous intelligence abhors sentim entality, and women must be sentimental to value the dreadful silliness of the men around them. Morbid intelligence abhors the
cheery sunlight of positive thinking and eternal sweetness; and
women must be sunlight and cheery and sweet, or the woman
could not bribe her w ay with smiles through a day. W ild intelligence abhors any narrow world; and the world of women must stay narrow, or the woman is an outlaw. No woman could be
Nietzsche or Rimbaud without ending up in a whorehouse or lo-
botomized. A ny vital intelligence has passionate questions, aggressive answers: but women cannot be explorers; there can be no Lewis and Clark of the female mind. Even restrained intelligence is
restrained not because it is timid, as women must be, but because
it is cautiously weighing impressions and facts that come to it from
an outside that the timid dare not face. A woman must please, and
restrained intelligence does not seek to please; it seeks to know
through discernment. Intelligence is also ambitious: it always
wants more: not more being fucked, not more pregnancy; but more
of a bigger world. A woman cannot be ambitious in her own right
without also being damned.
We take girls and send them to schools. It is good of us, because
girls are not supposed to know anything much, and in many other
societies girls are not sent to school or taught to read and write. In
our society, such a generous one to women, girls are taught some
facts, but not inquiry or the passion of knowing. Girls are taught
in order to make them compliant: intellectual adventurousness is
drained, punished, ridiculed out of girls. We use schools first to
narrow the girl’s scope, her curiosity, then to teach her certain
skills, necessary to the abstract husband. Girls are taught to be
passive in relation to facts. Girls are not seen as the potential originators of ideas or the potential searchers into the human condition.
Good behavior is the intellectual goal of a girl. A girl with intellectual drive is a girl who has to be cut down to size. An intelligent girl is supposed to use that intelligence to find a smarter husband.
Simone de Beauvoir settled on Sartre when she determined that he
was smarter than she was. In a film made when both were old,
toward the end of his life, Sartre asks de Beauvoir, the woman
with whom he has shared an astonishing life of intellectual action
and accomplishment: how does it feel, to have been a literary lady?
Carolina Maria de Jesus wrote in her diary: “Everyone has an
ideal in life. Mine is to be able to read. ” 5 She is ambitious, but it is
a strange ambition for a woman. She wants learning. She wants
the pleasure of reading and writing. Men ask her to marry but she
suspects that they will interfere with her reading and writing.
They will resent the time she takes alone. They will resent the
focus of her attention elsewhere. They will resent her concentration and they will resent her self-respect. They will resent her pride in herself and her pride in her unmediated relationship to a
larger world of ideas, descriptions, facts. Her neighbors see her
poring over books, or with pen and paper in hand, amidst the garbage and hunger of the fa vela . Her ideal makes her a pariah: her desire to read makes her more an outcast than if she sat in the