this man's world, so you see an expert or you read a book. This lets you understand how foolish common sense is: just eating less would be a counsel of ignorance, of not knowing how complex the chemistry is, the psychology, the sociology, the sex angle--vital, that--the normative, ethical, nutritional, aetiological, chemical, and recreational implications, theoretical possibilities, quantitative significance, vital statistics, and aesthetic deprivations. So you read your book, which tells you about all these complex relations and even gives you recipes. You go off to buy the stuff--the first shock usually comes with the discovery that restricted diets cost more than just eating. But it will be worth it, you tell yourself, if you can "master" it. The moment of truth comes on the day you look at your plate and say: I can't live on this.

Many of us feel that we cannot live intellectually on the dubiously nutritious diet of male-stream thought. Far more important, many of us feel that we may not be able to live for very much longer on man-kind's impoverished planet earth. If we are to survive as an earth species, to live in the world, we must constantly reproduce ourselves, our species, our planet, our living. Reproduction is multiple: it is reproducing the world.

Thinking about the world, acting in the world, getting the two together: that is the commonsense agenda for human survival, and it is far too important an agenda to entrust to experts or to books, and certainly to entrust to man-kind, universal man, the ruling sex, the combination of male narcissism, male violence, male dualism, and male dominance for which we use the short-cut word "patriarchy"--literally,the rule of fathers. I shall have something to say later about how uncertain a peg paternity is on which to hang the job of reproducing the world, but first let us talk about this world a little bit, and then about reproducing it.

It is, of course, quite difficult to think about the world-planet earth--an insignificant speck in the universe, yet too large and too complex to be easily grasped or to be experienced whole. It is a great lump of volcanic rock and fecund earth peopled by folk who never seem to have been able to grasp two relatively simple truths:

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