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forever, which is the ability that you had to make a baby; the most marvelous thing that was in you may have been shot into a diaphragm orwasted on a pill. One might be losing one’s future” (The Presidential Papers

[New York: Bantam Books, 1964], p. 142). “O f the million spermatozoa,

there may be only two or three with any real chance o f reaching the ovum

. . . [The others] go out with no sense at all of being real spermatozoa.

They may appear to be real spermatozoa under the microscope, but after

all, a man from Mars who’s looking at us through a telescope might think

that Communist bureaucrats and FBI men look exactly the same.. . .

Even the electron microscope can’t measure the striation o f passion in a

spermatozoon. O r the force o f its w ill” (The Presidential Papers, p. 143). “I

hate contraception.. . . There’s nothing I abhor more than planned parenthood. Planned parenthood is an abomination. I’d rather have thosefucking Communists over here” (The Presidential Papers, p. 131). “I think

(Footnote continues overleaf)

If an idea is stupid, presumably it is stupid whether the one who

articulates it is male or female. But that is not the case. Women,

undereducated as a class, do not have to read Aeschylus to know

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