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
tion in a world that consists fundamentally of two rules that by
their very nature prohibit the invention of values, identity, will,
desire: be fucked, reproduce. Men have constructed female sexuality and in so doing have annihilated the chance for sexual intelligence in women. Sexual intelligence cannot live in the shallow, predestined sexuality men have counterfeited for women.
*
I respect and honor the needy woman who, to
procure food for herself and child, sells her body to
some stranger for the necessary money; but for that
legal virtue which sells itself for a lifetime for a
home, with an abhorrence of the purchaser, and
which at the same time says to the former, “I
am holier than thou, ” I have only the supremest
contempt.
Victoria Woodhull, 1874
The argument between wives and whores is an old one; each one
thinking that whatever she is, at least she is not the other. And
