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
