action; so are writing, composing, painting; creative intelligence
can be used in the material world to make products of itself. But
there is more to creative intelligence than what it produces. Creative intelligence is searching intelligence: it demands to know the world, demands its right to consequence. It is not contemplative:
creative intelligence is too ambitious for that; it almost always announces itself. It may commit itself to the pure search for knowledge or truth, but almost always it wants recognition, influence, or power; it is an accomplishing intelligence. It is not satisfied by recognition of the personality that carries it; it wants respect in its own right, respect for itself. Sometimes this respect can be shown
toward its product. Sometimes, when this intelligence exercises itself in the more ephemeral realm of pure talk or mundane action, respect for creative intelligence must be shown through respect for
the person manifesting it. Women are consistently and system atically denied the respect creative intelligence requires to be sustained: painfully denied it, cruelly denied it, sadistically denied it.
Women are not supposed to have creative intelligence, but when
they do they are supposed to renounce it. If they want the love of
men, without which they are not really women, they had better
not hold on to an intelligence that searches and that is action in the
world; thought that has consequences is inimical to fettered femininity. Creative intelligence is not animaclass="underline" being fucked and reproducing w ill not satisfy it, ever; and creative intelligence is not decorative— it is never merely ornamental as, for instance, upper-class women however well educated must be. To stay a woman in
the male-supremacist meaning of that word, women must renounce
creative intelligence: not just verbally renounce it, though women
do that all the time, but snuff it out in themselves at worst, keep it
timid and restrained at best. The price for exercising creative intelligence for those born female is unspeakable suffering. “All things on earth have their price, ” wrote Olive Schreiner, “and for truth
we pay the dearest. We barter it for love and sym pathy. The road
to honour is paved with thorns; but on the path to truth, at every
step you set your foot down on your heart. ” 11 Truth is the goal of
creative intelligence, whatever its kind and path; tangling with the
world is tangling with the problem of truth. One confronts the
muck of the world, but one’s search is for the truth. The particular
truth or the ultimate character of the truth one finds is not the
issue. The intrusion of an intelligent, creative self into the world to
find the truth is the issue. There is nothing here for women, except
intimidation and contempt. In isolation, in private, a woman may
have pleasure from the exercise of creative intelligence, however
restrained she is in the exercise of it; but that intelligence will have
to be turned against herself because there is no further, complex,
human world in which it can be used and developed. Whatever of
it leaks out will entitle all and sundry to criticize her womanhood,
which is the sole identity available to her; her womanhood is deficient, because her intelligence is virile.
“Why have women passion, intellect, moral activity. . . ” Florence Nightingale asked in 1852, “and a place in society where no one of these three can be exercised? ” 12 When she referred to moral
activity, she did not mean moralism; she meant moral intelligence.
Moralism is the set of rules learned by rote that keeps women
locked in, so that intelligence can never meet the world head on.
Moralism is a defense against experiencing the world. Moralism is
the moral sphere designated to women, who are supposed to learn
the rules of their own proper, circumscribed behavior by rote.
Moral intelligence is active; it can only be developed and refined by
being used in the realm of real and direct experience. Moral activity is the use of that intelligence, the exercise of moral discernment. Moralism is passive: it accepts the version of the world it has been taught and shudders at the threat of direct experience. Moral
intelligence is characterized by activity, movement through ideas
and history: it takes on the world and insists on participating in the
great and terrifying issues of right and wrong, tenderness and cruelty. Moral intelligence constructs values; and because those values are exercised in the real world, they have consequences. There is
no moral intelligence that does not have real consequences in a real
world, or that is sim ply and passively received, or that can live in a
vacuum in which there is no action. Moral intelligence cannot be
expressed only through love or only through sex or only through
domesticity or only through ornamentation or only through obedience; moral intelligence cannot be expressed only through being fucked or reproducing. Moral intelligence must act in a public
world, not a private, refined, rarefied relationship with one other
person to the exclusion of the rest of the world. Moral intelligence
demands a nearly endless exercise of the ability to make decisions:
significant decisions; decisions inside history, not peripheral to it;
decisions about the meaning of life; decisions that arise from an
acute awareness of one’s own m ortality; decisions on which one can
honestly and w illfully stake one’s life. Moral intelligence is not the
stuff of which cunts are made. Moralism is the cunt’s effort to find
some basis for self-respect, a pitiful gesture toward being human at
which men laugh and for which women pity other women.
There is also, possibly, sexual intelligence, a human capacity for
discerning, manifesting, and constructing sexual integrity. Sexual
intelligence could not be measured in numbers of orgasms, erections, or partners; nor could it show itself by posing painted clitoral lips in front of a camera; nor could one measure it by the
number of children born; nor would it manifest as addiction. Sexual intelligence, like any other kind of intelligence, would be active and dynam ic; it would need the real world, the direct experience of
it; it would pose not buttocks but questions, answers, theories,
ideas— in the form of desire or act or art or articulation. It would
be in the body, but it could never be in an imprisoned, isolated
body, a body denied access to the world. It would not be mechanical; nor could it stand to be viewed as inert and stupid; nor could it be exploited by another without diminishing in vigor; and being
sold on the marketplace as a commodity would necessarily be
anathema to it, a direct affront to its intrinsic need to confront the