Intercourse, by: Andrea Dworkin - Feminish

accounts are happily invisible in the ideological representationsof how, why, when, and under what circumstances menfuck. The ideology allows for the fanciful development of apsychology of personal desire: the man is complex and interesting,lured as a unique individual by various manifestationsof beauty in women. But as Lenny Bruce noted: “You put guyson a desert island and they’ll do it to mud. ”37 Men dignifythemselves by insisting on a correspondence between fuckingand beauty, but there is none (see Baudelaire); men fuck femalein the metaphysical sense. Because male ideology has the authorityof truth, male desire is taken as a real recognition of ormeasure of female beauty, even though male desire in reality isa sexual recognition of female as female, fucking the empiricalproof that she is, therefore he can use her. According to the ideology,then, where there is no desire, there is no beauty. Thus,Bernard Shaw can write of Joan:any book about Joan which begins by describing her as abeauty may be at once classified as a romance. Not one o fJoan’s comrades, in village, court, or camp, even when theywere straining themselves to please the king by praising her,ever claimed that she was pretty. All the men who alluded tothe matter declared most emphatically that she was unattractiveto a degree that seemed to them miraculous, consideringthat she was in the bloom o f youth, and neither ugly, awkward,deformed, nor unpleasant in her person. 38But this is not what the men said. Joan lived in an all-male militarysociety. She slept with her fellow soldiers, “all in the strawtogether. ”39 Some said “that they had never felt desire for her,that is to say that sometimes they had the carnal desire for her