Intelligence is a form of energy, a force that pushes out into the world. It makes its mark, not once but continuously. It is curious, penetrating. Without the light of public life, discourse, and action, it dies. [...] It needs response, challenge, consequences that matter. Intelligence cannot be passive and private through a lifetime. Kept secret, kept inside, it withers and dies.

Andrea writes so beautifully and in a strangely comforting manner.

Traditionally and practically, the world is brought to women by men; they are the outside on which female intelligence must feed. The food is poor, orphan’s gruel. This is because men bring home half-truths, ego-laden lies, and use them to demand solace or sex or housekeeping.

The half-truths and ego-laden lies part resonates with me. And part of stifling women's intelligence causes the discouragement of asking questions or probing further into identifying the full truth behind the half-truths and egotistical lies. Which prevents women from gaining class consciousness.

Some will grant that women might have a particular kind of intelligence—essentially small, picky, good with details, bad with ideas. Some will grant—in fact, insist—that women know more of “the Good, ” that women are more cognizant of decency or kindness: this keeps intelligence small and tamed.

Women are allowed to be intelligent as long as it continues to promote status quo. As soon as a woman disagrees with what is collectively deemed "good," her intelligence is "warped."

There is no mourning for the lost intelligence of women because there is no conviction that such intelligence was real and was destroyed. Intelligence is, in fact, seen as a function of masculinity, and women are despised when they refuse to be lost.

💔

I have seen this frequently quoted:

No woman could be Nietzsche or Rimbaud without ending up in a whorehouse or lobotomized.

Though I found myself more entranced by the text directly before it:

Morbid intelligence abhors the cheery sunlight of positive thinking and eternal sweetness; and women must be sunlight and cheery and sweet, or the woman could not bribe her way with smiles through a day. Wild intelligence abhors any narrow world; and the world of women must stay narrow, or the woman is an outlaw.

Personally I don't have an issue with positive thinking, until it begins to impede serious discussion. And I currently have to deal with this expectation of women to only use their brains enough to "keep sweet" with regards to my HOA lol. The "president" of the HOA is a manipulative power tripping man. It seems he now dislikes me because I have the "nerve" to point out illogical HOA board decisions, fallacious thinking, and general incompetence and lack of accountability and communication from our community's HOA board. Finding feminist communities and forging friendships with women in my neighborhood has helped me stand up to manipulative people and attempts to get me to submit to the female socialization of subordination.

Two thirds of the world’s illiterates are women. To be fucked, to birth children, one need not know how to read. Women are for sex and reproduction, not for literature. But women have stories to tell. Women want to know. Women have questions, ideas, arguments, answers. [...] Literacy functions as part of the search for meaning; it helps to make that search possible. [...] The denial of literacy to any class or category of people is a denial of fundamental humanity.

Literacy is so important. Female friendships and communities are so important, because women helping each other is so important. With more and more communities being online, literacy is growing to be ever more important in order to strengthen female solidarity.

The increase in illiteracy among the urban poor in the United States is consonant with a new rise in overt racism and contempt for the poor. [...] [I]t abandons human dignity for those groups: it becomes strictly custodial, keeping the animals penned in; it does not bring human life to human beings.

I found this interesting because it reminds me of modern day "progressive" virtue signaling that apparently causes lower literacy rates for the population in general. From what I remember, it is things like removing standardized testing or literacy milestone requirements because some minorities perform poorly in those metrics. And so instead of focusing more resources on those struggling demographics, instead the standards are just lowered for all children. Of course, this also affects poor children of all demographics more than the rich who have parents who can afford to offer private tutoring, private schools, better school districts, or are more involved in their child's education in general.

A well-educated populace is harder to control. An illiterate populace is easier to manipulate, and easier to distract from injustice. This all applies to the female class.

If she can make her own fire, read a book herself, write a letter or a record of her thoughts or an essay or a story, it will be harder to get her to tolerate the unwanted fuck, to bear the unwanted children, to see him as life and life through him.

This quote from Virginia Woolf is fire:

She has to say I will wait. I will wait until men have become so civilised that they are not shocked when a woman speaks the truth about her body.

And I love this quote:

Truth is the goal of creative intelligence, whatever its kind and path; tangling with the world is tangling with the problem of truth.

Andrea then goes into a section on moralism versus moral intelligence that I thought was very interesting to distinguish. I already discussed this part in this comment.

She then talks about sexual intelligence, which I found interesting to learn about.

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. [...] [W]here moral intelligence must tangle with questions of right and wrong, sexual intelligence would have to tangle with questions of dominance and submission.

This notion was interesting to me because I think it shows how porn culture and transgenderism causes women to not wholly find or even desire possession in one's own body. Transgenderism and porn culture both prevent the ability for women to seek out sexual intelligence.

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.

Again, I feel like this relates to transgenderism and an overwhelmingly pornsick culture. Fifty years later, and I think this is only gotten worse in the Western world.

And then Andrea teaches us about Victoria Woodhull! What a fascinating woman. I especially admire this piece of writing from her in 1874:

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.

I really appreciate learning about this historic and impactful woman. I think this is a meaningful passage on female solidarity.

Prostitution, she made clear, was for money, not for fun; it was survival, not pleasure. Woodhull’s passion was sexual freedom, and she knew that the prostitution and rape of women were antithetical to it.

Seriously. I think this is where people cannot understand why radical feminists are against pornography, it is not due to prudish conservative values or to shame women, it is to liberate women's sexuality.

