Intercourse, by: Andrea Dworkin - Feminish

means becoming someone who experiences sensuality in beingpossessed: in the touch of the possessor, in his fuck, howevercallous it is to the complexity or the subtlety of one’s own humanity.Because a woman’s capacity to feel sexual pleasure is developedwithin the narrow confines of male sexual dominance,internally there is no separate being—conceived, nurturedsomewhere else, under different material circumstances—screaming to get out. There is only the flesh-and-blood reality ofbeing a sensate being whose body experiences sexual intensity,sexual pleasure, and sexual identity in being possessed: in beingowned and fucked. It is what one knows; and one’s capacities tofeel and to be are narrowed, sliced down, to fit the demands anddimensions of this sentient reality.Therefore, women feel the fuck—when it works, when itoverwhelms— as possession; and feel possession as deeplyerotic; and value annihilation of the self in sex as proof of theman’s desire or love, its awesome intensity. And therefore, beingpossessed is phenomenologically real for women; and sexitself is an experience of diminishing self-possession, an erosionof self. That loss of self is a physical reality, not just a psychicvampirism; and as a physical reality it is chilling andextreme, a literal erosion of the body’s integrity and its abilityto function and to survive. The physical rigors of sexual possession—ofbeing possessed—overwhelm the body’s vitality;and while at first the woman is fierce with the pride of possession—hewants her enough to empty her out—her insides areworn away over time, and she, possessed, becomes weak, depleted,usurped in all her physical and mental energies and capacitiesby the one who has physically taken her over; by theone who occupies her. This sexual possession is a sensual stateof being that borders on antibeing until it ends in death. The