Intercourse, by: Andrea Dworkin - Feminish

could or should belong to a woman, to take away any doubtsfrom people’s minds. . . ”61 After death, then, she became femalea third time: her naked body, including her genitals,shown to all the people. The fire was relit, and she was “ soonburned, both flesh and bone reduced to ashes. ”62Joan was burned in Rouen in 1431, in part because she heardvoices and saw lights; the Inquisition repeatedly interrogatedher on these phenomena and condemned her for them. A mere412 years later, at the age of 22, three years older than Joan hadbeen when she died, on his way home to Rouen, another personsaw lights and heard voices:Golden lights, blazing with indescribable intensity, began toflash before his left eye, and his whole brain seemed simultaneouslyto be bursting with a million multicoloured visionsand scenes. . . 63The drama, the magnitude of the event, suggests a male ego atthe center of the experience. There is nothing here so pedanticas learning how to get a sword or instructions on being pious,nor so demanding of discipline and responsibility as makingwar or crowning a king. Instead, there is sensation, feeling forits own sake, the intensity of a sublime, private ordeal. InRouen, at his home, he experienced:First the glow, the sounds; then terror, caused by the feeling ofthe ebbing away o f his personality and the approach o f annihilation;then the million thoughts, images, fantastic combinationso f every kind crowding at once into his brain like blazingrockets in a flood o f fireworks. He himself later described his