Selling themselves was women’s desperate, necessary, unforgivable crime; not acknowledging the sale divided women and obscured how and why women were used sexually by men; marriage, women’s only refuge, was the place of mass rape. [...] She was direct and impassioned and she made women remember: that they had been raped. In focusing on the apparent and actual sexual worth of wives and whores, she made the basic claim of radical feminism: all freedom, including sexual freedom, begins with an absolute right to one’s own body—physical self-possession.

I really like this because it paints how women in marriage and women in prostitution share similar experiences of their bodies being sold to men.

Called a prostitute by a man at a public meeting, Woodhull responded: “A man questioning my virtue! Have I any right as a woman to answer him? I hurl the intention back in your face, sir, and stand boldly before you and this convention, and declare that I never had sexual intercourse with any man of whom I am ashamed to stand side by side before the world with the act. I am not ashamed of any act of my life. At the time it was the best I knew. Nor am I ashamed of any desire that has been gratified, nor of any passion alluded to. Every one of them are a part of my own soul’s life, for which, thank God, I am not accountable to you.”

Pure fire.

“I make the claim boldly, ” [Victoria Woodhull] dared to say, “that from the very moment woman is emancipated from the necessity of yielding the control of her sexual organs to man to insure a home, food and clothing, the doom of sexual demoralization will be sealed.”

Still true to this day.

It is not in being a whore that a woman becomes an outlaw in this man’s world; it is in the possession of herself, the ownership and effective control of her own body, her separateness and distinctness, the integrity of her body as hers, not his.

Idk how many times I can say "true" and "fire" while reading this book lol goddamn.

Wife or whore: both are denied a human life, forced to live a female one.

Again, still true to this day. With escalating pornsickness and sexual sadism. And society wonders why young girls are now transitioning enmasse and want to escape their female bodies, they feel they cannot live a human life without renouncing their female bodies.

Feminists know that if women are paid equal wages for equal work, women will gain sexual as well as economic independence.

Hell yeah. This was indeed true in my case. When I had no money, when I was just going to school, when I didn't have a job, I was very much anxious about my male partner being unhappy if I didn't have sex with him (for anyone worried, no, my male partner would not get mad at me or retaliate if I didn't have sex, but I am a highly anxious person, so I lived with the fear that he would no matter how respectful he was to me about my boundaries). Obviously, this caused me to hate sex. It did feel transactional to me. When I got my first career, when I got a stable income, I was able to just say "I'm done accepting terrible sex" and our relationship ended up being more equal because of me feeling brave and stable enough in my independence to enforce boundaries over my body and sexuality.

Feminists appear to think that equal pay for equal work is a simple reform, whereas it is no reform at all; it is revolution.

Seriously. Seventy/eighty cents on the dollar matters. It adds up. Costs of childcare are rising rapidly. What determines which parents stays home to watch the children? Whoever makes the least amount of money. And if women statistically are making 70/80 cents for every dollar men make, which sex is going to overwhelmingly be the one staying home? Giving up their career? Getting a gap in their resume? Atrophying their professional skills? Equal pay for equal work is absolutely revolutionary.

[Some sexist guy wrote to Ellen Glasgow:] ‘The greatest woman is not the woman who has written the finest book, but the woman who has had the finest babies.’

I'm reminded of that sexist wojak meme about a woman who's a scientist compared to a woman who claims she birthed seven [male] scientists, implying the woman is only worthy when she produces male humans, who can actually be worthy in what they want to, unlike women who are forced to believe baring children is what they should want to do.

Right-wing women have surveyed the world: they find it a dangerous place. They see that work subjects them to more danger from more men; it increases the risk of sexual exploitation. [...] They see that the money they can earn will not make them independent of men and that they will still have to play the sex games of their kind: at home and at work too. They see no way to make their bodies authentically their own and to survive in the world of men. They know too that the Left has nothing better to offer: leftist men also want wives and whores[.] Right-wing women are not wrong. They fear that the Left, in stressing impersonal sex and promiscuity as values, will make them more vulnerable to male sexual aggression, and that they will be despised for not liking it. They are not wrong. Right-wing women see that within the system in which they live they cannot make their bodies their own, but they can agree to privatized male ownership: keep it one-on-one, as it were. [A]nd so they try to up their value: through cooperation, manipulation, conformity; through displays of affection or attempts at friendship; through submission and obedience; and especially through the use of euphemism—“femininity, ” “total woman, ” “good, ” “maternal instinct, ” “motherly love. ” [...] They see that intelligence displayed in a woman is a flaw, that intelligence realized in a woman is a crime. They see the world they live in and they are not wrong.

I like this passage because it offers a somewhat respectful understanding of why right-wing women choose to have the political beliefs and submissive qualities they have. Like was posted in /o/Radfemmery, “for many women, gilding their cage of subjugation is easier and more comfortable than leaving the cage altogether, because the cage is all they know”

Right-Wing Women book club posts postponed until April 6th

I am postponing the Right-Wing Women book club posts until April 6th, due to low participation. I was initially fine with running two book clubs at the same time when it seemed like there was a lot of interest in this one, but it does not seem like the enthusiasm transferred into actual participation. That is fine, we all have busy lives. I am going to lighten my responsibilities by postponing this second book club until the Why Does He Do That? book club is finished.

Didn't read it, but how frikkin' timely is this, when Trump might well be re-elected.