Intercourse, by: Andrea Dworkin - Feminish

would have held virginity to be a sacred state of being, one thatwould ennoble her for the duration of her life, a passive stateintrinsically holy and magical with God’s blessings. In her society,virginity was “an ideal wreathed by the finest poetry andexalted in beautiful Latin hymns and conventual chants. ”34 Itwas a common belief cited as fact by Church authorities withwhom she came into contact that “ God had revealed to virgins. . . that which He had kept hidden from men. ”35 Instead forJoan—and Catherine and Margaret—virginity was an activeelement of a self-determined integrity, an existential independence,affirmed in choice and faith from minute to minute; nota retreat from life but an active engagement with it; dangerousand confrontational because it repudiated rather than endorsedmale power over women. For all three women, virginitywas “a passage, not a permanent condition, ” the preconditionfor a precocious, tragic passage to death. As rebellion, virginityamounted to a capital crime. No woman, however, had everrebelled the way Joan of Arc, virgin, rebelled.Because she found a way to bypass male desire, Joan’s storyilluminates and clarifies to what degree male desire determinesa woman’s possibilities in life: how far, how fast, where, when,and how she can move; by what means; what activities she canengage in; how circumscribed her physical freedom is; the totalsubjugation of her physical form and freedom to what menwant from her.Joan, unlike Catherine and Margaret, lived in a Christianworld: all the soldiers, English, Burgundian, and French, wereChristians. Virgins were supposed to be venerated by Christians;and certainly, Christian virgins were not supposed to beraped. More than law, ecclesiastic or secular, magic backed upthe prohibition: God and all the angels and saints were on the