Right-wing Women

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