Intercourse, by: Andrea Dworkin - Feminish

and she spread her legs to show her nakedness and to bringmen into thoughts o f transgression: And she passed water andbefouled the holy place. . . Her left leg she twisted around herneck and the right she stuck out stiff as a board and her tonguerolled like a hanged man’s. . . And many righteous women didtestify that a stink issued from that same place. . . 42The public perception of this possession is that it is obscene.The community regards this exhibition of a woman’s raw sexualderangement and debasement as filth; her genital displaybecomes a synonym for dirt. There is a social repudiation ofthis possession— an attempt, eventually successful, to exorcisethe dybbuk— because the community, organized to maintainmale dominance (and therefore to protect it even from its ownworst excesses), cannot ultimately withstand the unmodifiedexposure of the real substance and final meaning of male dominance:the meaning of possession without the consolations ofprivacy, romance, or social regulation (law, marriage). Thepower of men over women— including the power of men topossess women in the fuck—is endangered by a social reality ofimpersonal possession. The potency of mortal men cannotcompete with the potency of an immortal rapist, always thepornographic hero; nor can the potency of mortal men meetthe challenge of female sexual provocation unregulated by theirown rules and patterns of desire. For other women possessedmore privately, possession tending toward coma, the devastationof being the public whore, of being used to the limits ofsadistic greed, suggests—perhaps inevitably, if humans haveany intrinsic dignity— the necessity of resistance; a resistancesprings up to eroticizing possession.