Andrea Dworkin - Right-wing Women

In a sense intellect is the combination of literacy and intelligence:

literacy disciplines intelligence and intelligence expands the uses of

literacy; there is a body of knowledge that changes and increases

and also a skill in acquiring knowledge; there is a memory filled

with ideas, a storehouse of what has gone before in the world.

Intellect is mastery of ideas, of culture, of the products and processes of other intellects. Intellect is the capacity to learn language disciplined into learning. Intellect must be cultivated: even in men,

even in the smartest. Left alone in a private world of isolation,

intellect does not develop unless it has a private cultivator: a

teacher, a father of intellect, for instance. But the intellect in the

female must not exceed that of the teacher—or the female will be

rebuked and denied. Walt Whitman wrote that a student necessarily disowns and overthrows a teacher; but the female student must always stay smaller than the teacher, always meeker; her intelligence is never supposed to become mastery. Intellect in a woman is always a sign of privilege: she has been raised up above

her kind, usually because of the beneficence of a man who has seen

fit to educate her. The insults to females of intellect are legion: so-

called bluestockings are a laughingstock; women of intellect are

ugly or they would not bother to have ideas; the pleasure of

cultivating the mind is sexual perversion in the female; the works

of literate men are strewn with vicious remarks against intellectual

women. Intellect in a woman is malignant. She is not ennobled by

a fine mind; she is deformed by it.

The creative mind is intelligence in action in the world. The

world need not be defined as rivers, mountains, and plains. The

world is anywhere that thought has consequences. In the most abstract philosophy, thought has consequences; philosophy is part of the world, sometimes its own self-contained world. Thinking is

action; so are writing, composing, painting; creative intelligence

can be used in the material world to make products of itself. But

there is more to creative intelligence than what it produces. Creative intelligence is searching intelligence: it demands to know the world, demands its right to consequence. It is not contemplative:

creative intelligence is too ambitious for that; it almost always announces itself. It may commit itself to the pure search for knowledge or truth, but almost always it wants recognition, influence, or power; it is an accomplishing intelligence. It is not satisfied by recognition of the personality that carries it; it wants respect in its own right, respect for itself. Sometimes this respect can be shown

toward its product. Sometimes, when this intelligence exercises itself in the more ephemeral realm of pure talk or mundane action, respect for creative intelligence must be shown through respect for

the person manifesting it. Women are consistently and system atically denied the respect creative intelligence requires to be sustained: painfully denied it, cruelly denied it, sadistically denied it.

Women are not supposed to have creative intelligence, but when

they do they are supposed to renounce it. If they want the love of

men, without which they are not really women, they had better

not hold on to an intelligence that searches and that is action in the

world; thought that has consequences is inimical to fettered femininity. Creative intelligence is not animal: being fucked and reproducing w ill not satisfy it, ever; and creative intelligence is not decorative— it is never merely ornamental as, for instance, upper-class women however well educated must be. To stay a woman in

the male-supremacist meaning of that word, women must renounce

creative intelligence: not just verbally renounce it, though women

do that all the time, but snuff it out in themselves at worst, keep it

timid and restrained at best. The price for exercising creative intelligence for those born female is unspeakable suffering. “All things on earth have their price, ” wrote Olive Schreiner, “and for truth

we pay the dearest. We barter it for love and sym pathy. The road

to honour is paved with thorns; but on the path to truth, at every

step you set your foot down on your heart. ” 11 Truth is the goal of

creative intelligence, whatever its kind and path; tangling with the

world is tangling with the problem of truth. One confronts the

muck of the world, but one’s search is for the truth. The particular

truth or the ultimate character of the truth one finds is not the

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