Intercourse, by: Andrea Dworkin - Feminish

was free, a rare and remarkable quality and kind of freedom—commonplace for men, virtually unattainable for women. Shehad contempt for the women who followed the soldiers as consortsor prostitutes. She expressed this contempt in outrightphysical aggression against the women—physically chasingthem away from the soldiers and, on at least one occasion,drawing a sword on a woman who was, of course, unarmed.These women were object lessons, the living embodiments ofwhat a fall from grace, from her exempt status, would mean,their lives bounded on every side by the constraining dominationof sexed men. Joan chose the status of the men becausefreedom was with them; in choosing that status, that company,she was bound to despise the women. She also hated swearing,the discourse that most rubbed in her face the sheer stigma ofbeing female—the stigma associated with the physiology of beinga woman, the functions of being a woman, the commonperceptions of what a woman is and what a woman is worth.The soldiers did not swear around her because her disapprovalwas so visceral, so intense, so absolute. These real anddeep antipathies— toward loose women and dirty words—meant to the Christians who rehabilitated her that she hadbeen pure and good in the moralistic sense; these were themost easily assimilable of her stratagems for escaping definitionas a female. Her intractable male identification, expressednot in the usual female submission to the male but in an attemptedcoequal bonding with him, was central to her questfor freedom. Under patriarchy, men have freedom because theyare men. To want freedom is to want not only what men havebut also what men are. This is male identification as militance,not feminine submission; it is deviant, complex. One wantswhat men have— especially physical freedom (freedom of