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afford to compare themselves to baboons and insects: they are writing books or teaching in universities when they do it. A Harvard professor does not refuse tenure because a baboon has never been

granted it. The biology of power is a game boys play. It is the male

way of saying: she is more like the female baboon than she is like me;

she cannot be an eminence grise at Harvard because she bleeds, we

fuck her, she bears our young, we beat her up, we rape her; she is an

animal, her function is to breed. I want to see the baboon, the ant,

the wasp, the goose, the cichlid, that has written War and Peace.

Even more I want to see the animal or insect or fish or fowl that has

written Middlemarch.

Literacy is a tool, like fire. It is a more advanced tool than fire,

and it has done as much or more to change the complexion of the

natural and social worlds. Literacy, like fire, is a tool that must be

used by intelligence. Literacy is also a capacity: the capacity to be

literate is a human capacity; the capacity exists and it can be used

or it can be denied, refuted, made to atrophy. In persons socially

despised, it is denied. But denial is not enough, because people

insist on meaning. Humankind finds meaning in experiences,

events, objects, communications, relationships, feelings. Literacy

functions as part of the search for meaning; it helps to make that

search possible. Men can deny that women have the capacity to

learn ancient Greek, but some women w ill learn it nevertheless.

Men can deny that poor women or working-class women or prostituted women have the capacity to read or write their own language, but some of those women will read or write their own language anyw ay; they will risk everything to learn it. In the

slaveholding South in the United States, it was forbidden by law

to teach slaves to read or write; but some slaveowners taught, some

slaves learned, some slaves taught themselves, and some slaves

taught other slaves. In Jew ish law, it is forbidden to teach women

Talm ud, but some women learned Talmud anyw ay. People know

that literacy brings dignity and a wider world. People are strongly

motivated to experience the world they live in through language:

spoken, sung, chanted, and written. One must punish people terribly to stop them from wanting to know what reading and writing bring, because people are curious and driven toward both experience and the conceptualization of it. The denial of literacy to any class or category of people is a denial of fundamental humanity.

Humans viewed as animal, not human, are classically denied literacy: slaves in slave-owning societies; women in woman-owning societies; racially degraded groups in racist societies. The male slave is treated as a beast of burden; he cannot be allowed to read or

write. The woman is treated as a beast of breeding; she must not

read or write. When women as a class are denied the right to read

and write, those who learn are shamed by their knowledge: they

are masculine, deviant; they have denied their wombs, their cunts;

in their literacy they repudiate the definition of their kind.

Certain classes of women have been granted some privileges of

literacy—not rights, privileges. The courtesans of ancient Greece

were educated when other women were kept ignorant, but they

were not philosophers, they were whores. Only by accepting their

function as whores could they exercise the privilege of literacy.

Upper-class women are traditionally taught some skills of literacy

(distinctly more circumscribed than the skills taught the males of

their mating class): they can exercise the privilege of literacy if they

accept their decorative function. After all, the man does not want

the breeding, bleeding bitch at the dinner table or the open cunt in

the parlor while he reads his newspaper or smokes his cigar. Language is refinement: proof that he is human, not she.

The increase in illiteracy among the urban poor in the United

States is consonant with a new rise in overt racism and contempt

for the poor. The illiteracy is programmed into the system: an intelligent child can go to school and not be taught how to read or write. When the educational system abandons reading and writing

for particular subgroups, it abandons human dignity for those

groups: it becomes strictly custodial, keeping the animals penned

in; it does not bring human life to human beings.