on a presumed chastity, a necessary chastity— of behavior but also
of appetite. She, as a woman, is not supposed to know sexual desire. Men lust. As one who by her nature does not lust, she is the opposite of man: he is carnal; she is good. There is no notion of
female m orality or of a woman’s being good in the world that is not
based largely on chastity as a moral value. The great female tragedies are stories of sexual falls. The tragic flaw in a female hero—
H ardy’s Tess or Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina— is sexual desire. All
the drama of a female life, in great or in banal works, basically
replicates the biblical fall. Seduction (or rape) means knowledge,
which is sexual desire; sexual desire means descent into sin and
inevitable punishment. As a cultural symbol, the good female is
innocent: innocent of sex, innocent of knowledge— chaste in both
ways. H istorically, ignorance has been a form of grace for the good
woman; education was denied women to keep them morally good.
The elevation of a woman requires that she have this innocence,
this purity, this chastity: she must not know the world, which men
embody. The worship of a woman or a female religious symbol is
often the unmediated worship of chastity. The virgin is the great
religious symbol of female good, the female who is by nature (in
her body) good, who embodies the good. The awe and honor accorded the chaste female by men are frequently pointed to to show that men do not hate or degrade women, that men worship, adore,
and admire women. The m orally superior nature of women is honored mostly in the abstract, and women are worshiped mostly in the abstract. The worship is worship of a sym bol— a symbol ma
nipulated to justify the uses to which fallen women are put. The
morally good woman is put on a pedestal—a small, precarious,
raised stage, often mined, on which she stands for as long as she
can—until she falls off or jumps or it goes boom.
In the secular world, women are also credited with having a
sense of good that is intrinsically female, a sense of good that men
do not have. This is a frequent feature of contemporary environmentalist or antimilitarist movements. Women are seen to have an inborn commitment to both clean air and peace, a moral nature
that abhors pollution and murder. Being good or moral is viewed
as a particular biological capacity of women and as a result women
are the natural guardians of morality: a moral vanguard as it were.
Organizers use this appeal to women all the time. Motherhood is
especially invoked as biological proof that women have a special
relationship to life, a special sensitivity to its meaning, a special,
intuitive knowledge of what is right. Any political group can appropriate the special moral sensibility of women to its own ends: most groups do, usually in place of offering substantive relief to
women with respect to sexism in the group itself. Women all along
the male-defined political spectrum give special credence to this
view of a female biological nature that is morally good.
However this premise about a biologically based morality is
used, the woman-superior model of antifeminism is operating to
keep women down, not up, in the crude world of actual human
interchange. To stay worshiped, the woman must stay a symbol
and she must stay good. She cannot become merely a human in the
muck of life, morally flawed and morally struggling, committing
acts that have complex, difficult, unpredictable consequences. She
