Andrea Dworkin - Right-wing Women

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 as inert and stupid; nor could it be exploited by another without diminishing in vigor; and being

sold on the marketplace as a commodity would necessarily be

anathema to it, a direct affront to its intrinsic need to confront the

world in self-defined and self-determining terms. Sexual intelligence would probably be more like moral intelligence than like

anything else: a point that women for centuries have been trying to

make. But since no intelligence in a woman is respected, and since

she is condemned to moralism because she is defined as being incapable of moral intelligence, and since she is defined as a sexual thing to be used, the meaning of women in likening moral and

sexual intelligence is not understood. Sexual intelligence asserts itself through sexual integrity, a dimension of values and action forbidden to women. Sexual intelligence would have to be rooted first and foremost in the honest possession of one’s own body, and

women exist to be possessed by others, namely men. The possession of one’s own body would have to be absolute and entirely realized for the intelligence to thrive in the world of action. Sexual

intelligence, like moral intelligence, would have to confront the

great issues of cruelty and tenderness; but where moral intelligence

must tangle with questions of right and wrong, sexual intelligence

would have to tangle with questions of dominance and submission.

One preordained to be fucked has no need to exercise sexual intelligence, no opportunity to exercise it, no argument that justifies exercising it. To keep the woman sexually acquiescent, the capacity for sexual intelligence must be prohibited to her; and it is. Her clitoris is denied; her capacity for pleasure is distorted and defamed; her erotic values are slandered and insulted; her desire to value her body as her own is paralyzed and maimed. She is turned

into an occasion for male pleasure, an object of male desire, a thing

to be used; and any willful expression of her sexuality in the world

unmediated by men or male values is punished. She is used as a

slut or as a lady; but sexual intelligence cannot manifest in a human

being whose predestined purpose is to be exploited through sex, by

sex, in sex, as sex. Sexual intelligence constructs its own use: it

begins with a whole body, not one that has already been cut into

parts and fetishized; it begins with a self-respecting body, not one

that is characterized by class as dirty, wanton, and slavish; it acts

in the world, a world it enters on its own, with freedom as well as

with passion. Sexual intelligence cannot live behind locked doors,

any more than any other kind of intelligence can. Sexual intelligence cannot exist defensively, keeping out rape. Sexual intelligence cannot be decorative or pretty or coy or timid, nor can it live on a diet of contempt and abuse and hatred of its human form.

Sexual intelligence is not animal, it is human; it has values; it sets

limits that are meaningful to the whole person and personality,

which must live in history and in the world. Women have found

the development and exercise of sexual intelligence more difficult

than any other kind: women have learned to read; women have

acquired intellect; women have had so much creative intelligence

that even despisal and isolation and punishment have not been able

to squeeze it out of them; women have struggled for a moral intelligence that by its very existence repudiates moralism; but sexual intelligence is cut off at its roots, because the woman’s body is not

her own. The incestuous use of a girl murders it. The sexual intimidation or violation of a girl murders it. The enforced chastity of a girl murders it. The separation of girl from girl murders it. The

turning over of a girl to a man as wife murders it. The selling of a

girl into prostitution murders it. The use of a woman as a wife

murders it. The use of a woman as a sexual thing murders it. The

selling of a woman as a sexual commodity, not just on the street

but in media, murders it. The economic value given to a woman’s

body, whether high or low, murders it. The keeping of a woman

as a toy or ornament or domesticated cunt murders it. The need to

be a mother so that one is not perceived as a whore murders it.

The requirement that one bear babies murders it. The fact that the

sexuality of the female is predetermined and that she is forced to be

what men say she is murders sexual intelligence: there is nothing

for her to discern or to construct; there is nothing for her to find

out except what men will do to her and what she will have to pay if

she resists or gives in. She lives in a private world—even a street

corner is a private world of sexual usage, not a public world of

honest confrontation; and her private world of sexual usage has

narrow boundaries and a host of givens. No intelligence can func­