I recall a theater audience, a few years ago, gasping when a sensationalistic documentary showed some ten- and twelve-year-old African boys who, from the ages of two and three, had been kept in tiny cages, molds, and mangles their whole lives to stunt and deform their limbs so that their owners could put them to beg on the highways where their deformities might excite sympathy.

But half the population on any street in any civilized western city is victim of an equally vicious process of physical deformation.

Man imposes on any one female—and on females alone—from infancy on, an aesthetic standard that equates the fragile, the weak, and the powerless with the Good and the Beautiful. Consider: an uncritical infant, you are encouraged by the giving and withholding of affection to be dainty; should you be fleshy … well, some men find that attractive. But you must not be muscular! Perhaps in your legs, if you are a dancer, for even that can attract men. But you must never have muscles in your arms and hands. In you, muscular strength is the definition of grotesquery; it is unthinkable; it is more obscene than any toilet graffiti; it must never be depicted, even in jest. (Because, of course, its possibility is much too serious for jest.) But the mental deformation has been proceeding apace: The only toys we will give you with full approval are first-level reproductions of the domestic surround. Do not play with anything that might move your imagination beyond the home. Play with nothing that must be built, constructed, created, or figured out; with nothing that might stretch the mind or, even worse, encourage competition in the physical sports or the fantasies of the moving, adult world. Once in school, you can be as intellectually advanced as possible; and (because at home the imaginative and fantasizing facilities, as well as displays of physical energy, have been continually discouraged) how customary it is in those early years for girls to excel in those purely imitative exercises by which the intellect of the young is first judged. And at first the praise you receive for your accomplishments seems lavish. But soon you notice a discrepancy: While your efforts are praised, any tangible results are subtly devalued. And the scale against which the devaluation occurs is the efforts and achievements of … him.

If you write a poem, it is nice.

If he writes a poem, it is an evidence that his is a creative personality.

If you organize some social event, that too is nice.

If he organizes some social event, it is because he has organizational abilities that may lead him on to greater things.

Everything he does seems to have both a history and a future.

Everything you do seems to register on only the most immediate attention matrix.

With the most outrageous thing he does, even the condemnation of it, again and again, reiterates that he and his outrage exist.

Any outrage of yours is glossed over, inarticulately excused and, as soon as possible, forgotten.