Intercourse, by: Andrea Dworkin - Feminish

never killed on the battlefield, improbable since the combat washand-to-hand; but she was known among her own men forstanding against the commonplace practices of sadism on thebattlefield. It is hard to believe that she did not kill; but whethershe did or did not, she was an exemplary martial liberator—nearly unique in the iconography and history of the Europeanfemale, that tamed and incomprehensibly peaceful creature.Joan’s story is not female until the end, when she died, like ninemillion other women, in flames, condemned by the Inquisitionfor witchcraft, heresy, and sorcery. Precisely because she was ahero whose biography brazenly and without precedent violatesthe constraints of being female until the terrible suffering of herdeath, her story, valorous and tragic, is political, not magical;mythic because she existed, was real, not because her personahas been enlarged over the centuries. Her virginity was not anexpression of some aspect of her femininity or her preciousnessas a woman, despite the existence of a cultish worship of virginityas a feminine ideal. She was known as Joan the Maid or, simply,The Maid (“La Pucelle” ). Her reputation, her declaration,preceded her, established her intention and her terms; not in thecontext of being a holy or ideal female but in the context of wagingwar. Her virginity was a self-conscious and militant repudiationof the common lot of the female with its intrinsic low status,which, then as now, appeared to have something to do with beingfucked. Joan wanted to be virtuous in the old sense, beforethe Christians got hold of it: virtuous meant brave, valiant. Sheincarnated virtue in its original meaning: strength or manliness.Her virginity was an essential element of her virility, her autonomy,her rebellious and intransigent self-definition. Virginitywas freedom from the real meaning of being female; it was notjust another style of being female. Being female meant tiny