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”
[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”
hate contraception.. . . There’s nothing I abhor more than planned parenthood. Planned parenthood is an abomination. I’d rather have thosefucking Communists over here”
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
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
