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
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
