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“the Good, ” that women are more cognizant of decency or kindness: this keeps intelligence small and tamed. Some will grant that there have been women of genius: after the woman of genius is

dead. The greatest writers in the English language have been

women: George Eliot, Jane Austen, Virginia Woolf. T hey were

sublime; and they were, all of them, shadows of what they might

have been. But the fact that they existed does not change the categorical perception that women are basically stupid: not capable of intelligence without the exercise of which the world as a whole is

impoverished. Women are stupid and men are smart; men have a

right to the world and women do not. A lost man is a lost intelligence; a lost woman is a lost (name the function) mother, housekeeper, sexual thing. Classes of men have been lost, have been thrown aw ay; there have always been mourners and fighters who

refused to accept the loss. There is no mourning for the lost intel­

ligence of women because there is no conviction that such intelligence was real and was destroyed. Intelligence is, in fact, seen as a function of masculinity, and women are despised when they refuse

to be lost.

Women have stupid ideas that do not deserve to be called ideas.

Marabel Morgan writes an awful, silly, terrible book in which she

claims that women must exist for their husbands, do sex and be sex

for their husbands. * D. H. Lawrence writes vile and stupid essays

in which he says the same thing basically with many references to

the divine phallus; t but D. H. Lawrence is smart. Anita Bryant

* See The Total Woman or the quotations from it in chapter 1 of this book.

Or: “In the beginning, sex started in the garden. The first man was all

alone. The days were long, the nights were longer. He had no cook, no

nurse, no lover. God saw that man was lonely and in need of a partner, so

He gave him a woman, the best present any man could receive” (The Total

Woman, [New York: Pocket Books, 1975], p. 129). “Spiritually, for sexual

intercourse to be the ultimate satisfaction, both partners need a personal

relationship with their God. When this is so their union is sacred and

beautiful, and mysteriously the two blend perfectly into one” (Total

Woman, p. 128).

t For instance: “Christianity brought marriage into the world: marriage as

we know it.. . . Man and wife, a king and queen with one or two subjects, and a few square yards of territory of their own: this, really, ismarriage. It is true freedom because it is a true fulfillment for man,

woman, and children” (Sex, Literature, and Censorship [New York: The Viking Press, 1959], p. 98). “It is the tragedy of modern woman.. . . She iscocksure, but she is a hen all the time. Frightened of her own henny self,

she rushes to mad lengths about votes, or welfare, or sports, or business:

she is marvellous, out-manning the man.. . . Suddenly it all falls out of

relation to her basic henny self, and she realises she has lost her life. The